Electronic Transfer Account - ETA
Categories: Tech, Banking, Accounting
The Electronic Transfer Account program allowed people to receive money from the federal government, even if they didn't have a bank account.
If you were in the military, or if you received social security, or if you were a foreign dictator receiving payments from the CIA, and you didn't happen to have a bank account, you might have an electronic transfer account in order to get the money the government owed you. (On second thought, the foreign dictators probably received cash stuffed into non-descript briefcases...but that wouldn't be an efficent way to distribute social security payments).
With the proliferation of other electronic payment options, the U.S. Treasury Department ended the ETA program in 2018.
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Finance a la shmoop. What is an omnibus account?
Herbi just eats leaves, Carni just eats meat, Omni well it's pretty much [Different buses eating stuff]
everything. So yeah an omnibus as in bus-i-ness or business account services is
a bunch of investors who've all pitched in or wired in their capital to become a
percentage owner of that omnibus account. Why would people do this? Scale, volume,
discounts size, heft. When you have a lot of money in an account basic things like [Lots of money in a suitcase]
audit and legal fees and brokerage services and the fees with them and
other one-off costs get amortized across a lot of people in dollars invested [Definition of Amortization]
rather than being laid entirely or solely on one investor where they can
then be a meaningful percentage of the total and with an omnibus account you [Bus labelled Omni eating leaves]
also get anonymity since it's a broker dealing in street name with the account [Anonymity stamp]
interfacing with the street well investors can live if they want in the
lovely dark shadows of Erewhon. Omnibus accounts are sort of like your own [Full moon in a dark sky]
custom mutual fund without the whole nav, net asset value stamp requirements at
the end of each trading day and all the other regulations and filings and legal
crap needed for publicly offered securities it's like having a fully [Book labelled my very own omnibus account]
gassed up bus with a working GPS and Waze system you can drive anywhere you [Guy sat on a bus]
want on the investing landscape you don't have to tell anyone outside of
your own partners about it, and it works great as long as you all want to eat the
same kind of financial cooking.. [Omni asking Carni if he is going to finish his food]