America, as we all know, is a country which loves technology. When internet access came through the telephone, America had free local phone calls and a permanently connected population. Some years passed, the rest of the world got free local calls and so America got broadband. The entire country was alive with clever wires beaming pictures of naked ladies to countless dimly-lit homes.
Americans do everything online. The coke dealer who hangs around at the end of the road probably has a web site. You can pre-order your wrap, request how much you’d like it cut with baking powder, pay via a credit card and probably have the stuff delivered via Twitter.
Well, my furry friend, one thing Americans do not do online is transfer money from their bank account to someone else’s goddamned account with a different bloody bank. I wasted a good hour of my life faffing around on First Tech Credit Union‘s internet banking site trying to find where it was I clicked to send money to other people, only to eventually discover that this is impossible. Impossible, you hear. It’s impossible to transfer money from one bank to another. Perhaps I should send a cheque, they said. A cheque! What is this, 1860? And I suppose you expect me to write on it using a pen? I’d have to buy one especially! I don’t even know how to draw letters any more!
Oh, I know you can pay people using your mobile phone and probably print a contract with your shoe over there.
Here we don’t write checks, we just ask our bank to write checks. Set up a bill pay with your friend as the payee…
The dirty little secret around this is that the American banking system is still fundamentally the same at its core as it was the day ATMs first went live.
It’s a critical system, you see, and it can’t be down. Ever. Not even for a fraction of a second. Plus it can’t change its calculation methods, ever, by even a fraction of a cent. So we’re trapped with a boatload of COBOL running on virtualised mainframes, unless somehow every bank agrees that we can afford to build an entire new system that runs simultaneously alongside the current one until we’re 100% certain it’s exactly the same. Then we can take the old one down.
Can you see the problem? The new system will be EXACTLY THE SAME. You don’t get anything from it. If you propose even the slightest change in how things operate, they’ll stomp on it because it may introduce instability. So each bank has to build its own private infrastructure to transfer funds, and that infrastructure only works on its own accounts.
The funny thing is that Americans tend to scoff at the rest of the world for being too stodgy and conservative, when our own monetary system is so risk-averse it can’t make any meaningful progress.
I whinge about this a lot.
It’s a bit of a mystery why the US didn’t go down the EMV route: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV. To make use of banks in the States you need a credit card, hence the obsession with your credit rating. Does anywhere else in the world have a payday loan industry?
Yeah nuisance, but we got Prairie Dog Town and over 600 roller coasters.
Use PayPal.
My credit Union allows me to send money via their bill pay web site. I’ve done it many times.
Phineas. Yes, we have a big payday loan industry. The APR must be in triple figures. But, we have much higher debt as a proportion of GDP than the US, so perhaps it’s not so surprising.
Darklock is absolutely correct, however, he did forget to mention that the COBOL source code has all been lost and all the bug patches are made by crazy ol’ greybeards (like me) using hex editors on the executables.
And the new system will be ready as soon as the abacus is certified y2k compliant.
Ok… as an American living in England.. two observations… one, why the hell has America not started using the chip and pin technology? As far as I can tell, this is the one area that UK banks are kicking American credit card ass in… on the other end… why can’t somebody write me a check in the UK, and then I could go to their bank with ID and cash the check… the only way to “cash” a check in the Uk is to deposit it in your own bank.. which can take up to 8 or 9 days to clear depending on holidays… also, for a country with no guns, every bank is bullet proof glassed to the hilt… ok, they love stabbing and kicking people to death… so maybe some protection is prudent (especially given that your blood pressure is bound to go up when you step into a British bank), but maybe somethinga little less menacing like chicken wire would give the banks a little more friendly feel. Also… man, do they charge businesses up the wazoo for business accounts here!.. get this, they charge businesses a percentage for deposits and withdrawls… “put your money in our bank so we can use your deposits to invest and make money with, oh, and we’re going to charge you for giving us that priveledge as well”…daaaaaaaaaaaammmmnnnn!