Right. I’m saying having all transactions be pull transactions is wrong anyway. The way I understand it, in other parts of the world (Europe, Asia?), the recipient says “Please send $X to account #Y.” (or has a QR code for it or something), the sender then tells their bank “Send $X to account #Y for transaction ID Z”. That is, the sender authorizes it and never has to give out their account info. And anyone can send to anyone, and since Y is a receive-only number, the recipient’s account isn’t in danger either.
Here, the standard is “Give me your account number so I can charge you.” and you give them your account numbers, with an implicit “Please only charge what you’re supposed to when you’re supposed to.” and you never get to authorize it with your bank. Assuming they have ACH access, they can then charge whatever whenever. You can just dispute it afterward, if when it eventually goes through you notice that it was wrong. (Then wait for the dispute resolution to get your money back.) But normal people don’t have ACH access, so you can’t transfer it to your daughter who’s broken down on the side of the highway and even if you could it’d take 4 days before she received it and could call a tow truck.
If transactions were push, authorized by the sender, they could be much faster, safer, and more capable.
ETA: Maybe somebody here from Europe could explain how that works there?
In the UK, you can transfer money from any account to any other account through a common system (BACS) (and all banks use a common account numbering scheme). All personal bank accounts let you do this through an app or website. They supply a little card reader that looks like a calculator, which you use to authenticate for things like setting up a new payee, though I’m not sure why that’s really necessary.
There’s also “direct debit”, where you authorise a company to take money from your account at scheduled intervals for, like, phone and energy bills. Obviously that does make people wary, but banks offset this by guaranteeing that the payer can claim an immediate refund (even if the charge was legitimate).
I’m not sure I understood the question though. Surely even the US has some electronic equivalent to paper che[ck/que]s?
There’s a scheduled bill pay option (sounds like your direct debit description), but no way to transfer directly to other personal accounts or anything instant. If you’re not signed up for scheduled bill pay with a company, you can use ACH with some businesses, but that can take about a week to process (nominally 3 days, depending on time, weekends, holidays, etc.). But again, it’s them charging you, not you authorizing a send to them.
To clarify, the “direct debit” option is for paying variable amounts, i.e. the merchant can take however much they want, which I think is more like this ACH you speak of. If you want to pay a company (or anyone else) the same amount every month, that’s called a “standing order” here; it’s not used so much any more because you have to manually update the amount whenever it changes. All bank transfers are more or less instant, at least during working hours.
I guess the big difference here is that, like most places, the UK has a handful of big banks instead of thousands of small ones, so although they still don’t want to move into the 21st mid-20th century, it’s much easier for them to do so when they are forced into it.
I have an EMV AmEx card but I have never been able to get it to work anywhere - didn’t work in France this summer and has never worked anywhere I tried it here in the US
I doubt it’s the actual station, it’s the company that has it’s name on the sign.
Consider how many gas stations would need to be retrofitted with new card readers. Oh my, the companies might have made less
profit that year, can’t have that. So, they told Mastercard/Visa/Etc to go screw themselves and have a rolling exemption from
needing to verify a chip enabled card. When you can download an app for your phone that scans for card skimmers, get hits, it’s
gone beyond negligence to accessory to the crime.
Ah, ok, I see your point there. Most of the ones around here are all name brand stations, or working with large national fast
food chains. But the smaller independents, yeah, possible.
I worked with many big fuel suppliers (think nationwide trucking stations like Pilot and Loves) and the EMV switchover is a huge problem.
First, each pump requires replacement at a cost of upwards $20k each. This includes ripping up concrete to replace wiring and upgrade communication lines. A typical truck stop can have 20-30 pumps. That’s 1/2 million bucks per site. Loves has 1500 locations nationwide. Now we’re talking close to half a Billion dollars just to replace equipment that’s already functioning. Now imagine a small mom & pop station (most are franchises).
There are over 160,000 retail gas stations in the US. The math is staggering. Bottom line is they’d rather pay the fraud.
Second issue is there are only 2-3 suppliers of gas pump equipment of this type. The current waitlist to get an EMV enabled pump is about 2 years long. They simply can’t make them fast enough.
Fuel is a low margin business. Gas stations make pennies of profit on gas. The real money is in the convenience store which already has EMV terminals. Most large gas station chains are just eating the fraud until the problem becomes too big to ignore.
But it isn’t just the station owner or company, it’s us also. The company might decide to just eat the cost, be we don’t have
that choice. We buy gas, a week later our card gets used to buy tickets from Japan to Australia, then we have to deal with
updating all the places that card was on file, once we get a new card in two weeks, and scream in frustration at the orders that
start bouncing because the card number used is now invalid.
I finally geo-locked my card after $2000 in airline tickets showed up the day before Thanksgiving, but that has caused problems
also. I went to contribute to a KickStarter project, but the vendor was in Hong-Kong and the charge bounced. I also got a call
out they were calling my home number in Washington where I’d just used that card to buy dinner the night before.
Until we force the cost of all of this back onto the companies that are delaying, cost-shifting, etc, we’re never going to solve
the problem and it’s we average citizens that take the brunt of the pain.
