Is there a difference between a wire transfer and an EFT?
I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet not, not in 2003. At one time, there were wire transfers but no such thing as EFT. The term wire transfer has hung on for some reason. It is possible that the mechanisms may be subtly different, but I believe the original wire transfer had to do with telegraph. You can still have someone “wire” you money to a Western Union office.
I talked to my bill payment service, and apparently they ARE different. A wire transfer is used to transfer funds from one financial institution to another, an EFT is used to transfer funds from your bank to a company for bill payment. These were the definitions used by my bill payment service anyway, YMMV.
just to add a me, too - I agree with ccwaterback. I work with some of this stuff, and EFT generally refers to bill presentation and payment technologies. Whether or not this is universal or just my workplace’s terminalogy, I don’t know.
… err terminology…
seem to have terminals on the brain tonight…
I worked in the debit card industry a few years ago. We used ACH to send funds from our master settlement account (which funds were themselves ACH’d in beforehand) so I saw what sort of setup the dinky bank we used had. Two or three times a day their computers would connect to the Fed (-eral Reserve) computers to send ACH funds. But if a wire transfer had to go out, they’d made the Fed connection right then for it - and if a wire transfer came in, the Fed computers called up the bank computers to perform it - it didn’t hang out in a queue like the ACH transfers. ACH’s can also be used to take funds from an account - it’s not a one-way send like a wire.
IIRC this bank charged our company $8 for wires and $0.10 for ACH’s. There might be a world of difference in the way wires are treated versus ACH’s also (such as repudiation), see federal banking “Regulation E”; it’s been too long for me and I’m lazy tonite 
Yeah, my bill payment service said an EFT to a biller would be recorded as an ACH debit on my account (what’s ACH stand for?).
I was concerned because my bank said they would charge $20 for a wire transfer. I just wanted to make sure the EFTs used to pay my bills were not a wire transfers, and that seems to be the case.
I would say a Bank Wire is a TYPE of EFT. For instance when I did payroll those having direct deposit were recorded as EFTs. When we reconciled credit cards in accounting it was a recorded as an EFT.
I can’t really help on the OP, but I can tell you that ACH stands for Automated Clearing House.