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Comment by Qworg | Hacker News Reader

The US Federal Reserve is currently trying to work towards faster payments - and seems to want to let private industry solve the problem.

It really is terrible though and has been for a long time.

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Historically, in EU the private industry chose not to solve the problem because (just like in USA) the problem is profitable for them. Sometimes people need fast payments and you can charge them lots of money for that; if everyone's basic payments are fast and cheap, then you lose that revenue.

The point of change in EU was legally mandated changes (PSD) which (after a transition period, something like 2 years maybe?) essentially required banks to deliver payments within a certain time or compensate the payer for any losses/costs caused by the delay, at which point suddenly the private industry managed to quickly solve all the technical and organizational problems that were impossible before.

I think it's a bit odd we rely on governments to print and issue currency (estimates that only 8% of currency is physical), yet are very hands off about the digital side of things.

The problem with that from what I've heard is that private industry really loves the float on that 3+ day transfer window.

I think a few years ago there was a summit of US bankers to talk about creating a faster alternative to ACH. They decided not to (presumably because they didn't see any benefit to themselves).

I do keep hearing about "Same Day ACH" which was rolled out and phases and phase 3 was supposed to be done on March 16, 2018.

https://www.nacha.org/rules/same-day-ach-moving-payments-fas...

Isn't "letting private industry solve the problem" exactly what we've already got?

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