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Comment by artursapek | Hacker News Reader

In college I worked part-time for a music social network startup that sold songs and paid artists a commission, kind of like iTunes. I had to write a cron job that would issue the artist payouts every night by writing ACH files in plaintext and SFTPing them to SVB.

3 years later it's great to see Stripe providing this, but I will always have an oddly fond memory of working on that. It felt so obscure and unnecessarily difficult.

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> It felt so obscure and unnecessarily difficult.

I earned a bit of money in the 90's doing a lot of those types of data transfers. I get the feeling 70% of IT is just data munging.

> I get the feeling 70% of IT is just data munging.

The remaining 30% is, as far as I can tell, fixing bugs in the data munging code.

Leave some room for the UI folks - although that is basically getting humans to munge the data as a pre-step for the computer munging.

Wow, this is oddly familiar. I wrote some software for my company to crunch tons of payment numbers on demand which eventually boil down to writing ACH files in plaintext and SFTPing them to SVB(although SVB really only processes them twice a day).

I'm pretty stoked Stripe is supporting ACH now as I have other products that customers would like to pay with ACH rather than credit. But I don't think the Stripe product just released will help send money from control accounts(and replace SVB origination), just accepting incoming ACH payments from customers to our own company accounts.

Writing files in plaintext and SFTPing them is still a r equirement when working in the insurance world :(

Sounds like a business opportunity...

Only if your business is "writing files in plaintext and SFTPing them." Payers are basically immune to technical disruption, and it's really not worth the effort trying to create friendlier facades on what are essentially 1960s-era business and EDI processes. Someday they'll catch up technically, but until then med-fin-tech startups are punching boulders uphill.

Do I sound bitter? I think I sound bitter.

> Someday they'll catch up technically.

Going to need some really good people in Congress to start. Good luck finding them!

Do I sound bitter? I'm bitter.

Yes, but probably a business opportunity to write an API layer over the top, that writes files and SFTPs them on the backend. Sadly.

I always love memories like these. Looks like you found a pain point with a clear value-add solution. Hindsight is 20/20, but I always wonder what would have happened if your startup pivoted to offering ACH as a service....

Is this satire?

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