Part of why PayPal got big is that at the time it was new the incumbent banks had transactions that tended to be slow and crappy and sometimes expensive on top

Part of why PayPal got big is that at the time it was new the incumbent banks had transactions that tended to be slow and crappy and sometimes expensive on top of that. I remember when I was younger that there was this "mysterious" clearing time with my bank where you'd send money and the other party wouldn't get it for a number of days (and that number of days wasn't even reliable either). And with international transfers it was worse than the domestic ones. Now that people have got used to better payment processing the banks have had to improve, I think it's easy to forget just how bad things used to be.