Re:How ACH works: A developer perspective – Part 3
by zaroth on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @04:21AM
(#8008594)
It's interesting how the incentives are misaligned for the two banks. The receiver wants to wait as long as possible before returning a REJECT, because returning earlier doesn't benefit them, and in fact can hurt the customer experience.
My bank will send me a warning that an ACH is pending, and I need a certain amount in the account by 10am the next morning. That's plenty of time to move funds into place from a neighboring account (as long as it doesn't involve selling shares). And on the other hand, it's an interesting benefit that the requester of the debit doesn't see this happening.
I think the solution is an explicit ACK. We could add an optional pingback url as part of each transaction message, and let everyone else deal with building the infra.
I have a feeling it's a lot more complicated than that. $39 trillion a year is a lot of transactions to track live status for, so I suspect this is both complicated and valuable.
What the heck NACHA -- impress us with your ability to build the next gen ACH system! Oh right, unless we're talking a physical structure, that's never going to happen.
My bank will send me a warning that an ACH is pending, and I need a certain amount in the account by 10am the next morning. That's plenty of time to move funds into place from a neighboring account (as long as it doesn't involve selling shares). And on the other hand, it's an interesting benefit that the requester of the debit doesn't see this happening.
I think the solution is an explicit ACK. We could add an optional pingback url as part of each transaction message, and let everyone else deal with building the infra.
I have a feeling it's a lot more complicated than that. $39 trillion a year is a lot of transactions to track live status for, so I suspect this is both complicated and valuable.
What the heck NACHA -- impress us with your ability to build the next gen ACH system! Oh right, unless we're talking a physical structure, that's never going to happen.