Primarily because they also monopolized the telegraph industry. Western Union pretty much monopolized the wire transfer space for a number of years. Western Union (a company that is still around, and publicly traded) allowed individuals to bring money to a telegraph office, where a message would be sent to a separate location to release a like amount of funds to a specified individual-something like: he is wearing silver spurs STOP a handlebar mustache STOP a dangerous glint in his eye STOP and goes by the moniker of Soapy Smith FULL STOP.įor this Yee-Haw arraignment to work, of course, the banks involved would need to have some sort of reciprocal agreement. Wire transfers specifically date back to the late 19th century, when the Civil War had just ended and the West was still wild. Wire Transfers and ACH Transfers Enter the Money Moving Landscape In summary, the history of money showed a progression toward a rapid exchange.Īnd this rapid exchange of money from one party to another-through the proxies of their respective banks-is something very much at the heart of ACH and wire transactions. And paper currency that represented an underlying precious metal (a gold standard that is no longer applicable) became the norm for everyday transactions. This malleability was further accelerated by the development of checks, a tool that Italian merchants used to facilitate commerce-without having to be weighed down by coins. Eventually, precious and semi-precious metals became a sort of international standard that could allow merchants to take their coins from one region and spend them somewhere else. But coins appeared in the first river-valley civilizations like Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Yangtze River. The Greek historian Herodotus would like you to believe that King Midas was the first one to strike coinage, which makes sense since everything he touched turned to gold. Eventually, they discovered that trading money for goods and services was more efficient since money could be stored for later use and offered more flexibility. ![]() A History of Sending MoneyĪ long, long, time ago (and not in a galaxy far, far away, but right here on planet Earth) people used a barter system to exchange goods and services. Moreover, there are practical ramifications to these payment method differences.īut before we get into all that, let’s see how electronic payments and international wires fit into the larger history of funds transfers between bank accounts. But is ACH a wire transfer? As it turns out, ACH transfers and wire transfers are very separate things. ![]() ![]() To the average person, ACH vs Wire transfer seem to be the same.
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