> The only one I've seen is the gartner snake but here in Edmonton it is just a little bigger than an earthworm.
That might just be because Edmonton has lots of enormous dew worms :)
There are bigger garter snakes around - I live just outside Edmonton and see them pretty frequently. I hear there are plenty of rattlesnakes in southern Alberta too.
You can do a lot worse than ACH. It's hard to read, but it's simple and pretty well-defined.
What _really_ sucks is one-off fixed-width formats that aren't well defined, or that change suddenly (oh, you thought that field would always be populated? lol no.)
Even calling it archaic is too harsh. Granted, the batch-centric nature is not ideal (and it's hard to imagine a system with this kind of latency built in being designed today), but if you're designing a system based on batch processing then shipping files over SFTP is a pretty reasonable way to do it.
In addition to what everyone else said there are big regional effects: in North America cardholders have often never seen 3D Secure before, they don't know their passwords, and issuers don't care enough to make their authentication pages usable.
But in France and the UK it's pretty standard; cardholders are used to it, and issuers make an effort to decide whether it's worth requiring authentication.
That might just be because Edmonton has lots of enormous dew worms :)
There are bigger garter snakes around - I live just outside Edmonton and see them pretty frequently. I hear there are plenty of rattlesnakes in southern Alberta too.