Danny
Garcia

I have accounts with two separate financial institutions, one at Vanguard (who have $10.4 trillion assets under management) and another at a Morgan Stanley (who have $1.46 trillion assets under management) subsidiary. Transferring funds from Morgan Stanley to Vanguard has cost me over ten business days all because I chose to wire funds instead of going the ACH route. In my case I failed to provide one with information about the other’s “for further credit”. Retrieving this information in one system and filling it out in the other requires navigating a myriad of arcane online forms with awkwardly named labels and obscure options meant to capture every facet of possibility in the banking systems. Resolving a little mix up like this means calling each institution, trying to track down the when and why of what went wrong and being told effectively nothing and having to figure it out on your own in the end.

There’s really no excuse for these systems (and more so the user experience) to have not advanced beyond their mid-century origins. There is some value in adding friction to a system because it helps to catch mistakes and avoid fraud. Still, I argue it would be better for banks to agree on a Plaid-like system of account attestation. Adding a standardized view on top of that, allowing senders and recipients to transparently see the status of their wires would probably do more to catch simple mistakes and even fraud, I suspect.