In the US, AFAIK the only metadata you get with a direct / ACH deposit is the sender's "name", usually the company name. I assume that you can't easily change this per transaction.
US banking infrastructure is decades behind the rest of the world in many areas.
This says I have to pay a fee, and then wait 2-3 days to send somebody money. That's not caused by "infrastructure" that's caused by greed in the absence of effective government to tell them to get their shit together.
Even better it tells me the size of that fee is included in a "Fee Guide" the link for which is a 404. Excellent work.
For regular bills, when adding a bill pay account online, the bank will ask for your account number... so there must be some way to specify that with an ACH transaction. I've noticed that the custom input memo field visible to the end user goes away on ACH transactions though, at least at my bank. Perhaps it's just used by the account number automatically?
For bills that don't accept ACH bill pay (i.e. most smaller companies and utilities), banks will often print and mail payments via check for free (it just says "signature on file" on the printed check). Like I said, decades behind.
I pay our childminder by bank transfer. Its almost instant to do from my phone, free, and I just put the invoice number in the reference field. The idea that banks would print and post cheques is like something from the era of telegrams. So weirdly anachronistic.
Yep. While Faster Payments is brilliant, BACS' overnight processing and the direct debit system is total sufficient for the vast majority of cases, certainly things like bill payments.
I wonder if you could write a personal check and deposit it to the person's bank account -- write something in the "memo" line and hope that the person checks the scanned images of the cancelled checks. Of course, then that person would also have your bank account number.
US banking infrastructure is decades behind the rest of the world in many areas.
You can include a memo on a paper check though.