Poland has a really interesting system (Blik), based internally on fast interbank wire-transfers I believe.
Each banking app that supports this system can give you a six-digit code valid for two minutes. You can enter this code in a supported store or ATM, either online or in-person, you get a popup in the app with the amount to be paid, the merchant and a description of what you're paying for, you click "confirm" and the transaction goes through.
This system is great because it enables secure payments on devices you don't trust. Because the codes are single-use and transactions require an extra confirmation step in the app, it's perfectly fine to give a code to your child who wants to buy something online, text it to a family member who is at an ATM, or give it to a friend who has free shipping due to a loyalty program and wants to order something for you.
This system can also do transfers and transfer-requests to a phone number. In some banks, you can even generate "Blik checks", 9-digit codes that are valid for 24 hours, cover a pre-set amount and don't require a confirmation, which you can give out to someone. These checks have been used to efficiently send money to unbanked Ukrainian refugees when the war started, as they could simply be redeemed at any supporting ATM.
> The Single Europe Payment Area (SEPA) offers free, instant transactions between European banks. They’re pull based; a user communicates their banking information to a business, which debits the user’s account, rather than the business communicating their banking information to the user in order to send them money.
I think this is something of a simplification since SEPA encompasses multiple types of payment. While Direct Debits are pull based you can also make push based payments from your bank, usually for free.
It's completely normal and safe in Europe to share your bank account number (IBAN) with others so that they can send you money through online banking. This is how I paid my rent (you can setup a recurring payment, kinda like bill pay but instant and without the risk of a physical check potentially being delayed in the mail); settled up with friends for shared expenses; and got paid for freelance consulting (I'd put my IBAN on the invoice.)
I don’t understand why SEPA direct debit was started a few years ago. Push based methods were working great for decades, and SEPA had unified national payment methods to a european level. There were national pull based methods with built in fraud guard rails, and automatic recurring payments for e.g. monthly subscriptions.
Then came direct debit, where giving out your IBAN now somehow became a fraud risk. Meanwhile, most companies still publish their IBAN on their websites. Customers hate giving away control over their account and seeing random money transfers from mysterious companies. Banks hate all the random middleman grabbing money out of accounts. We need these new middleman for some reason.
I have no idea why they implemented SDD like this. It reeks as if someone decided to force the US payment system on top of SEPA, even if the legal framework for it is missing, there is a huge cultural impedance mismatch, and the credit card based system is inferior in almost every way to the existing debet cards. Things that were working just fine in the 1980’s are now losing consumer trust because of SDD. All of this was a very predictable idiotic clusterfuck. Why?
> It's completely normal and safe in Europe to share your bank account number (IBAN) with others so that they can send you money through online banking. This is how I paid my rent (you can setup a recurring payment, kinda like bill pay but instant and without the risk of a physical check potentially being delayed in the mail); settled up with friends for shared expenses; and got paid for freelance consulting (I'd put my IBAN on the invoice.)
Just because everyone does it this doesn't mean it's safe to do. If some trolls manage to get hold of your IBAN and the account isn't protected from direct debit, you will get fucked by idiots ordering pizza and dildos.
Australian banking regulator appears to think there is a natural floor cost of interbank payment settlement, which I am going to call "rent" and basically said as long as it doesn't exceed some metric for CPI related costs, it's fine to charge it no matter what the impact on transactions.
This is a loaded comment, because I think it's bullshit. The cost to process any payment of any size under the $10,000 AML threshold is constant, and functionally zero. As consumers, we've become a profit centre, and there is between $600m and $1b of "cost" which is being met by a % value of transaction fee, irrespective of the real costs of operation. It's regulated theft. Tax office loves it because the black economy is shrinking, small traders are wearing processing costs, intermediaries like stripe are hoovering up data, alongside p2p and inter account direct debit and payment models. Credit unions and banks have an uneasy alliance with "key" and "associated" status to inter bank clearing data networks.
The direct payment scheme we have (osko/payid: typically Australia they couldn't decide a single branding) is seconds to complete sometimes and competes with other forms of transaction clearing for cost and time.
We still have chequebook process clearing times. We still have "not on weekend" and "3 business day" rules. It's totally Bizarre.
When they spun credit and debit card fees out from each other I asked some questions of the finance regulators and they said "works for us, cheaper overall" but I think they left this $600m+ profit component in on bogus logic:
Tl;Dr real costs of settlement per transaction do not relate to how costs are met. Banking is highly profitable and is a protected industry under a benign regulator.
> This is a loaded comment, because I think it's bullshit. The cost to process any payment of any size under the $10,000 AML threshold is constant, and functionally zero.
Your argument fails here, because you are wrong here. The cost is not zero, because what the bank does for interbank payments is subject to the same regulations and procedures as everything else a bank does. Banks charge money for transfers because there's regulatory overhead and shared liability.
What happens if they've missed you're a money launderer for the cartel and have to pay a $2bn fine because they processed your transaction for nearly nothing, instead of doing proper checks and stopping it?
Sorry, but you're just plainly wrong here. Very populist and very wrong
He says that SEPA has a pull model. But when someone gives me their IBAN, and I go to my bank's website (or phone app), type in that IBAN and tell it to send X amount of money, that feels like a push model to me. (I can also include a payment reference, which will probably have to be manually checked, much as he describes for the Japanese model.)
I've used this method for paying back friends for minor loans, or suchlike, and also for paying my rent. And once for buying physical goods from a website: they gave me an invoice with a payment reference number and an IBAN, and I sent the amount requested to that IBAN with the reference number supplied, after which they shipped the goods.
Maybe SEPA has both push and pull models, and this article neglected to mention the push one? (I do have direct debits on my account, for a few charities, which are a pull transaction. And standing orders, which I think are also a push transaction.)
For me as a consumer in the USA, one of the biggest advantages for credit cards over bank transfers is where the money is in case of dispute.
With credit cards, I still have the money in my possession, the dispute process is about the credit card company trying to get paid. With a bank transfer, the money is gone from me, and the dispute process is about me trying to get my money back.
Even with the same policies on paper, this one fact makes me prefer to pay with credit cards wherever possible.
And you’ll still have that option, you’ll just likely pay for the privilege with the 3% fee pushed back onto customers who opt to use credit card rails. Think of it as a dispute insurance premium for less than high confidence transactions.
An early example of this is T-Mobile’s recent decision to remove their autopay discount if you use a credit card instead of a deposit account (their CC interchange fees are material at their scale). Instant settlements at low or no cost give merchants options to squeeze out their payment costs.
Didn't get a mention in the article but Singapore's PayNow is magical. Direct bank-to-bank transfers that operate instantly 24/7, and for free. QR code-based so it's not uncommon to pay at retail outlets with this method; some shops will only accept PayNow or cash, because they're free. You can also pay directly to someone's NRIC (national ID number) or mobile number so you don't have to tack in their bank details or get a QR code from them.
Honestly the only thing that isn't perfect about this system is that there's no hyperlink standard. If you want to pay a PayNow QR code on your phone, you have to screenshot the QR code and then share it to your banking app. Would be nice if you could just tap the QR code. Other than that it's hard for me to imagine a better payment system.
We have the same here in Luxembourg (name is Payconiq). It starts being accepted a bit everywhere. We scan the QR code with our banking app and it sends the money instantly. Some providers (telcos, electricity, etc.) started putting QR code on their invoice. Very convenient.
Otherwise we pay nearly everything by bank transfer.
In México, we have SPEI. Allows free instant transfers between bank accounts (with some exceptions). We employ an 18-digit code (CLABE), and debit card numbers are also permitted. You can add a phone number to your bank account to receive money transfers with it. SPEI supports push and pull, the latter being less common. SPEI can be utilized to remit payment for certain credit cards and specialized services. CLABE 18-digit codifies the bank, account location, account number and a verify digit. SPEI is managed by a subsidiary of the Mexican central bank. For a country where many things work slow a clunky, SPEI woks surprisingly well and fast. We really missed it when we tried to send money outside of Mexico.
I'm sorry SEPA is pull based? IDK in other countries but in Spain is pretty common to use it for push and pull operations. I certainly do, and everyone I know. The only nuisance is that requires an IBAN number and most Banks require a security ritual which is pretty boring.
I didn't know that there's high fraud in SEPA either. Whoever tries to charge me, I can block em and contact my bank to make em know I didn't allow such charge, and in my case, when that happened (only once in my life) they handled everything and I got my money back.
> most Banks require a security ritual which is pretty boring
This varies significantly by country and bank. At my bank I can authorize transactions (up to a preconfigured amount) just with my fingerprint, and it takes like 5 seconds.
Yeah I think the pull based is not that common (usually for standing orders, and most of the time it's intra-country, through it works cross) but the push mode is also very popular
The article is probably right about FedNow likely not drastically improving things immediately, but maybe people will build good products on top of it over the coming years.
Most Americans don’t realize how atrocious the US banking system is when it comes to technology and transfers. It’s embarrassingly bad. Shameful, even.
Would be interesting to know how Canada's Interac e-transfers[1] compare to the Indian or Japanese systems. Probably the biggest inconvenience of Canada's system it the need to use an email address as the destination.
I can compare it to Brazilian Pix. I use both extensively.
INTERAC is like the beta version of Pix (which is basically the same as the Indian system in the article).
Pix works via email, CPF (a person's "SIN" number, which isn't secret in Brazil), randomly generated key, telephone number, QR codes. INTERAC is mostly email.
Pix works immediately. Some transactions take 1 second or less to credit on the other bank (you can see that when you are trying to send money to yourself, when the destination bank gives you a notification that it received the money before the UI of the sending bank has even acknowledged that the operation is completed). INTERAC sometime takes several minutes, up to 30 minutes sometimes in my experience.
Personally I think INTERAC is about 70% of the way there, but I would chose PIX every time simply because it seems like a much better iteration.
With Pix, you get credited and debited immediately. With INTERAC, I've noticed that sometimes you can be debited immediately and the credit takes longer, and vice versa. Sometimes for several minutes, your money can "double" (appear in second account without disappearing from the first one) or "disappear" (leave the first account but not get credited on the second one).
This last point might not seem like much, but it gets in the way of using for a lot of things that would need to be immediate (paying for a Taxi, or a supermarket purchase). Since Pix is instantaneous, it is used heavily for those kind of payments where you don't want to wait.
For all of Canada's chartered banking bureaucracy and lack of customer empathy ... I have to say that our e-transfer system is pretty amazing. For business or personal, one-off or regular transfers. It just works.
I've always wondered why big banks don't implement a lot more technologies, and I guess this gets to some of it. But it does seem like banks would have the incentives to kill services like Venmo and Stripe overnight. Like why are there not clear and straightforward banking APIs that let me create virtual cards and why doesn't my app let me just transfer money directly to my friend's bank account (I get global being a bit more difficult, but country wide is similar regulations, right?). I feel like there's just so much that I don't know that I don't even have the ability to reasonably answer these questions and I'm pretty sure there's reasons the above companies exist and it isn't simply static friction of big banks.
Brazil does have a system similar to what you mentioned. It's called PIX (https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/financialstability/pix_en) and it's basically an API that banks and payments systems implements and we use to make instant transfer from/to any bank account in the country. Can also be used to pay for things, most of the card machines that we have in the country today support paying with Pix instead of a Credit/Debit card as well, you read a QR code with your bank app and pay for whetever you're buying (from a big grocery store to a street vendor selling popcorn).
Brazil has a lot of negatives, but I always find amusing that we managed to have a bank system that is light years ahead of the US.
I worked for a couple of banks. The older the bank is, the difficult it is to 'implement a lot more technologies'. They have the old COBOL codebase running on mainframes from 70's, then a lot of Java, COBRA interfaces that deal with this ancient, but reliable COBOL in the backend. Who is going to implement these technologies 'without being responsible for failures'? Modern management is all about taking credit for success, but not being responsible for failures. This sets up very bad incentives for any paradigmatic changes underneath.
That's why newer banks without legacy cruft, without a large customer base, can implement better stuff: for instance, Capital One entered retail banking in 2005, so they are better at some stuff.
There's a few big problems, at least on the "friend-to-friend" transfer.
1) You kinda need everybody on board. The biggest banks in the US have something like 5% market share, so it's not just 3 companies you need to get on the same page. This probably means it needs to be mandated from above. Any 1 bank could probably throw together an easy account-to-account transfer for other customers at the same bank without too much trouble, but inter-bank? Yikes.
2) 90% of the institutions are slow and conservative. Even if they agree this is a good idea, it's a couple years of meetings and gathering requirements, then a couple more to implement.
3) You can either have instant transfers or you can have reversibility, you can't really have both. People want the first...until they (desperately) want the second. This becomes a support nightmare for banks. Now, you limit this if you have really good security (password requirements, 2FA, transaction limits, recipient verification, risk analysis)...but all that needs to be in place first, so we're back at point 2.
A lot of it is because they suck at technology, software, and marketing. You may recall that when Apple first announced Apple Pay, a bunch of banks were worried this would lock them out of the loop, and they announced, to no fanfare whatsoever, a competitor called Isis (lol, oops), quickly renamed to CurrentC. It went nowhere and was killed with nobody noticing a few years later.
In the banks' defense, they have to work with absolutely archaic infrastructure like ACH, so maybe once the considerably-improved FedNow takes over they'll have a better shot at building something people actually want.
India has done this for more than a decade at this point with IMPS and NEFT, and recently UPI. And I'm sure several other countries have them too, but for some reason the US chooses to remain backwards in this case.
In Turkey there is EFT, electronic funds transfer. Works with IBAN's. It's fast and mostly free on business hours (depending on originating bank). You can order EFT outside business hours next work day. This is more expensive most of the time.
Recently Turkey also built a newer and faster transfer network FAST. This one has improvements over EFT for limited amounts of transfer and it's nearly instant any time of the day. You can use your email address, mobile number, or IBAN for transfers. It defaults to EFT of you are trying to transfer over the limit.
Europe's SEPA or International SWIFT are archeic compared to these networks. Even using Bank-Exchange-Crypto-Exchange-Bank transfers can be considered better UX
There are lots of things that many countries do better than US in regards to banking.
One thing that I don't often see mentioned are invoices. In Finland you can get many of them delivered as standardized e-invoice to your bank. This then allows you to setup automatic payment for them on your side (pay on the due date, set maximum value that will be approved automatically if the amount is not static). For consumer protection if the due date falls on weekend/bank holiday, the due date in reality is the first normal day. It's also the day when you need to make the payment, it doesn't need to arrive on seller's account on that date (though these days it normally will).
Do we really want every payment we make in database where it can be passed around and used to analyze, market, and persecute us?
I was a big fan of MobileCoin the privacy token in Signal because as far is I can tell it’s the best solution out there. They have gotten much traction largely because the feds and banks haven’t let them, however I hope some day some how I can buy groceries without my location and purchase details being sold to every data broker in the world.
As a South African, it's weird seeing this presented as a strange/futuristic idea. I pay most of my bills through bank transfers and it's the standard way for two people with bank accounts to send money to each other. As long as you know someone's bank and account number, you can send them money.
All local online retailers, investment brokers, etc, support bank transfers, with some[1] even providing discounts for paying via bank transfer instead of credit card. I've even paid this way at a brick and mortar place that didn't have a card machine.
The comparison between SA bank transactions and UPI is pretty superficial. Precisely because the sender needs to know banking details about the receiver and to confirm the transaction on the receiver side you need access to the receivers bank data. UPI does not require either of those! It’s pretty great, and what modern bank transfers will look like.
SA bank transfers, like non-US bank transfers, are newer, cheaper and faster than their US counterparts, but aren’t fundamentally different in the mechanics and the edge cases. More in the regulations and market forces on banks.
That’s not to say they aren’t good! They certainly are in comparison to US bank transfers. But UPI does compare closer to sci fi.
> As long as you know someone's bank and account number, you can send them money.
This works in the US just fine as well, although you probably need to go to a bank to do it.
I've also been given the option to pay plenty of bills through bank transfers but usually choose not to if I can use my credit card for the same price.
Not all banking systems are realtime. Some are batch processed at each X hour marks or during weekday nights and updated 9AM, on literal mainframe computers somewhere running COBOL programming. It's fine for sending a plush to a friend(literally did recently) but not for a lunch takeout and so where that's common it'll be strange.
Everything you've said here applies to New Zealand too. Most of the banks maintain a register of businesses' bank account details so you usually don't even need to know their account number to make a payment - you can just search up the business name when you're making the transaction.
SA banking regulations are meant to be extremely sensible[0]. It's possible that the US has very strange ones that not only enable some awful things, but also disable good ones.
[0] Source: worked for African Bank for a bit, years ago
However, unlike UPI in India, neither banks nor businesses are required to support FedNow, so adoption will likely be slow, especially because the traditional (and more expensive) credit card based payment system is already firmly established.
There is also another upcoming system called RTP, which is very similar to FedNow, but is governed not by the Fed, but privately by the The Clearing House, an association of large US banks. The piece above mentions that both implement ISO 20022, which could allow future interoperability.
As someone who's not entirely opposed to crypto, this was an interesting read. Mostly in terms of the following: I sort of assumed that one of the factors (among many, for sure) limiting widespread adoption of crypto was that the thing we (in the US) already have was probably pretty smooth?
And reading this, seems like it really ain't. Interesting that crypto hasn't made inroads here. I mostly get why, incumbents don't like change, but still.
[+] [-] miki123211|2 years ago|reply
Each banking app that supports this system can give you a six-digit code valid for two minutes. You can enter this code in a supported store or ATM, either online or in-person, you get a popup in the app with the amount to be paid, the merchant and a description of what you're paying for, you click "confirm" and the transaction goes through.
This system is great because it enables secure payments on devices you don't trust. Because the codes are single-use and transactions require an extra confirmation step in the app, it's perfectly fine to give a code to your child who wants to buy something online, text it to a family member who is at an ATM, or give it to a friend who has free shipping due to a loyalty program and wants to order something for you.
This system can also do transfers and transfer-requests to a phone number. In some banks, you can even generate "Blik checks", 9-digit codes that are valid for 24 hours, cover a pre-set amount and don't require a confirmation, which you can give out to someone. These checks have been used to efficiently send money to unbanked Ukrainian refugees when the war started, as they could simply be redeemed at any supporting ATM.
[+] [-] laurencerowe|2 years ago|reply
I think this is something of a simplification since SEPA encompasses multiple types of payment. While Direct Debits are pull based you can also make push based payments from your bank, usually for free.
It's completely normal and safe in Europe to share your bank account number (IBAN) with others so that they can send you money through online banking. This is how I paid my rent (you can setup a recurring payment, kinda like bill pay but instant and without the risk of a physical check potentially being delayed in the mail); settled up with friends for shared expenses; and got paid for freelance consulting (I'd put my IBAN on the invoice.)
[+] [-] hyperman1|2 years ago|reply
Then came direct debit, where giving out your IBAN now somehow became a fraud risk. Meanwhile, most companies still publish their IBAN on their websites. Customers hate giving away control over their account and seeing random money transfers from mysterious companies. Banks hate all the random middleman grabbing money out of accounts. We need these new middleman for some reason.
I have no idea why they implemented SDD like this. It reeks as if someone decided to force the US payment system on top of SEPA, even if the legal framework for it is missing, there is a huge cultural impedance mismatch, and the credit card based system is inferior in almost every way to the existing debet cards. Things that were working just fine in the 1980’s are now losing consumer trust because of SDD. All of this was a very predictable idiotic clusterfuck. Why?
[+] [-] mschuster91|2 years ago|reply
Just because everyone does it this doesn't mean it's safe to do. If some trolls manage to get hold of your IBAN and the account isn't protected from direct debit, you will get fucked by idiots ordering pizza and dildos.
[+] [-] ggm|2 years ago|reply
This is a loaded comment, because I think it's bullshit. The cost to process any payment of any size under the $10,000 AML threshold is constant, and functionally zero. As consumers, we've become a profit centre, and there is between $600m and $1b of "cost" which is being met by a % value of transaction fee, irrespective of the real costs of operation. It's regulated theft. Tax office loves it because the black economy is shrinking, small traders are wearing processing costs, intermediaries like stripe are hoovering up data, alongside p2p and inter account direct debit and payment models. Credit unions and banks have an uneasy alliance with "key" and "associated" status to inter bank clearing data networks.
The direct payment scheme we have (osko/payid: typically Australia they couldn't decide a single branding) is seconds to complete sometimes and competes with other forms of transaction clearing for cost and time.
We still have chequebook process clearing times. We still have "not on weekend" and "3 business day" rules. It's totally Bizarre.
When they spun credit and debit card fees out from each other I asked some questions of the finance regulators and they said "works for us, cheaper overall" but I think they left this $600m+ profit component in on bogus logic:
Tl;Dr real costs of settlement per transaction do not relate to how costs are met. Banking is highly profitable and is a protected industry under a benign regulator.
[+] [-] paulusthe|2 years ago|reply
Your argument fails here, because you are wrong here. The cost is not zero, because what the bank does for interbank payments is subject to the same regulations and procedures as everything else a bank does. Banks charge money for transfers because there's regulatory overhead and shared liability.
What happens if they've missed you're a money launderer for the cartel and have to pay a $2bn fine because they processed your transaction for nearly nothing, instead of doing proper checks and stopping it?
Sorry, but you're just plainly wrong here. Very populist and very wrong
[+] [-] TRiG_Ireland|2 years ago|reply
I've used this method for paying back friends for minor loans, or suchlike, and also for paying my rent. And once for buying physical goods from a website: they gave me an invoice with a payment reference number and an IBAN, and I sent the amount requested to that IBAN with the reference number supplied, after which they shipped the goods.
Maybe SEPA has both push and pull models, and this article neglected to mention the push one? (I do have direct debits on my account, for a few charities, which are a pull transaction. And standing orders, which I think are also a push transaction.)
[+] [-] Denvercoder9|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|2 years ago|reply
With credit cards, I still have the money in my possession, the dispute process is about the credit card company trying to get paid. With a bank transfer, the money is gone from me, and the dispute process is about me trying to get my money back.
Even with the same policies on paper, this one fact makes me prefer to pay with credit cards wherever possible.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|2 years ago|reply
An early example of this is T-Mobile’s recent decision to remove their autopay discount if you use a credit card instead of a deposit account (their CC interchange fees are material at their scale). Instant settlements at low or no cost give merchants options to squeeze out their payment costs.
[+] [-] hlieberman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anothermoron|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smcf|2 years ago|reply
Honestly the only thing that isn't perfect about this system is that there's no hyperlink standard. If you want to pay a PayNow QR code on your phone, you have to screenshot the QR code and then share it to your banking app. Would be nice if you could just tap the QR code. Other than that it's hard for me to imagine a better payment system.
[+] [-] 255kb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjmalagon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ix-ix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] latchkey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tough|2 years ago|reply
also only 50 cents comission, no %.
Big for big item sales
[+] [-] spaniard89277|2 years ago|reply
I didn't know that there's high fraud in SEPA either. Whoever tries to charge me, I can block em and contact my bank to make em know I didn't allow such charge, and in my case, when that happened (only once in my life) they handled everything and I got my money back.
[+] [-] Denvercoder9|2 years ago|reply
This varies significantly by country and bank. At my bank I can authorize transactions (up to a preconfigured amount) just with my fingerprint, and it takes like 5 seconds.
[+] [-] raverbashing|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dementik|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nzach|2 years ago|reply
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system)
[+] [-] judge2020|2 years ago|reply
The launch is for late July https://www.frbservices.org/news/press-releases/062923-organ...
[+] [-] candiddevmike|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpursley|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexandrB|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac_e-Transfer
[+] [-] hugocbp|2 years ago|reply
INTERAC is like the beta version of Pix (which is basically the same as the Indian system in the article).
Pix works via email, CPF (a person's "SIN" number, which isn't secret in Brazil), randomly generated key, telephone number, QR codes. INTERAC is mostly email.
Pix works immediately. Some transactions take 1 second or less to credit on the other bank (you can see that when you are trying to send money to yourself, when the destination bank gives you a notification that it received the money before the UI of the sending bank has even acknowledged that the operation is completed). INTERAC sometime takes several minutes, up to 30 minutes sometimes in my experience.
Personally I think INTERAC is about 70% of the way there, but I would chose PIX every time simply because it seems like a much better iteration.
With Pix, you get credited and debited immediately. With INTERAC, I've noticed that sometimes you can be debited immediately and the credit takes longer, and vice versa. Sometimes for several minutes, your money can "double" (appear in second account without disappearing from the first one) or "disappear" (leave the first account but not get credited on the second one).
This last point might not seem like much, but it gets in the way of using for a lot of things that would need to be immediate (paying for a Taxi, or a supermarket purchase). Since Pix is instantaneous, it is used heavily for those kind of payments where you don't want to wait.
[+] [-] emptybits|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scoundreller|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelski|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucasfdacunha|2 years ago|reply
Brazil has a lot of negatives, but I always find amusing that we managed to have a bank system that is light years ahead of the US.
[+] [-] raincom|2 years ago|reply
That's why newer banks without legacy cruft, without a large customer base, can implement better stuff: for instance, Capital One entered retail banking in 2005, so they are better at some stuff.
[+] [-] patmcc|2 years ago|reply
1) You kinda need everybody on board. The biggest banks in the US have something like 5% market share, so it's not just 3 companies you need to get on the same page. This probably means it needs to be mandated from above. Any 1 bank could probably throw together an easy account-to-account transfer for other customers at the same bank without too much trouble, but inter-bank? Yikes.
2) 90% of the institutions are slow and conservative. Even if they agree this is a good idea, it's a couple years of meetings and gathering requirements, then a couple more to implement.
3) You can either have instant transfers or you can have reversibility, you can't really have both. People want the first...until they (desperately) want the second. This becomes a support nightmare for banks. Now, you limit this if you have really good security (password requirements, 2FA, transaction limits, recipient verification, risk analysis)...but all that needs to be in place first, so we're back at point 2.
[+] [-] zubairshaik|2 years ago|reply
But it's not intended for business payments like Stripe or PayPal, or Venmo for business.
[1] https://www.zellepay.com/get-started
[+] [-] Analemma_|2 years ago|reply
In the banks' defense, they have to work with absolutely archaic infrastructure like ACH, so maybe once the considerably-improved FedNow takes over they'll have a better shot at building something people actually want.
[+] [-] cubefox|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anaganisk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numpad0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsniper|2 years ago|reply
Europe's SEPA or International SWIFT are archeic compared to these networks. Even using Bank-Exchange-Crypto-Exchange-Bank transfers can be considered better UX
[+] [-] buzer|2 years ago|reply
One thing that I don't often see mentioned are invoices. In Finland you can get many of them delivered as standardized e-invoice to your bank. This then allows you to setup automatic payment for them on your side (pay on the due date, set maximum value that will be approved automatically if the amount is not static). For consumer protection if the due date falls on weekend/bank holiday, the due date in reality is the first normal day. It's also the day when you need to make the payment, it doesn't need to arrive on seller's account on that date (though these days it normally will).
[+] [-] crystaln|2 years ago|reply
Do we really want every payment we make in database where it can be passed around and used to analyze, market, and persecute us?
I was a big fan of MobileCoin the privacy token in Signal because as far is I can tell it’s the best solution out there. They have gotten much traction largely because the feds and banks haven’t let them, however I hope some day some how I can buy groceries without my location and purchase details being sold to every data broker in the world.
[+] [-] dyates|2 years ago|reply
All local online retailers, investment brokers, etc, support bank transfers, with some[1] even providing discounts for paying via bank transfer instead of credit card. I've even paid this way at a brick and mortar place that didn't have a card machine.
[1] https://www.evetech.co.za/
[+] [-] kasey_junk|2 years ago|reply
SA bank transfers, like non-US bank transfers, are newer, cheaper and faster than their US counterparts, but aren’t fundamentally different in the mechanics and the edge cases. More in the regulations and market forces on banks.
That’s not to say they aren’t good! They certainly are in comparison to US bank transfers. But UPI does compare closer to sci fi.
[+] [-] RandallBrown|2 years ago|reply
This works in the US just fine as well, although you probably need to go to a bank to do it.
I've also been given the option to pay plenty of bills through bank transfers but usually choose not to if I can use my credit card for the same price.
[+] [-] numpad0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amanzi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robertlagrant|2 years ago|reply
[0] Source: worked for African Bank for a bit, years ago
[+] [-] cubefox|2 years ago|reply
This piece mentions FedNow, an instantaneous 24/7 bank transfer system for the US, whose launch happens to be imminent. Details:
https://www.clevelandfed.org/collections/speeches/2023/sp-20...
However, unlike UPI in India, neither banks nor businesses are required to support FedNow, so adoption will likely be slow, especially because the traditional (and more expensive) credit card based payment system is already firmly established.
There is also another upcoming system called RTP, which is very similar to FedNow, but is governed not by the Fed, but privately by the The Clearing House, an association of large US banks. The piece above mentions that both implement ISO 20022, which could allow future interoperability.
[+] [-] jrm4|2 years ago|reply
And reading this, seems like it really ain't. Interesting that crypto hasn't made inroads here. I mostly get why, incumbents don't like change, but still.