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Comment by wickedsight | Hacker News Reader

> banks specifically are among the most obnoxious shitters when it comes to "you aren't allowed to do things except the way we want it"

Since this post is about a Dutch bank, I think it's important to add some nuance to this. In the Netherlands, banks have pretty much been made responsible for any money a client loses that a bank could have theoretically prevented. This includes people wiring their life savings to someone who pretended to be a bank employee or police officer. This has become a massive cost to banks over here and they're trying to do anything to prevent this.

Right now, I need to wait 4 hours before I can increase the maximum amount I can transfer through internet banking. Want to buy something expensive and you forgot to do this? Too bad, try again in 4 hours.

> forces banks to provide access through a common API standard

Doesn't PSD2 already provide this?

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I think this is good actually. We have taken the convenience vs security trade off too much towards the former either because or due to how busy and intense life is nowadays. Waiting 4hr to make a big purchase should almost never be a problem.

No, the banking system just runs so perennially behind the times that they suffer from baroque issues that no one else has had in 20 years.

Eg the above example; how is it possible to send money without knowing who the other side is? I can trivially look up a domain name and see registration info, I can look up the IP to see who it’s registered to, I can check certs to see if they’re valid and legit.

It’s bizarre how normal we think it is to send large sums to random strings of digits that we think are Amazon or the IRS with basically 0 way to validate them.

I bought a house in cash and putting the money in escrow was unbelievably stressful. They send me numbers, on a printout that’s a scan of a scan of a scan with text that says “call to make sure this is still the right account number”, and a bajillion warnings to make sure the number is right or vague and terrible things might happen.

Insanity that I can get insanely complicated gadgets shipped to my house in 4 hours but we don’t have a better way to move 6 figure sums than “double check your numbers”.

In Finland at least there’s now recipient (name) verification, so it absolutely can be done. When you transfer money to someone, it will check your input against the true account holder and will warn if they don’t match. You can ignore the warning at your own peril.

I recently had a family member with a medical emergency in a foreign country with only 1 direct flight to cross an ocean, and there was a narrow window of time to buy the very limited supply of lie flat seats needed to make the trip so medical care could be resumed as quickly as possible.

It was nice to be able to spend $30k+ on short notice. With modern security features, there is no need to enforce an arbitrary time limit if the payer accepts the risks.

What exactly do you mean by sending that $30k at your own risk? Like are you suggesting if you sent it to the wrong entity (say they turned out to be a scammer) and the bank shrugged, you'd be fine with it because you took the risk? If yes, do you think most people would? I feel like most people expect more safeguards and recourse when the transaction amount is higher, not less.

Bit late. But people who can spend $30k+ on a plane ticket usually have other ways to pay that type of thing, in my experience, like credit cards.

Also, I'm really happy I have insurance for this type of thing.

That seems like a big regression versus a paper check. With a check I can “spend” the money immediately, or at least commit to spending it. It isn’t deducted until the check clears (which is a pain) but I don’t have to wait around for 4 hours apologizing to the seller until I’m allowed to transfer my own money.

This reads like you’ve never made a large purchase outside of the internet. I don’t know why you’d advocate for this except to be contrarian.

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