> The US system is still pretty bad. Banking throughout Europe works a bit differently everywhere, but the basis is that you have wire transfer for basically fr

> The US system is still pretty bad. Banking throughout Europe works a bit differently everywhere, but the basis is that you have wire transfer for basically free (inside the Eurozone, this covers the whole Eurozone). Paying rent? Just set up a monthly wire transfer. The reason this came to be is that the Eurozone sets up a more beneficial system for the banks than the status quo. Barriers to international transfers hurt both small and large banks, and having many sets of laws and politics around the rules made them exceedingly difficult to change. The Eurozone fixes this. In the US, interbank transfers are regulated by the banks themselves (NACHA) and the majority are performed in partnership with the Federal Reserve. The banks have all the power to improve payment and transfer systems, and none of the impetus. We have been stuck on a 40-year-old daily batch-file processing system because the banks make too much money on wire fees. It took threatened action by the Fed and Congress for NACHA to finally make same-day transfers mandatory for 2016. Note that this is still not a real-time system, and we are very, very far from such. > "Pull" also works and is common in many european countries through direct debit. You give amazon/your electricity provider/whomever your bank account number and they just pull the money from you. No sketchy credit card companies needed, fraud is pretty minuscule. This is how ACH pull works in the United States. It is enticing because the ACH network is very low-cost and the credit card networks are not involved. And yet it is a consistent source of fraudulent activity. There is nothing inherent in a "pull" model that prevents fraud; you need additional controls around the relationship to prevent that.