[dyates]

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.

[1] https://www.evetech.co.za/

[kasey_junk]

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.

[davchana]

True. UPI is amazing. The Zelle in US is similar, but lacks in that private group of banks control it, whereas UPI central processing is public or government controlled. Also, zelle is not implemented same in every bank. For a person with multiple accounts in same bank, Capital One allows a unique email address for directing zelle txns to each unique account. Discover allows that specific mapping only if initiated from discover itself. Chase does not allow you to have zelle connected to more than 1 account of yours.

[dyates]

Later on the article, when he talks about not needing access to the receiving account to confirm payments, I kinda got it. Just the initial framing of "what if we used bank transfers for payments" threw me for a loop.

[RandallBrown]

> 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.

[nomel]

> This works in the US just fine as well, although you probably need to go to a bank to do it.

Venmo and the like exist because that's not "fine". If you have the same bank, there's a good chance you can do it online, or with some crappy third party app. If you have different banks, there's a very slim chance they use the same crappy third party app, leaving you driving in person to initiate a digital transaction that usually takes between a few days to a week to clear.

[numpad0]

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.

[amanzi]

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.

[robertlagrant]

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