11 ms·
What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?
- s9w 7y agoNeither the title of this post nor the article explains what ACH is. And it somehow got 15 points in 6 minutes or so. Am I missing something? edit: yes, downvote me to -3. I love you all
- mpoteat 7y agoACH is a bank to bank transfer.
- refurb 7y agoOr bank to customer, thus potentially customer to customer.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- one2zero 7y agoI don't believe that its technically a bank to bank transfer because the ACH is involved. With wire transfers you're communicating directly with the bank via SWIFT or Fedwire.
- edubs25 7y agoI think it depends on context - I'm guessing you're thinking about flow of funds where as others are thinking about the actual process of running ACH files through the network. As an end consumer or other entity(like a TPA or bank ISO), you can submit a request or set of requests that will end up in that banks ACH file. At the end of the day, the bank that submits that file is responsible for ensuring those requests are valid, and ensuring all the returns are processed. These requests consist of to/from account routing information and dollar amounts with a lot of other rules in the file specifications. Not every banks can submit these directly. A lot of banks submit to larger banks and so on. I vaguely recall there also being fines/fees applied to the file submitter on if you send bad data or exceed return thresholds.
- bonyt 7y agoACH is Automated Clearing House - a US Bank Transfer / Direct Deposit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- paulddraper 7y agohttps://lmgtfy.com/?q=ACH https://lmgtfy.com/?q=ACH Automated Clearinghouse Chances are that's how your employer is paying you.
- tjpaudio 7y agoThe article is written for people interested in the very specific topic of the technical workings ACH transfers. It seems absurd to me that you would try to write this article to an audience that hasn't even heard of ACH. I think the only thing you are missing is that you are not the target reader.
- munk-a 7y agoElitism is no reason to avoid having a definition of jargon. HN has discussions on a wide variety of technical topics most of which aren't directly useful in our day job - or at least on the topic of information we'd seek out independently... But we have this list in part because intellectual curiosity is a good thing and maybe, within the way that whatever an ACH is deals with a dead person, there might be some interesting logic that you could apply to your own field. If someone submitted "How I managed to emulate Super Mario in C without using more than 30 Kb of memory" I'd be super interested and look to see what sorts of crazy pointer tricks or unioned structs were in use - even though I don't currently work with games or C in my daily.
- tjpaudio 7y agoIt's not elitism. ACH is a term that should be familiar to anyone even remotely informed on the topic. It's ok to read articles on things you are unfamiliar with but it is also on you as the reader to educate yourself when you read on topics that you are unfamiliar with. If every detail was explained in layman's terms, reading would be terribly boring and nuanced technical writing would be dead.
- munk-a 7y agoBut... I've worked with technical writers and PhDs, technical writers (the good ones) can really easily pull analogies out of thin air to help elevate a reader's understanding, I think (maybe due to star trek) that a lot of technical PhDs are quite good at forming comprehensible analogies as well. Usually CS papers are ~40% comprehensible to the vast majority of non-CS people, this differs from more liberal artsy fields where other field pieces are taken as a given and the assumptions compound to the point where education ends up being about familiarizing yourself with all that jargon. There are some terribly complex CS concepts (try and explain how a hash function produces essentially random output - or how private and public keys are actually computed in a manner to make private keys non-trivially derivable from public keys) and some terribly ingrained jargon (Oh, how's that SSL cert was it SHA signed?) but the effect on your topic of how these jargony terms work is usually easy to express, you don't need to know the history of POSIX to comprehend that CS people have a tool that checks if a string sorta looks like an expect format that we use everywhere, and you don't need to explain positive lookahead zero width assertions to convey that point. Having a single clause stating "ACH (the preferred US method for bank-to-bank transfers)" would instantly clear all this up... it's also insanely relevant because the topic of the article is about what happens when bank-to-bank transfers have a recipient who is dead.
- teraflop 7y agoAlso currently on the front page: * An article about a null-pointer bug in GCC that doesn't explain what pointers are * An article about Stripe that doesn't explain what Stripe is or does * An article about the programming language Julia that doesn't explain what Julia is. I think it's your expectations that are out of whack. Not every article needs to explain everything as if the reader is completely unfamiliar with the topic being discussed.
- munk-a 7y agoThe article on the null-pointer bug goes into technical details about what the exposed error case is - the fact that it's a bug is made super clear - the fact that it's a logic bug is pretty readily apparent. The Stripe article starts with "I worked at Stripe for 3+ years" so Stripe is clearly a company, the article itself is focused on the operations & team cohesion side of stripe not on their line of business. The article about Julia is hosted on `julialang` and within the first paragraph there is a sentence containing: "So I thought it might be helpful to the broader Julia community—and maybe even for other programming language communities—to actually write down Julia’s release process" None of these articles give you a full and complete comprehension of their topics - walking away from Strip I don't know if they're a listed company or what their market cap is - but I was given enough information to make it through. ACH is not a common jargon term, and even with common jargon there usually is some explanation, if someone writes a well-written article about some MySQL quirk, it'll probably have the term "SQL" somewhere in the first paragraph and it'll certainly have the term "database" and "query" - those hints are enough to grasp the general subject matter. The word "bank" doesn't show up in the article until paragraph three and the jokey description of doing it to "a dead person" immediately derails the users ability to grasp that it's a monetary transaction - it's perfectly logical that monetary transactions need to have error handling around dead, missing and not-yet-existing people, but leading with that point harms readability. I think this article is a great example of a poorly written piece that with some very minor edits to clearly define the scope of the article would be a lot more legible.
- kody 7y agoAgreed. Even after Googling "ACH" I had to reconcile the article's usage of "ACH" as a verb, when it appears to be a electronic payment system.
- C14L 7y agoProbably the US version of European SEPA.
- mynameisvlad 7y agoThat's not quite right. An automated clearing house for transactions isn't a US-specific concept, it's used all over the world (sometimes called an ACH, sometimes under a different name). SEPA uses STEP2 as the pan-European clearing house. Each European country also has their own equivalent to the ACH. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_clearing_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_clearing_house, Germany's seems to be a service offered by the Bundesbank.
- falsedan 7y agoIn the context of the title though, ACH =~ SEPA
- teilo 7y agoAh, NACHA, oh how I hate thee. If only NACHA files were JSON as shown in the example in the article. I wrote a NACHA processor in MS Access many years ago for a client in the insurance industry. That thing is still being used. God, I wish it would die. Although, I'm not sure which is worse: Parsing and generating the NACHA record format, or trying to parse and generate JSON in VBA. Why MS Access? Their entire claims processing system (which I did not write) ran on it. I only just got that damn thing migrated to an MSSQL backend. The pain.
- __s 7y agoMy previous job involved MS Access for insurance too, this in Canada. We got them to use SQL Server as a backend for most of the databases at least, so I could build infrastructure for reporting off the SQL. But all the data entry & quite a few reports were built into Access UIs. Quite a few places where we had to shunt table valued functions into Access to output into Excel
- Thorrez 7y agoI wrote an ACH generator in Thoroughbred Script-IV[1] as an intern. It was pretty funny when my malformed ACH file generated $1 out of thin air (the bank took the dollar back a few days later). Trying to do JSON in Script-IV would have been quite a challenge. One thing I remember was I think there were 3 different places in the ACH file to insert company name, and they were fixed length, each with a different length. I had a list of companies to support, so for each company, I carefully created 3 different abbreviated names for it, one for each length, applying more extreme abbreviation strategies for the shorter lengths. [1] http://www.thoroughbredsoftware.com/reference/DOCUMENTATION/SCRIPT_IV_DEVELOPER_GUIDE_V880.PDF http://www.thoroughbredsoftware.com/reference/DOCUMENTATION/...
- r00fus 7y agoThe new international standard for banking is ISO 20022 [1]. Yes, it's XML, but it also doesn't have fixed width lengths, and is relatively extensible. 20022 does a lot more than just payments, too. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_20022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_20022
- itcrowd 7y agoThis reminds me of a question I've had for the longest time (+): why is it that in the US wiring money between accounts is so expensive or difficult? Whole ecosystems of companies have sprung up (PayPal and Stripe come to mind, and apps such as TransferWise) to reduce the friction when the banks could easily set up a way cheaper system that would actually be better (privacy etc.) for the consumer. The EU seems to be much better at this .. ? (+) Partial answer found here, but not satisfying https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/27474/why-are-wire-transfers-and-other-financial-services-in-canada-so-much-more-expen https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/27474/why-are-wire...
- grecy 7y agoMoving from Australia to Canada/US felt like going back in time 20 years when it came to banking. Even ten years ago in Australia I could do more with my online banking than I can today in North America. Checks are for what now?
- lettergram 7y agoI use checks all the time actually. Every other form of payment online is “pull”, I only want to “push” my funds to external people.
- fernandotakai 7y agoi've never used a check in my entire life. when i need to pay someone i just do an online transfer.
- loeber 7y agoThat's not actually correct. By giving an external person a check, you give them the ABILITY to PULL funds from you. It looks like a push, but it's actually not. https://www.bankrate.com/financing/banking/writing-checks-increasingly-risky/ https://www.bankrate.com/financing/banking/writing-checks-in...
- 7y ago
- ergothus 7y agoPerhaps those well-versed in such arts can inform me, who knows little about ACH and the rest: Why is it so slow? I get that this is a system that can work built on top of any number of manual processes, but check-cashing scams are rampant and function in world where a major bank gets a check (apparently) from a different major bank and the customer is told it is all good....and possibly weeks later the check is noted as invalid and the deposit reversed. ...why can't the big players (at least) confirm things quickly? Why can't there be an easy status to say if a check has truly "cleared" or not? The amount of fraud committed using this must be astronomical, based on how many reports I see without really looking. What is the piece I'm missing?
- theossuary 7y agoThere's an interesting series of blog posts on the topic: https://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-perspective-part-1/ https://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-pers... And the accompanying hackernews thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7636066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7636066 But basically it seems like ACH is slow because the federal reserve runs once a day batches.
- teilo 7y agoThe entire system is built around asynchronous batch processing, as one would expect given when it was designed. It assumes intermittent serial connections between systems to transfer the payload. The systems then process the payload offline, generate a response, and send back the result during the next transfer window. Nowadays this is done via the Internet,* but the same basic architecture, and in many cases, the same mainframe backends, are still being used to do the processing. * I'm not sure how the banks and the Fed are connected, actually. But ACH from businesses almost always go over the Internet. They used to go over dialup.
- mattmarcus 7y agoHey there - author of the article here. Like some of the other comments said, ACH payments are handled by a middle man(The Clearing House/FedACH). In terms of speed, this is what their current guidance is: "Specifically, the Nacha Operating Rules require that ACH credits settle in one to two business days and ACH debits settle on the next business day. Recent enhancements to the Nacha Operating Rules now enable same-day settlement of virtually all ACH transactions." (https://www.nacha.org/news/what-ach-quick-facts-about-automated-clearing-house-ach-network https://www.nacha.org/news/what-ach-quick-facts-about-automa...) For what you're asking about with check reversals, there are protections that let you challenge payments after they have "cleared". ACH payments from individuals can be challenged for up to 60 days and for businesses, up to 3 days (although sometimes banks will let you do it beyond that window). ACH is built to be reversible. If you want avoid that, you can use wires or (soon) RTP.
- runako 7y agoRelevant podcast on the workings of ACH, if you're interested in something less technical than this post: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/10/576879734/episode-489-the-invisible-plumbing-of-our-economy https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/10/576879734/epis...
- kyrra 7y agoAs someone who has worked on integrating with BACS (UK version of ACH) they have the have the same code. https://gocardless.com/direct-debit/receiving-messages/#auddis-messages https://gocardless.com/direct-debit/receiving-messages/#audd... "2 Payer deceased You have attempted to set up a DDI on the account of someone who is deceased. Extremely rare."
- killjoywashere 7y agoThe Social Security Administration's Death Index and Death Master File are a great resource. Too bad they make it such a pain to get. The US military keeps its own death file for its beneficiary population (all members of the military, retirees, and their dependents). I have been told (not surprisingly) that there are disagreements between the various authorities on who exactly is dead. So, even if you get an R15 and the bank tells you they certified the death against the SSA's MDF, they may only be mostly dead.
- paule89 7y agoWhat is ACH?