|
|
|
|
|
|
by lordentropy
1733 days ago
|
|
|
Yeah, nationalize all the innovative companies and let the bureaucrats run them. You then end up with a system designed in the 1970s and rarely updated - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network. In the US, it takes 4-10 days to send an ACH. |
|
|
I think a better question is why, for all supposed innovation that is brought by private enterprise, the country with seemingly most privatised financial sector has some of the most backwards, arse-end-of-nowhere, the devil has said goodnight few stations before payments situation?
One hypothesis is that in such situation, the vendors are not interested in cooperation if they can operate nationwide, and instead try to get as much lock-in in spite of what's better for customer, and thus aren't interested in faster general payments system.
I mean, seriously, Poland despite all the crap we had to sort out in 1990s managed to build a faster and more reliable system by using file transfer (mostly by FTPS, but used to be X.25 and optionally floppies!), scheduled jobs (essentially cron) and these days basic PKI file signing.
It worked well enough that cheques were phased out by I think 2002 (as in "no, there are no cheques supported anywhere").
And the capability floor it set means that any private alternative has to figure something that adds value - for example, instant online settlement (ever paid for pizza by wire? I do, often), shortcode-plus-phone quick transfers (essentially a common enough variant of the previous that even works at POS).