"NACHA projects that ACH Originators would generate approximately 1.4 billion same-day ACH payments annually as of ten years after full implementation and rollout, primarily for transactions that can be initiated before 2:45 PM ET on business days (not on weekends or holidays), and that do not require real-time functionality."
So you'll still have to deal with the absurd notion of holidays and weekends when working with bank transfers.
What we need is instant clearing, 24/7/365. Nobody cares that it's Sunday. Nobody cares that it's Presidents Day.
> What we need is instant clearing, 24/7/365. Nobody cares that it's Sunday. Nobody cares that it's Presidents Day.
UK has had near-real-time transfers for a while, it's called "Faster Payments" and there's no fees for end-users. It's also a "push" system (and not a "pull" system like ACH) which has serious advantages -- you can send money to anyone given their sort code and account number, and those numbers do not need to be kept private. With ACH if you have someone's routing number and account number you can pull money from their account without them needing to authorise it.
Same-day ACH is just ACH with more batches, it's the same old shit cooked a little faster.
It also allows for things like one of the UK Bitcoin trading sites that offers payment by bank transfer where it generally takes less time for the bank transfer to reach them than it takes for the BTC transfer to confirm.
The only reason you do want to keep your account details secret is that people can set up direct debits on your account. This happened to Jeremy Clarkson after he posted his account number and sort code in a newspaper column and challenged people to take some money [0]
Indeed. SEPA direct debit is disabled by default on Finnish bank accounts(), I believe for exactly this reason (and because no service here actually uses it).
Instead we use an e-invoice system that requires explicit signup from the user with their bank, usually via the bank web service.
() I checked OP and Nordea. I guess it could be enabled on some other banks but it is hard to find information about this service.
The linked BBC article says the victim hinted at how the public could find his address, so someone who knew how the system works called Clarkson's bluff with a £500 monthly debit to a UK charity.
Apparently, the UK system was designed to support push and pull transfer modes.
At least with a direct debit, my bank has a list of companies authorized to pull money from my account (they are all supposed to have a signed direct debit agreement on file) and I can revoke from my bank's website. Is there something similar in the US?
With my bank (known for its great service) you can call to place an ACH freeze but you have to know the vendor's identification or rough amount but you may end up with collateral damage (stopping a payment you do want to go through).
Or a dodgy enough place willing to look the other way when setting up the direct debit, because at least as of 9 years ago it was possible to do so when I was selling mobile contracts. Some would do so, and one of those is in jail now; so I guess it's not worth it, but the "validation" definitely wasn't foolproof then
When you understand that it’s based on checks, it makes perfect sense. Not that checks are a good system, but if the alternative is a check then it’s the same downside.
"What we need is instant clearing, 24/7/365. Nobody cares that it's Sunday. Nobody cares that it's Presidents Day."
Given that the whole thing is done by computer, how on earth do holidays fit in? I will grudgingly accept an answer involving maint. staff but computers themselves don't take hols.
The really funny/sad thing is that this is even a thing. The basic technologies required for near instantaneous inter bank account transfers has been available for quite a few decades.
"So you'll still have to deal with the absurd notion of holidays and weekends when working with bank transfers."
The blockchain works on holidays. Say what you want about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but the hard truth is that processing transactions 24/7/365 is part of their appeal compared to legacy financial systems, as perfectly illustrated in this example...
A SQL database also works on holidays. The problem with the "legacy financial systems" is not that their technology mysteriously shuts down on holidays, it's that the people do. As soon as they automate clearing house processes, they can also have 24/7/365 transactions, blockchain or not.
Doesn't ACH stand for Automated Clearing House? Which part of the process has yet to be automated? Clearly it is poorly named if it isn't fully automated which seems to be the case. It is possible that it is fully automated but because money is important, you need maintenance staff to be available to correct any mistakes.
It's automated. It doesn't mean continuously operating.
I'd recommend listening to this planet money episode[1] where they describe how the ACH came to be.
It's called automated, because it's a step up from the original method of payment processing between banks: handing physical slips of paper between each other.
Another blockchain solutionist in search of a problem to solve.
Finland, 15 years ago: free bank transfers from individual to individual, money appears on the bank account of the recipient in a matter of minutes or even just seconds, including the time it takes for him to check on the cash dispenser interface or the bank website. Regular average Joes' banks. No blockchain in sight.
I've been thinking that bank transaction reconciliation is one of the best use-cases for DLT. No need for a crypto coin, each financial institution could just hold a ledger copy. R3's Corda is being built to plug in directly to legacy SQL systems, and its founders have lots of experience in finance. If anyone is interested, I found this epicenter podcast interview really interesting:
Sigh... I never said the problem can be solved only by a blockchain. But the problem does exist in some countries and the blockchain does solve it.
Also the problems of the Finnish system that cryptocurrencies solve are obvious: your system has low-ish daily/monthly limits, and your system only works with 0.05% of the world's population (namely those with a Finnish bank account). In an era of European and international trade, that is ridiculous.
2 - Irreversibility of payments. This helps merchants avoid fraudulent credit card chargebacks: once funds are received they are spendable right away. No one can reverse payments. No system other than blockchains offer irreversibility.
3 - Permissionless. You don't need anyone's permission to participate in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Banks sometimes refuse to let people (especially the poor) open bank accounts. Because they don't have enough for an initial deposit, or have a bad credit history, etc. By contrast, anyone can be a cryptocurrency user as long as they have a $20 Android smartphone.
Every blockchain initiative being explored by financial institutions is not decentralized. Unless you're tossing out the banking system to directly transact with other parties using digital currencies, in which case: good luck, I don't have a rebuttal except to say I doubt that will become mainstream enough to be ubiquitous and convenient, but maybe I'm wrong.
> 1. Censorship resistance.
I don't personally care about this; do you think most people do?
> 2. Irreversibility of payments.
That's admittedly cool, but I personally don't want that either. Great for vendors I suppose, but I like being able to e.g. issue chargebacks with AmEx when there is legitimate fraud. I don't think there is a technical solution that satisfies both buyers and sellers and mitigates fraud on both sides.
> 3. Permissionless.
I don't really understand this, I have accounts with several banks that didn't run credit checks before I opened an account. They did an identity verification, but they didn't care about my creditworthiness for a checking account. Moreover, these were national banking chains with online account signup and approval, so it isn't limited to regional availability.
Other than that - I agree permissionless is a cool feature, but I don't particularly want to transact with people in a permissionless system. The natural extrapolation of a permissionless system is one in which there are fewer safeguards for e.g. verifying a user's identity, and (speaking as someone who works in cryptography research here), I don't think schemes that enable two parties to transact without mutually trusting each other are a worthwhile problem for a technical solution in the real world.
Regarding 1. If I understand this correctly, then I believe that this is only partly true. How do you buy bitcoin? You need fiat currencies in a current account or a credit card. How do you get that? You need a bank account. At that stage you will get verified and a state could censor you.
Regarding 2. Actually, there are real-time payment systems around the globe that are also irreversible. E.g. Faster Payments in the UK. SEPA Instant will launch with the Euro in November 2017. The company I co-founded even offers an API to initiate Faster Payments from the backend of any app: https://www.telleroo.com/faster-payments-api
To be honest, it's mostly the US that is not up to date here.
Regarding 3. It maybe permissionless now but that is mostly because it is not regulated. As soon as it becomes regulated as a financial service you will have all the same processes that you already have for financial products. Will it ever get regulated? Of course! As someone who works in the financial space I can tell you that, for example Anti-Money Laundering legislation is extremely important to regulators and they will push this through with force.
I don't want to sound too discouraging, cryptocurrencies are really cool. But the question is if payments is actually the right area for them. All of the problems above can and are already currently being solved by non-crypto solutions. I highly encourage you to take a look at the fintech market in the UK who are tackling all these challenges. Furthermore, these fintechs are expanding to the US and around the globe where they will solve those problems.
1 - I think many people care. Maybe you are not considering the other 7 billion people on the planet who have drastically different life situations. I believe it's the key reason why people are so divided about whether cryptocurrencies are useful or not. Just because a feature isn't useful to you doesn't mean it's not useful to others.
2 - Yet you tolerate the irreversibility of cash. So it's probably not such a big deal. Besides, most merchants are honest (the need to charge back a CC transaction is extremely rare.) I also think one of the potential great use cases of Bitcoin is informal person-to-person transactions (paying back lunch money to a friend, giving money to family, etc). Irreversibility is irrelevant, actually desired, in those cases.
3 - Once again I think you are not considering the situation of others. In the US alone, millions are denied banking accounts https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/news/cnfall13/denied... This is severly handicapping them given that a bank account is practically required for participation in the modern economy.
Thank you for intelligently and politely discussing. Too many critics of cryptocurrencies are borderline aggressive/insulting and I've never understood why.
2 - Irreversibility of payments. This helps merchants avoid fraudulent credit card chargebacks: once funds are received they are spendable right away. No one can reverse payments. No system other than blockchains offer irreversibility.
Flip side is that customers can't reverse payments when they're victims of fraud.
You're missing my point. I'm not saying btc won't or doesn't work, but that there is a flip side to the no reversible transactions, and one that merchants already deal with.
Similar here in Norway although the transfers are batched when the recipient is at a different bank. Batches run three times a day. Transfers to accounts at the same bank are instantaneous.
Thats's not perfectly illustrated at all...financial institutions have been capable of servicing transactions 24/7/365 for decades now. ACH just doesn't do it, and a blockchain doesn't inherently empower it more than, say, Postgres.
...which is precisely what perfectly illustrates the problem. Users are at the mercy of some arbitrary policy of not processing transactions on weekends & holidays.
That's not a technical problem, especially because every blockchain proposal for financial institutions is centralized. Until you hit competitive transaction throughput on a blockchain while retaining its decentralized features, it doesn't really free you from being at the whims of other parties. There is no proof of work or proof of stake system that solves this yet.
That's the point: it's a human problem. And by removing the human element, blockchains solve the problem.
Note that I'm taking about decentralized blockchains (Bitcoin, Ethereum...), not the private centralized ones that are being proposed for financial institutions.
There are a few cryptcurrencies that are attempting to solve this problem. Some are actually centralized enough that banks are testing them out for this exact purpose (Ripple). Are they the solution to the problem? I don't know. But ACH is pretty old school and there are more than enough technologies to do far better.
The fact that HNers are so adamant that payments should happen faster displays a complete lack of understanding of user needs. In fact inter-bank transfers in the US via ACH have worked just fine for many decades.
Further, the US is one of the only countries where you can pull funds from a bank account.
Yeah, amazing how the public routing number and secret can be used to empty an account without any further auth.
We need to end this madness. I was hopeful for chip&PIN but we just got chip&recurring transaction fraud. Places don't even try to check your ID, but now the card verification takes at least 4x as long without any additional meaningful security factors. As someone who has had cards stolen from their mailbox and activated + used, this is frustrating to say the least.
The majority of fraud is via counterfeit cards (which chip is effective against), not stolen cards. Most of the US credit card industry decided that they'd lose more by being the "difficult card" in your wallet than those transactions cost them. They're not just lazy or incompetent.
I am no fan of chip&sign, but there is added security from the terminal to the merchant gateway, where a very significant amount of card theft has traditionally occurred. The POS system can be compromised and your card number is still safe.
However, at least in Finland this (SEPA direct debit) is not really used. It is not free for end user (~1€/payment) and banks have it disabled by default for security reasons.
For domestic recurring payments we normally use "e-invoice" which requires the user to authorize payments per-invoicer on the bank web service, or if one prefers, just a traditional invoice paid manually with a traditional bank transfer. Both are normally free for the end user.
In Norway we have a similar system called AvtaleGiro but the bank gives me a lot more control over it than a UK direct debit. For instance I can specify the maximum amount that each recipient can demand and I normally set that to as near the expected amount as possible. If the creditor demands more the payment is refused and I get an email so that I can investigate and, usually, just increase the limit and re-enable the transaction. This doesn't cost me anything.
In the UK the banks will pay the direct debit even if you don't have any money and then charge you a fee for the unauthorized overdraft and another fee for the letter telling you about it.
Nonetheless Venmo exists for a reason, User need. It would also be more comparable if one were to be able to buy Government bonds as a corporation using Venmo to make your comparison aapt, alas you can't do that.
If one were to compare sub $50 payments on retail banking ACH vs Venmo you would have some valuable information indeed.
That means you need engineers on call 24/7/365, which raises the cost. One of the nice things about ACH is that it's dirt cheap, especially compared to the credit card network.
For example, Stripe charges 0.80% for an ACH transaction, capped at $5 max. Some processors just charge a flat rate. A credit transaction is a whopping 2.90% + $0.30, with no cap. When it comes to my paycheck and bills, slow and cheap is totally fine.
On top of that, many banks don't even post transactions on weekends/holidays anyway. They'll remain pending until close of business on the next weekday. That's been starting to change, but still.
The banking system is built around store-and-forward and batch processing, with lots of auditing in between. This is a feature, not a bug. :) Sure, it could be speed up... but if you really need instant, there are already options that exist (debit, credit, wire). You just have to pay for them.
(Fun fact: Even the credit card system isn't really instant. The credit authorization goes through immediately, but the actual charge still takes 1-2 days to clear... and is often done in end-of-day batches. And yes, there are exceptions... but it's not the norm.)
Really, there's no reason for ACH to suck so much. Other countries have better payments infrastructure that costs less (to operate and for end-users) and is more modern -- and it hasn't imploded their banking systems.
Same day transfers have been a reality for a long time (at least in The Netherlands), the fact that it takes 3 - 5 days here in the US is absolutely insane.
Don't forget that many banks will still require that they fax you a form to sign which must be faxed back for large transfers. This + multiple phone calls to both the bank and the person you're trying to pay make for a fun time.
Sure, but most transactions aren't large. The UK system is convineant enough that I've had several occasions where people have asked me to grab some cash for them on the way to meet because it was easier to make an instant bank transfer than to make the detour to a cash point.
A team of 100 24/7 engineers amortized across the full amount of money transferred across i.e. Bank Of America or Credit Suisse's would cost a fraction of a penny per dollar, and it wouldn't require 100 24/7 engineers.
The costs of real-time ACH have nothing to do with engineering payroll, and everything to do with executive payroll.
Banking isn't expensive in the US because of engineering costs...
It's expensive because of greed
Enabled by a lack of competition and regulatory pressure. In Europe politicians, giant co-operatives, and partially state owned companies aren't afraid to join the debate when someone mentions credit card fees.
As described at http://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-persp... , ACH has called itself a 'next-day' settlement system yet funds transferred on a Thursday may not be available until the next Wednesday (6 days later) since they leave several days of buffer in case of returns and do not count weekends or holidays. And that's only if the transfer is done early in the day. If it's the evening, it could take 7 days.
Unless they changed something else, changing from so-called 'next-day' to 'same-day' would only reduce that by 1 day from 6 or 7 days to 5 or 6 days, which isn't really that significant and certainly isn't what people think of when they see 'same-day'.
It says "for transactions that can be initiated before 2:45 PM ET on business days (not on weekends or holidays)" so it's still broken with several days of delay, but there is a line that says "RDFIs will be mandated to make funds available from same day ACH credits (such as payroll Direct Deposits) to their depositors by 5:00 PM at the RDFI's local time." Does that require them to drop the return buffer? That could at least cut it down to only 2 or 3 days delay.
If it does cut the delay in half, that's a mixed blessing since it reduces the pressure to develop a better protocol or even change ACH implementations to reduce the delay to a few minutes. It's just a series of 3 requests and 3 responses - even with processing, that shouldn't take more than a few minutes.
And if they added an extension for the receiving institution to confirm success in the return file (or another file), everyone involved would be better off (except the bankers making interest while the money sits in limbo, I guess).
> bankers making interest while the money sits in limbo, I guess
This is a common refrain. Has anyone ever actually done a calculation to show that it's a significant amount, at least enough to disincentivise building a quicker payments system?
Living in India, this has always stuck me as very odd with the U.S. that there are no quick ways to transfer money between bank accounts. In India, payments have long been done in hourly batches six days a week (with time limits) in a system called NEFT (National Electronic Funds Transfer) and for higher amounts, an almost real time system called RTGS (Real Time Gross Settlement).
A few years ago, a consortium of private and public entities setup IMPS (Immediate Payment Service) that allowed instant payments (just a few seconds) 24x7 with a cell phone number and a bank provided ID (called MMID). Then came UPI (Unified Payments Interface), which improved on this and provided for user chosen IDs (like name@bank) as an easier way to exchange information and transact. In both cases, there's no need to reveal the underlying bank account number, branch and other details. The latter two systems have been criticized for how they work (mainly that they don't maintain audit trails and that they could be used to launder money).
It's good to see the U.S. system improving, but this needs to get a lot better to be comparative to other places.
You can come up with all sorts of proximal causes for the current situation, but once all the bs excuses are stripped away it really comes down to plain old corruption.
Banks collude with their regulators to both minimize required changes to the system and make it effectively illegal to create a competing system. Without pressure from regulators or markets, banks can rest on their laurels while doing just enough to avoid public outrage over their level of dysfunction.
There's a lot of money to be made with overdraft fees and offering pseudo-banking services (cheque cashing places, refillable debit cards that can be ACH-deposited into) to the unbanked, so US banks have a very strong incentive to keep their consumer-facing offerings slow and sucky.
When I make a payment to someone via say a banking app on my mobile, they can be spending it virtually within seconds. That's from one bank to another.
I knew that transfers happened pretty quickly here but I paid someone for some work and they were spending it within say five minutes. They were unable to use their card beforehand because I had to come out earlier on the same day to buy some materials on their behalf.
In US a person can actually write a check for any amount, and you can photograph it with the bank app on your phone and be able to spend it instantly. I'm not saying it's an elegant system, but at least instant free payments exist.
What the hell is a check! I am, of course, joking: I'm 47 and probably still have a cheque book ... somewhere. I think I last wrote one about five or six years ago and before that a year or two.
You are probably acutely aware how ridiculous a solution to the delay in check clearance is, that involves taking photographs of it. That's something like a 10MB data transfer to convey say 1Kb of information. Those numbers are plucked from the air but probably of the right magnitude.
You'll be telling me next that in the US a written signature is still a thing 8) OK - I have stopped giggling from being offered a terminal to sign to approve purchases via my debit card when in the US: I haven't signed the back of one in about 20 years.
I never sign mine (I'm in the US) and have only rarely had it checked . I can count on one hand the number of times I've been asked to provide ID when using an unsigned card, and I've never been refused a purchase due to missing signature.
It might have changed in the 4 years I've been away from the states, but there is a simple answer on Why you haven't had it checked: In general, customers rarely hand their cards over to a store clerk.
The pharmacy I worked at had self-service machines. Customers signed the machine, and we never took the card. We were instructed not to do so unless the system prompted us to check. From what I could observe, there usually isn't reason to do so since the card companies only want proof if they are investigating a fraudulent purchase. I've personally had to go through paper signed slips (before a digital signature system) to prove the person signed. Otherwise, they just get stored for many years.
And honestly, it is a pretty bad security feature as there is no way I can tell if the signatures correctly match the person. Most signatures are illegible anyway and become even more so when it is digital. My own signature looks different in the two mediums. And this ignores the fact that signatures vary or that I was dealing with possibly sick people, who sometimes had their family member sign their name for them (especially for prescriptions) - and all the other variation that can make things not match.
The main exception to this rule is when folks purchased gift cards of different sorts. Even then, the signature wasn't a concern as we were making sure the card number was the same as the magnetic stripe.
No you can't. Most U.S. banks require a 1-2 day hold on mobile deposits still. Some banks, like USAA, credit you immediately, but most major banks and local CUs don't.
Hell, one of my credit unions holds payments I make to my credit card from my credit union checking account.
One credit union will give me a "courtesy credit" for photo-deposited checks up to $1,500. Another holds all of them for three business days.
The bank I was using to receive a wire transfer sat on the deposit until 6pm even though the sending bank said it was transmitted at 8:30am (same time zone).
How we handle moving money is nuts. Most of the time, the way that's actually the fastest is to go to a credit union ATM, withdraw the desired amount with one plastic card, and use the destination credit union's plastic card to deposit the exact same money back into the exact same ATM.
Schwab seems to clear my mobile deposits up to $10,000 per day within about 30 minutes of snapping the picture. If you deposit over $10,000 god help you.
I didn't mean to say every bank supports this. If USAA is the only one that credits any amount instantly, that's a shame, since they've started restricting who can sign up.
There is absolutely no instant spending of money deposited by check in the US. Checks have to clear, in some situations there can be a 1-5 hold for the entire amount, and the money can be returned within 30 days. Most banks will make a very small amount available for instant spend, in the $100-500 range. So I would say we're very far from instant free payment, don't you think?
I live in US and have a USAA bank account which allows this. They do not wait for the check to clear, even if it's tens of thousands of dollars. Obviously they reserve the right to bring your account into negative balance if the check fails to clear and you have spent it all. I guess it's akin to a line of credit?
I used this recently to send my little brother a wedding present. The UX was pretty poor from his side for enrollment, but after that was done the transfer was instant as advertised.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Businesses have call to send _many_ payments (and many types of payments); the overwhelming majority by count are below $25k. Since nothing about existing ACH or wires is going away as a result of this system, it's a pure win.
The bitcoin threat is a motivator for these legacy systems to get up to speed. Even if bitcoin ends up not being universally used, I'd still consider it a success for causing this.
It's a sadistic joke that it's so hard to transfer money from one person to another (at least here in the US). The fact that it even takes more than an hour is absurd.
Almost all of those checks tend to happen after the fact and lead to transactions getting rolled back, rather than being checked in advance.
(Whether that's a desirable approach is a reasonable question, but that's already a thing that happens today. The only thing that needs checking in advance is "is there enough money".)
If Bitcoin can do it in 10 minutes globally, we can do it faster in a centralized system.
Edit: ... Not to mention many other developed nations' banking systems.
Edit: Not sure about the downvotes, but really- please don't pretend sending money instantly within one country is rocket science. The reason we're in this mess is mostly banks wanting to hang onto float, and legacy. Both our neighbors to the north and south have much speedier internal banking systems than we do, as do countless other countries.
How do you query the card balance and transfer the funds? Do you actually get cash out of the card, or do you have to resell it as a store credit to someone else?
It's incredibly easy to transfer money. I and all my friends use Venmo. Settling the tab, paying rent, utilities, in a few seconds. It works extremely well for me.
Venmo (and paypal and friends) are just little proprietary walled gardens, and if you want to exit the walled garden, you have to go through ACH. More rent-seeking walled gardens -- who only exist because the default payment infrastructure in the US is slow obsolete shit -- is not a solution to this, better infrastructure (like UK's Faster Payments) is the solution.
In China with Alipay, I receive transfers instantly and deposits to my bank account "can take up to 2 hours", but typically land within 5 minutes. I get instant WeChat notifications whenever my card is used. Although, to be honest I haven't used a physical card in months. I pay for everything with QR codes. There's a code you can present to the attendant and they scan you (typically faster) and then I authenticate the transfer with a fingerprint or pin. It's honestly astounding to see how advanced the financial system is here, ESPECIALLY when compared to the bullshit that currently exists in the US.
In practice this isn't an issue. Money is immediately withdrawn and I transfer the floating balance back to my bank account every week or so. There are few situations where I want the money in my account immediately.
Thanks, I was just reading the parent link to part 2. Makes sense they are making lower-risk / more trusted transactions faster, similar to remittance companies already.
Ripple is part of the NACHA alliance. A lot of banks are using this to settle transactions in RT and even more banks are experimenting with it including the Fed itself.
Paypal doesn't serve many countries. Has high fees. Can arbitrarily lock you away from funds or freeze accounts. Censors Transactions. Banking law does not apply as they are a transmitter, not a bank. Many many reasons not to PayPal.
If you look into the reason for each of those constraints, you'll find that any cryptocurrency exchange will eventually have to face the same challenges.
I think it was Hector-Garcia Molina who used to talk about how NoSQL proponents were so excited about the scale benefits, but just hadn't yet realized that they need ACID, normalization, etc.. That's who cryptocurrency advocates remind me of. Just because some features are superior currently, doesn't mean those features are consistent with future, inevitable constraints.
On the other hand, Europe broadly has better ways to transfer money. For example, anyone with a mobile banking app can transfer money to anyone else who's registered their mobile number with their bank - even completely separate banks - near-instantly, with an hour's delay in extreme cases, in the UK. And I often hear that other countries have significantly better infrastructure than us.
There is huge potential with what Ripple is doing, and their technology very much has a lot to do with ACH and cash settlement. Apologies if I was being an ass. I'm just really excited about Ripple and how I think their technology can transform the entire electronic movement of money. No more waiting days for cash to settle... it literally takes seconds. It's pretty amazing to see it in action.
You are so right, Ripple is one of the only companies trying to revolutionize how payments work by creating interoperability between different payment networks and working with banks. What they are trying to do is extremely ambitious... if they can pull it off then oh man, not sure what to say. It's like trying to predict Facebook pre internet.....
"NACHA projects that ACH Originators would generate approximately 1.4 billion same-day ACH payments annually as of ten years after full implementation and rollout, primarily for transactions that can be initiated before 2:45 PM ET on business days (not on weekends or holidays), and that do not require real-time functionality."
So you'll still have to deal with the absurd notion of holidays and weekends when working with bank transfers.
What we need is instant clearing, 24/7/365. Nobody cares that it's Sunday. Nobody cares that it's Presidents Day.