Electronic funds transfer in the US, stone age?

I am also quite sure the bank wants to know where that transmission originated. A check scan sent from an account with dynamic IP (which most high-speed accounts out here are) obviously isn't going to fly.

Why don't you read your own references...?

"The Mobile Banking app is available on iPad, iPhone, Android" ^^^^^^^

The security of burner phones??? I guess that's why the drug guys use them, they like the security.

The news server charges 10 Euros per year. That needs to be paid.

No, it's paid from a European account and, therefore, arrives instantly.

A banking system like they have in Europe. That works.

Baloney. I lived there for most of my live. You obviously haven't because otherwise you'd know that as well. The fact that money transfers arrive in minutes is simply that, a fact. Lasse and others here can surely confirm that.

No. I know there is something better and I have experienced it, lived there.

Because I am an analog design engineer and are busy doing other things. Designing electronics. All that is required would be American bank IT guys visiting Europe and learning how it's done there. That's it.

_Not_ on untethered devices on Wifi or LAN such as Android TV boxes. They told us so.

You really just can't even understand the question.

Ok, so the "what" is paying through an EU online billpay. You got the newsserver company to give you their bank account number? Good luck doing that here unless you are a credible company. Bank account numbers are not given out so freely.

Which you have no idea how it works.

And yet you *still* can't tell us how it's done!

Yes, I have tasted some very, very delicious food. But it's hard to ask anyone else to fix it for me unless I have some idea of how it was made.

Like so many in this group you think the problems of other businesses are so easy to solve, even when you have very little understanding.

So, you just advertise that those entrusted with the customer's money are incompetent. Great plan. No, you train people to do their jobs. If there is something that's done so rarely that the line people can't remember how to do it, the teller just discretely gets help. They do

Yes, quite. A RPi *is* a "phone*; in that it uses a mobile phone processor AIUI. Android is available for the RPi 3 for example and it runs the google playstore like any Android phone or tablet.

Of course it would be less of a project to just get a cheap second hand smartphone. I doubt it even needs a SIM for banking.

Now that you say that, I believe you can get refurbished smart phones for less than the cost of a rPi once you factor in the PSU, case, camera, etc.

Yes, bank account numbers /are/ given out freely. Maybe that is a key difference between the USA system and the European system.

When I get a bill, the bank account number for the recipient is written on the bill. When a I pay it through my online banking (which is /really/ online), I type in the bank account number for the recipient, the amount due, and either an identifying comment or an identifying number that the biller's accountancy software generated and printed on the bill. (This number is used to let the accountancy software automatically track which customers have paid.)

Using a bank account number as the identifier is vastly more efficient, more convenient, less error-prone, and safer than using names and addresses. Clearly I can only pay money /into/ the receiver's account - I can't take money out, view their accounts, or anything else.

The same system is used whether I am paying a workman for fixing my pipes, or the state for outstanding taxes, or the school class parents' representative who is collecting for an end-of-term party.

I know that /I/ don't know how the banking system in Europe works. But clearly, it /does/ work - and it does so far, far faster and more conveniently than the American system. It is up to the American banks to look at the European ones and learn how to improve - and up to American bank customers to demand that they do so. It is not up to a bunch of electronics engineers to understand the details of a completely different industry.

Whether it is /possible/ to change the American bank system to work like the European one, is a different matter.

Maybe it's like your health service. By any objective measurement (money spent, treatment received, child mortality rates, fairness, etc.), the American health system is abysmal in comparison to European countries. Yet most Americans believe - as surely as they believe the sun will rise tomorrow - that they have the world's best health care. And the people involved in the health care "industry" (only in the USA is it thought of as an "industry" for making money - elsewhere, it is a "service" for helping the people) make vast amounts of money out of your system. So there is no incentive to actually make the changes needed to turn the system into a fair and efficient one. And since properly changing it would involve a complete rebuild of the entire system, it will probably never happen.

Trying to change the American banking system to work more like the European ones might be possible, but it might also be /impossible/ to copy it completely. Maybe it cannot be done where you have such an overriding distrust in any sort of authority or institution.

(I don't mean to be anti-American here - this is just an example. There are plenty of things wrong with the way things work in Europe, including within the health services and banking industry, and plenty of things that work better in the USA than over here.)

All he is saying is that European banking is much faster and more efficient than American banking, and it should be possible to improve banking in America if the bank people there were to look at the European systems and learn from them. He has made no claims that this would be an easy or fast change - merely that it should be possible.

Again, perhaps honesty and openness is something we are proud of in Norway, but you hide away in the USA. Maybe the difference is that in Norway, when you go to the bank and talk to a cashier it is first and foremost one person talking to another person - it is /not/ primarily a customer talking to a bank servant.

Yeah, I hate the way larger businesses have gone to hiring bots rather than people. I used to walk out my back door across my yard to visit the bank where I could talk to the branch manager who could actually do things like remove fees from my account (because I asked for it) or have counter checks printed for free. Now I get none of that and to do anything beyond opening an account requires a call to the same 800 number I call. The employees have been "trained" in how to talk to customers and trying to get them to talk like people it hard. Getting past to sales-speak to find answers to your questions is painful.

I'm sick of that part of US companies. But there isn't much I can do about it. Companies respond to what customers accept. There are just too many who aren't willing to reject this behavior because changing a bank account is a PITA.

I think you are supporting my point. Joerg looks at the fact that he gets faster transfers in Europe and thinks that should be possible here. But that is not a given. I don't know what restrains the US banking system regarding how they adopt technology. Joerg doesn't either. Until you have *some* understanding of the system, how it works and what limits it has, it is just BS to condemn it as being prehistoric.

There are tradeoffs to everything.

He is saying that, but Joerg is saying much more using words like steampunk, Flintstonian age and stage coach transport as well as suggesting that the bank officers only need to "see how it is done in Europe". He lives in ignorance of the systems he thinks should be changed.

I share his frustration at not being able to even find anyone at the bank to discuss this with. That's because of the bigger problems we have with our companies these days, they "push" new things to us rather than considering what we want. I literally can't find anyone to discuss issues with at most companies.

When people like KRW expect employees to act like automated servants that are not allowed to think or interact like people, and whose primary purpose is to make their employer look good, then I suppose that is the kind of employees you get.

I would not say I am /supporting/ your point, but maybe I am slightly more in the middle. I look at the European banking system and see that transferring money takes seconds. I hear about the American banking system and see that transferring money regularly takes days or even weeks. (From my very limited experience from trying to get some money to an American many years ago, the transfer also involved a fair number of completely unpredictable transfer fees taken by a number of banks along the way.)

I don't think it would be an easy matter to make American banks as good and efficient as European ones. But I /do/ think there is enormous scope for improvement, and that much of that should be possible by /relatively/ simple means. And I do think the starting point would be for American bankers to visit Europe, learn from them, and admit that perhaps the American way is not actually the best way.

However, I don't think you will get as far as in Europe - at least, not until you as a society learn that it's okay to trust your banks, and it's okay to trust your government. I think the "winners" in the American banking will be companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, or Amazon - one or more of these will go into banking and let people pay quickly and easily with small fees. And that will work, because for some bizarre reason Americans are much happier to trust those companies with all sorts of information than they are to trust established authorities.

And yes, you /do/ have a banking system that is close to prehistoric. As far as I can tell, it is more like we had some 40 or 50 years ago.

That's always true.

My understanding is that Joerg lived in Europe for decades, and then moved to America (I don't know how long he has lived there). /I/ have no personal experience with American banking, but Joerg has.

here in the US. I'd like to know just how it is accomplished. "

It is. It's just that the banks sit on the money. Of ALL the transactions, imagine the interest. They are maintaining a "minimum balance".

I explained how the newsserver company gets paid. Is it too difficult to understand?

ROFL. You are kidding, right? Pull out your check book and take a closer peek. It normally looks like this:

1. On the top left there is your full name and address, for everyone on the account.
2. On the bottom left there is the routing number for your bank.

1. On the bottom middle area there is ... ... (quelle horreur!) ... your account number.

2. Right above that is ... brace yourself, sit down before reading this ... your signature.

_All_ that gets sent to any recipient your are paying via a check. In fact, your are giving it out very freely all by yourself.

Any questions?

Nonsense. I have given you the link to the SEPA method which they are now all using.

SEPA. That was simple. If you can't understand the first link I gave here is another:

That is why chefs get hired. Anyone who has ever worked in a mangerial function knows this. You do not have to know everything yourself but you must be able to find out who does. And then tell your employee to learn it from there.

The European money transfer system for consumers is much faster than ours. It is thus better. It thus makes sense to send US bank IT folks over there to learn it. Simple.

It is easy to solve. I also know some of the reason why it isn't being solved but that was divulged to me in confidence by someone with internal know-how of the banking IT systems in the US (at one particular bank) and cannot be disclosed here. What I heard almost made me sick.

Afraid that's never going to happen because of NIH.

When I got my first American credit card it had a stage coach roaring through the night on it, with four horses. Very nice Wild-West seting. In hindsight that was quite fitting for the "state-of-the-art" of our US banking system.

Oh yeah, and not necessarily positive ones. It was almost like stepping out of a time machine and finding myself back in the 60's. However, they did already have ATMs out here, and Edison electric light inside the bank :-)

There's the problem. You explained it as if you were explaining how a car works by saying, "the wheels go around". You have no understanding of how their system works. Is there a central coordinator or do all the banks talk directly to one another through a given protocol? What are the system costs and who pays them? Who is responsible when something goes awry and who is responsible for investigating problems?

In other words, if this were a road system, who builds the roads for these transactions, who is the cop and who is the court?

You mean the wiki page with gives very little info. I hope you get more info than this when looking at new work.

I don't see anything about the details. It just says the IBAN is your best friend.

But how does it work? How do you know we can even use the same system here? Banks are governed by laws. I seem to recall reading one of your links that referred to legislation that was passed to allow this in Europe. Do you know this would be possible here?

Of course, Fermet's last theorem. We need to get you a book with larger margins. If you are talking about profits, yes, I expect that is no small part of it. They have a system that works and they make money on it. Just like the nuke industry, they have no incentive to change to a better system because they would make less money. Perhaps the same is true for the banks.