Seconded. Look at the comments here briefly: ACH? That's US-only. Debit card? That's first and second-world only. No discussion of the political or engineering implications of any of the options discussed. No discussion of opening hours, transfer reliability, best and worst case transfer latency, maximum value cap, legal framework for dispute resolution, etc. No discussion of what is probably the biggest recent development in the sector: Europe's IBAN (now live in many non-EU/SEPA locations). The picture is clear. (PS. If anyone needs a global perspective on business and consumer finance, tap me on the shoulder)

Indeed.

Not even Google manages to handle anything except for credit cards or PayPal – horrible.

I was thinking about writing a small JS IBAN verification lib that also format and shows the user the issuing institute and Country.

Cool. Pro-tip: Use the actually machine-parseable version I maintain at https://code.google.com/p/php-iban/ ... the officially issued text and PDF versions differ and the text version often has inconsistent formatting to boot.

A lot of US startups don't even consider the fact that there might be people living outside the US, neither in their US products nor in their US PR material.