16 ms·

Bank transfers as a payment method

• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  While I am by no means an expert, the implication of the article is "worldwide all bank transactions do not include enough metadata not enough auth security to make them machine processable, and while you can usually guess, that's either a liability or manual process(or both). Basically across the globe, finance will benefit from the sort of basic metadata an undergraduate would put in their first draft.
• markdog12 5y ago
  Surprised Canada's Interac system was omitted from this post.
• otar 5y ago
  It's a no-brainer. Card processing fees are just too high (2.9% + $0.3). Account transfers bring more flexibility and convenience and costs almost nothing.
  • charlieyu1 5y ago
    If it could work, it would have worked three decades ago. Bank transfers are just a pain in the ass. I still remember all the fees I paid just to transfer money to another bank/another country. Cryptocurrency was considered a way to simplify the problem, but probably didn’t work in this aspect
    • rasz 5y ago
      US? Bank transfers are couple clicks with zero fees in most of Europe.
      • bserge 5y ago
        *EU, that's the point. Outside SEPA, people still use SWIFT.
        • CRConrad 5y ago
          Even Swift wasn't all that bad. A bit more clicks, and a fee IIRC, but fortunately most people don't do international transfers all that often.
    • KennyBlanken 5y ago
      Zelle payment transfers are painless, instantaneous, and free. I can do it from my bank's app or online banking page. Punch in the person's phone number or email, enter the amount, done. They don't even have to accept the payment. And nobody has to describe what the transaction was for; it's highly private, beyond who the money came from / went to and the amount. The caveat is that the money transfer cannot be undone for almost any reason. There's zero customer/purchase protection. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, however, has instructed banks that part of the Electronic Transfer Act requires banks to refund people if the transfer was a result of them being tricked into giving up their account details (it's not clear if this means the money would be yoinked from the recipient.) I kind of would like the option to enable some sort of confirmation and/or 2FA for a Zelle payment (mainly this means disabling it via the website; my phone provides bio 2FA), and confirmations for receiving a payment. Those are my only complaints with the system. But that means it can be trusted by people who want to know, for certain, that they've been paid "for real." It's instantly settled, unlike damn near every other form of money transfer system where even if the money seems to be in your account, there's still a days or WEEKS long delay until the transaction can't be yoinked back. This makes it great for if you're selling a car and about to sign & hand over the title to the other person, for example.
      • baby 5y ago
        I’ve used Zelle for years to pay my rent and it’s a real pain because you’re limited to 2k a day. So I have to spread payments on multiple days (I live in SF). I miss Monzo.
      • krinchan 5y ago
        It’s crazy how much Zelle has taken off in my area. Home contractors. My barber. My family. Also the etiquette that’s emerged around using Zelle is funny too. If I’m paying someone new, they’ll normally have me send $1 as a test to make sure we all have the right contact info before sending the rest.
        • lotsofpulp 5y ago
          They should be able to request a payment instead of sending $1. If I go into Bank of America's app, I see "Send" "Request" and "Split" options. I do not see these options on BoA's website though, which is a dumb inconsistency.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      I'm in the lucky situation that locally I can transfer instantaneously or nearly so across all of Europe and internationally I use bitcoin for recipients in places where banking fees are too high or the transfers too slow. It's a good combination.
      • baby 5y ago
        Why not a stablecoin with lower fees?
        • jacquesm 5y ago
          Because I'm more than a bit skeptical about all of the groups jumping on the 'lets mint our own coin' bandwagon. The number of stories of scam coins is large enough that I'll take my chances with Bitcoin for the moment and see which ones of the others survive over the longer term. I'm also a bit allergic to being marketed to in the name of the class of product, 'stable' has certain associations that I don't think apply to any of the crypto coins.
          • baby 5y ago
            Usdt sure, although it’s working so far, but there’s plenty of legit stablecoin projects like usdc, or even paxos (which is what novi is using). Why isn’t stable applying to these coins?
            • astrange 5y ago
              I sent $50 in USDC yesterday and was charged $9 in fees, not counting the coinbase USD<>USDC fee which I think existed since I used a debit card. Legit crypto users[1] should let you pay with TransferWise. [1] ie online research chemical stores
              • baby 5y ago
                Ah interesting, I guess USDC relies on Ethereum and so you're eating ETH's fees? I've never used USDC myself. I'm hearing Celo fees are around 1 cents. Wise is also a great solution, but its speed is going to be dependent on a lot of factors: does it have a partnership with your bank, how long is the route it'll take, and how long each node will take to process a transfer on the route. It is streamlined though so the user experience is top notch, security wise it's a centralized system so the more people use it the more it becomes a single point of failure.
    • Silhouette 5y ago
      I don't know about three decades ago but this type of payment has been ubiquitous in the UK for at least two in the form of Direct Debit and widespread across Europe for years now via SEPA. It is not just much cheaper than card payments, it is also dramatically more reliable. If you lived in a parallel universe where all of these payment methods had emerged at once and you described a payment method so unreliable that people would actually give a name to the hack of retrying each failed charge automatically, they would think you were joking. Ironically, despite in theory having a more generous reversal policy to protect consumers from fraud, these direct payment methods are also much less likely to result in inappropriate reversals that harm legitimate merchants, at least in our experience. Perhaps this is because banks will typically only reverse in cases of real fraud whereas card chargebacks are widely abused to commit fraud themselves or applied inappropriately as a blanket measure after an event like a stolen or lost card, and the incentives favour granting the refunds even if the customer just says for the flimsiest of reasons that they want their money back.
    • thelittleone 5y ago
      This seems out of touch with modern offerings e.g. wise.com. Easier than PayPal with none of the crazy bank transfer fees.
      • TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
        Wise fees are still too high for international transfers. They are doing currency arbitrage to sweeten the deal they get.
      • blntechie 5y ago
        Wise is too slow (especially for transactions involving the US) and still expensive.
    • yashg 5y ago
      India, a third world country has worked it out. Apart from UPI, we have other bank transfer mechanism that doesn't involve writing a check. There's RTGS (Real Time Gross Settlement) for large payments. It's what we use when we buy property or do large business transactions. There's NEFT (National Electronic Fund Transfer) for instant transfers upto INR 500K. There's IMPS (The underlying mechanism of UPI) for instant transfers upto INR 100K. Intra-bank transfers are always free and instant because bank is just changing numbers on two accounts in the same database. It has been so easy to move money between banks in India that we don't even think about it. A decentralized system like crypto which uses pointless proof-of-work to remove trust providing intermediaries are just too slow, expensive and overall inefficient by design. They won't work in real world.
      • baby 5y ago
        1. India is a single country, cryptocurrencies are global 2. Nobody uses proof of work anymore (besides bitcoin)
        • purple_turtle 5y ago
          > 2. Nobody uses proof of work anymore (besides bitcoin) And Ethereum and...
          • baby 5y ago
            True, but Ethereum is moving away from it. If we're talking about modern cryptocurrencies, what's the point of including Bitcoin and Ethereum in discussions?
  • cbg0 5y ago
    You can probably get a volume discount on that 2.9% in the US. In Europe, Stripe starts at 1.4% + $0.3 for charging European cards.
    • justincormack 5y ago
      Thats because the EU regulates fees.
    • ericcholis 5y ago
      You can DEFIANTLY get a volume discount from any credit card processor based on volume. Typical large merchants are paying Interchange Plus at a much lower rate than what's listed on Stripe or Square. Interchange is the rate paid directly to the card issuer and Visa/MC. Plus is paid to the merchant account (Stripe). The actual itemized fees inside of that Interchange fee are mind boggling.
  • emodendroket 5y ago
    Well, are they really though? Sales taxes are more than twice that where I live, and anyway I don't have to pay it directly.
  • m_km 5y ago
    Indian here. One thing you should remember is that UPI is free (so far) because it is not a 'Credit' product yet. With a credit card, someone is giving you a loan for x days and there are costs associated with it - interest rates, default rates, etc. Of the 2.9% that Stripe (or any other processor) charges, a majority of the fee goes to the credit card issuer, i.e. bank. You probably chose to use a particular credit card because of the rewards offered by that particular bank. So, practically, a majority of the 2.9% fees goes to the issuing bank and a major portion is returned as rewards to the credit card user, i.e. the payer. Since the merchant, i.e. the seller, probably raised the prices by ~3% in order to afford the processing fees and credit card users get back most of it in rewards, people that use any other mode of payment end-up paying extra for the same product practically. 'Credit' cards are going to cost money for the foreseeable future. Issuing banks charge anywhere from 1.8% to 3% or higher for processing credit their cards. Processors add a markup on top of this fees to their merchants. 'Debit' cards issued by the major banks on the other hand, cost less than 0.5% for the processors. Stripe charges 2.9% for both debit as well as credit cards, YES but their costs to them are not the same.
• jacquesm 5y ago
  Wait, didn't Patrick ask for his stuff not to be posted to HN anymore? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29122338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29122338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29041030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29041030
  • dang 5y ago
    Not exactly, and if he happens to write something every week that the community finds interesting, it seems to me we're all better off. If anyone can do that it's probably patio11 :)
  • greenyoda 5y ago
    Neither of those comments ask for the articles not to be posted to HN. They both ask for people to be "selective in submitting these", which I understand to mean: don't submit every single one indiscriminately, just the ones that would be of particular interest to the HN community.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      Ah, so it's marketing then. Got it.
    • patio11 5y ago
      Yep. In particular I’d like to only be front paged when I’m writing well relative to my beat and my ability, not just because I have high name recognition or am better than the least interesting thing on the front page, which is a bar I think I’d clear too often to be healthy for the community.
  • gorgoiler 5y ago
    Allowing site owners to declare zero-karma could nullify the market pressure. The site owner would be saying “let people post my stuff, but don’t give them any karma for it”: $ curl https://example.com/.well-known/hn.txt Nokarma: / That could have a side effect of promoting commentary blogspam about the original post instead but dang et al are pretty quick to swap out those links for links to the original material, which would then pick up zero karma.
• xyst 5y ago
  This is all great if the currency between the buying and business is the same (ie, USD to USD), but still does not fix transactions between entities of different currency types. In my opinion, this is where cryptocurrency as a payment method for B2B, B2C will shine. No more dealing with foreign transaction fees and conversion fees. Plus the added benefit of not converting your money into an unstable currency (ie, Turkish Lira)
  • Robotbeat 5y ago
    You could also just have a bank account with money denominated in USD or Euros or something.
    • everfree 5y ago
      You can have a cryptocurrency wallet with money denominated in USD or Euros, too (asset-backed stablecoins).
      • Robotbeat 5y ago
        …which is the same thing as a bank account but not FDIC insured and now you have to pay cryptocurrency transaction fees.
        • everfree 5y ago
          But you don't have to pay bank fees, and you have access to global payment and smart contract networks. It's all trade offs.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Crypto currencies are great for paying people whose names and banking details you don't necessarily know. I've used them to pretty good effect to date and the fact that they have all the drawbacks of cash and are used by criminals too doesn't diminish any of that.
    • 5y ago
• rohithkp 5y ago
  UPI can potentially be scaled to all countries. I think the biggest USP of UPI is the interoperability between payment apps(Google Pay, Paytm, PhonePe, etc), VPAs(alice@icici, bob@axis, dan@upi, 9848123456@paytm) and banks. One could have an account with bank A, create a VPA with bank B and use that VPA to pay a business through virtually any of the payment apps(GPay, Paytm, PhonePe, BHIM, etc). The main pain point UPI addresses is instant transfer, zero cost transfer irrespective of transaction size and removal of friction due to credential exchange. NPCI (the creators of UPI) are already in talks with the UAE and other neighbouring countries to build a cross nation interoperable payment stack. Since no player in the entire stack can charge a service fee, the way that payment apps have monetized UPI is by acquiring customers through payments and selling value added services like insurance, prepaid mobile recharges and mutual funds/ETFs. Interoperability allows for balancing and decentralisation of network load across multiple providers, making transactions less likely to fail. Also cross border exchange is another problem that is still unsolved. Maybe a UPI backed approach to real-time currency transfers is a pipe dream but in a ideal world every transaction, irrespective of point of origin, size or currency would be as seamless as an UPI transaction. On a side note, I wonder if something like this could be built in the web3 space. A totally decentralised public blockchain implementation of the payment network using UPI-esque interoperability between payment providers and banks.
  • devnull3 5y ago
    Actually the India-Singapore link will start in 2022 [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/13/india-and-singapore-to-link-their-digital-payments-upi-paynow-systems/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/13/india-and-singapore-to-lin...
    • dustintrex 5y ago
      But it's going to be an overlapping mesh of 1-to-1 agreements. Singapore is also negotiating with Malaysia to allow cross-border payments, but it's unlikely a Malaysian user would be able to chain these together to pay someone in India.
  • melony 5y ago
• devnull3 5y ago
  About UPI: The standardisation of payment interface is done by a corporation called NPCI. It’s an initiative from India's central bank (RBI) and it is non-profit. [1] This means that a private player's implementation does not become defacto standard. Multiple factors are aligning to make UPI successful: 1. Massive Mobile (smart phones) & Internet penetration 2. Cheap mobile data from telcos 3. Low cost of payment infrastructure to the banks and shops. 4. Fast clearing of payments (< 5-8 seconds) 5. Neutral standardisation body with blessings from the central bank [1] https://www.npci.org.in/who-we-are/about-us https://www.npci.org.in/who-we-are/about-us
  • xyst 5y ago
    I could do without #5 to be honest. Should be working towards a more decentralized approach.
    • yashg 5y ago
      Why this obsession with doing away with a central authority? What is so evil about a central bank? Decentralization is not cheap. I buy a pack of bread from a door-to-door bread and eggs salesman (Yes that's a thing in India). It costs INR 40 ($0.53). I pay him via UPI, he gets money instantly in his bank account with zero fees. He gets full INR 40 like I had paid him in cash. I don't think any decentralized system will be able to do that with zero fees. It obviously costs money to banks to maintain the infra that makes UPI possible. It still costs nothing for end users to use UPI. You know why is that? Because the Reserve Bank of India has mandated that. A central authority that grants banking licenses and oversees all banks in the country. Banks have to factor in the cost of supporting UPI as a regular cost of business. Banks actually may be saving money by supporting UPI because they don't have to deal with cash. They need less branches and ATMs, less people to handle all the cash. You remove the central authority, and it becomes anarchy.
      • captn3m0 5y ago
        The GP's point isn't about RBI being a central authority, but about NPCI being granted a quasi-monopoly on retail payments despite being a non-government body. One of the important recommendations from the Watal Committee report[x] was to restructure the NPCI-relationship: 1. Change ownership structure. It was 75% owned by 10 banks in India, with no seats for other players in the industry. 2. Allow competition to NPCI. This got envisioned in the recent push for a NUE[0], but with a lot of caveats. RBI ended up deferring the plan[1] 3. NPCI also is pushing heavily to move from a non-profit to a for-profit model: https://www.livemint.com/news/india/npci-turning-for-profit-could-help-key-stakeholders-11609083399751.html https://www.livemint.com/news/india/npci-turning-for-profit-.... This will significantly change the current incentives it holds. As an example of this conflict, RBI runs NEFT and RTGS for free as near-realtime transaction platforms for free, and now 24x7 (The 24x7 was a recommendation in the report). RBI does not charge banks for interchange on NEFT, but NPCI does charge for IMPS. [0]: https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/npci-its-nue-competitor-and-the-push-for-retail-payments https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/npci-its-nue-competi... [1]: https://inc42.com/buzz/rbi-defers-its-plans-to-distribute-licence-for-nues/ https://inc42.com/buzz/rbi-defers-its-plans-to-distribute-li... [x]: https://dea.gov.in/sites/default/files/watal_report271216.pdf https://dea.gov.in/sites/default/files/watal_report271216.pd...
• grecy 5y ago
  This is already very common in Australia and Canada. I'm sure a ton of other countries too.
  • ashconnor 5y ago
    Bill payments sure, but not many businesses accept Interac e-transfers.
    • grecy 5y ago
      I bought something here in Australia last week with a bank transfer, and I've paid plenty of business using e-transfer in Canada - especially when covid kicked in.
      • koyote 5y ago
        I was forced to pay Qantas using BPAY (as in, I did not want to spend $70+ on card fees). I ended up cancelling the flight for a full refund and was told I need to wait up to 12 weeks to get it paid back into the account. Definitely not as flexible as a credit card payment which would have been reimbursed within days.
    • timbit42 5y ago
      Stores don't and it's not used for making recurring payments, but small businesses use it. Half the payments made to my small Canadian business are eTransfers.
• spir 5y ago
  Let's adopt patio11's criteria to a programmable public blockchain, like ethereum - Customer UX: crypto wallets built into browsers and phones. Connect your wallet to any webpage to pay. Or, tap your phone to pay via a crypto payment - Certainty: crypto transactions are, by default, instant and irreversible. Any kind of chargeback scheme, refund policy, or time-delay may be built into the crypto app layer - Settlement time: per previous remark, crypto transactions settle instantly on a global basis, unless a slower speed is built into the app layer - Reversibility: again, crypto transactions are irreversible by default, and any kind of reversibility scheme or policy may be built into the app layer Doubters or critics of ethereum's ability to handle global-scale payments may find the following items to be of interest: - Scale: ethereum has adopted a rollup scaling architecture where separate physical networks settle on ethereum. These separate networks are known as rollups aka Layer-2s aka L2s aka execution layers,. Some of the most important L2s are Arbitrum, Optimism, StarkNet, zkSync 2.0, and Miden. These L2s will help grow ethereum to billions of daily active users - Cost: ethereum's rollups may be expected to be cheap enough for everyone in the world, especially using a technology known as "zero-knowledge rollups with off-chain data" - Environmental impact: ethereum is five and a half years into a six-year upgrade to completely eliminate any negative environmental impact. Ie. Ethereum will stop using proof of work mining
  • anchpop 5y ago
    You keep saying “instant”, but in practice ethereum takes a few minutes for finality and can only handle a maximum of 50 tps. I’ll grant that both of those may improve with as zk tech matures, but even with rollups there’s no way of having better finality than ethereum, which is unlikely to ever be better than 60s
    • everfree 5y ago
      In practice, rollups can offer better finality than ethereum's base layer by using a bonding scheme. Basically, a rollup provider can sign a message that says "I promise that this transaction will become finalized, otherwise I forfeit my bond." Depending on the implementation, the receipt of that message can give the payment recipient pretty good confidence that the transaction will be finalized. I believe some rollup providers are either doing this already or currently researching it.
• kalleboo 5y ago
  When discussing Europe, you can't leave out the rise of mobile payments that work similar to India's UPI. For instance, in Sweden, "Swish"[0] has quickly taken over the market for casual payments, with free, instant, irreversible bank transfers between individuals using only the recipients phone number (or a QR code). They are a bunch of these systems, but currently they are all fractured into national systems, although work has started on adding interoperability[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Mobile_Payment_Systems_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Mobile_Payment_System...
  • joshuaissac 5y ago
    There is paym in the UK, which works the same way, using phone numbers, but it is not used that much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paym
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Tikkies are the Dutch equivalent. https://dutchreview.com/expat/tikkie-netherlands/ https://dutchreview.com/expat/tikkie-netherlands/
    • zoover2020 5y ago
      I'd say they have become obsolete ever since all major banks now support similar functionality (payment requests) + the enablement of instant payments across Dutch banks
      • brnt 5y ago
        Hate that neither of them support non-Dutch banks (well, I think maybe Rabo has an extra paid service that does, but I don't bank there). Bunqs service did also accept CC, but I had to quit them over their never ending 'innovation'. I desperately need something that works at least in the entire Eurozone.
    • fbrncci 5y ago
• manmal 5y ago
  Just yesterday, I deposited money from my bank account to Coinbase via SEPA. Refreshed the Coinbase page, and it was there, ready to buy digital currency with - so, the transaction was instant, or almost so. The transfer didn’t cost me anything, and neither did it Coinbase (it seems). Coinbase seems to be positive the transaction will settle, or else it wouldn’t let me use the money immediately, right? Reversibility seems to be limited for consumers, I tried that once with a fraudulent seller, and the bank basically said I can’t do that. What’s exactly the catch with SEPA?
  • black_puppydog 5y ago
    For the customer? Basically this: > the bank basically said I can’t do that. For the shop? I think it's mostly that software solutions are incredibly US centric (or more accurately, not EU centric enough) meaning SEPA always stays an afterthought. I also want to mention SEPA direct debits. They're great from a the customer's perspective, especially for subscriptions and the like.
  • hjtkfkfmr 5y ago
    According to article there is a huge amount of SEPA fraud going around because seller receives you banking details. Unauthorized direct debit maybe?
    • riffraff 5y ago
      Yeah that confused me about the article. I've never heard of SEPA direct debit fraud, as my understanding is that SDD requires a notification to be sent before any debit is initiated to give time to the user to block it. It surely can be an issue but I'm not familiar with people refusing to share their IBAN number because they're afraid of random charges, which is a thing for ACH numbers.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      I don't doubt there is some SEPA fraud but 'huge amount' is something that requires some proof. Personally I haven't seen a single instance and that's with all of my banking details public and many thousands of transactions per year across 10 different bank accounts (three companies, and a bunch of private accounts).
• aidenn0 5y ago
  In terms of credit cards being "cheaper than free" in the US, I've noticed more places offering cash discounts in the past year or so
• kalleboo 5y ago
  Re: bank transfers in Japan, TFA states that after-hours bank transfers are still in the making, but, my experience is that the 24/7 instant transfers have pretty good coverage already - recently every transfer I've made or received has arrived instantly (to like 3-4 different banks from my rural institution). Once I didn't have the cash to cover my bar tab at like 1 AM on a Saturday, but the bar took PayPay. I didn't have enough PayPay balance, but I could do a transfer from my main bank to PayPay bank and refill my balance. A lifesaver!
• captn3m0 5y ago
  Fun Fact: UPI also allows certain other interesting kinds of transactions based on "special VPAs". These include: - IFSC code and account number combination, resolved directly by NPCI, is represented as account-no@ifsc-code.ifsc.npci (e.g. 12345@HDFC0000001.ifsc.npci) - RuPay card number, resolved directly by NPCI, is represented as card-no@rupay.npci (e.g. 1234123412341234@rupay.npci) The following were proposed, but didn't take off - Aadhaar number, resolved directly by NPCI using existing Aadhaar to bank mapper, is represented as aadhaar-no@aadhaar.npci (e.g. 234567890123@aadhaar.npci) - Mobile number, resolved directly by NPCI using proposed mobile to account mapper, is represented as mobile-no@mobile.npci (e.g. 9800011111@mobile.npci). Instead of this, many PSPs (PhonePe/BHIM most notably) ended up using mobilenumber@psp by default because of the usability benefit, and this "centralized mobile mapper" was never built afaik. The following are implemented at some banks: - When bank itself is the PSP, any account identifier, resolved directly by bank as the PSP, is represented as account-id@bank-psp-code (e.g. 12345678@icici) - A one time or time/amount limited tokens issued by a PSP, resolved directly by that PSP, is represented as token@psp-code (e.g. ot123456@mypsp) PPIs (Prepaid Payment Instrument - wallets in India) were added to the UPI system quite late, but there's very few who've actually started working. This was also in the original plan: - A PPI provider issued card number, resolved directly by PPI provider, is represented as ppi-card-no@ppi-psp-code (e.g. 000012346789@myppi) There's also some credit card providers that let you pay off your card by using a special VPA (cardnumber@card-issuer). See https://www.wishfin.com/credit-card-payment/how-to-pay-credit-card-bills-through-upi/ https://www.wishfin.com/credit-card-payment/how-to-pay-credi... for a list of supported issuers. Unfortunately, this makes compliance a huge hassle because every one must treat VPAs as hazardous (because they can now contain complete card numbers). Scroll to page 20 for the complete list: https://www.mygov.in/digidhan/pages/pdf/sbi/NPCI%20Unified%20Payment%20Interface.pdf https://www.mygov.in/digidhan/pages/pdf/sbi/NPCI%20Unified%2...
  • vishnugupta 5y ago
    This is a very useful list. I recently found out that every FASTAG (highway toll payments) has its own VPA handle for convenient top-us. https://www.npci.org.in/PDF/npci/netc/Bank-UPI-Handels.pdf https://www.npci.org.in/PDF/npci/netc/Bank-UPI-Handels.pdf
• thweorui234 5y ago
  +1 for UPI. However, UPI is not "open" in the true sense (you can't have an app running on linux or AOSP for instance). It's locked to certain apps, which apparently need license from GOI. The whole Indian banking system is also too reliant on SMS + TOTP. That UPI locks people to US proprietary systems, while GOI also has been making noises on tech monopolies, is apparently an irony not apparent the babucracy.
  • vickychijwani 5y ago
    What “US proprietary systems” does UPI lock people into, exactly? The number of available UPI apps today exceeds 100. Some of the big ones are created by US companies, sure, but many are created by Indian/non-US-owned companies. There is no lock-in though. Also, UPI is not on Windows/MacOS either, so it’s not correct to infer that it’s “not open” simply because it doesn’t run on Linux. It was designed from the start to be a mobile payment system, and there are good reasons for that (more on this below). The reason it doesn’t work on AOSP is, I presume, due to security concerns related to rooting (similar to why it doesn’t work on older known-insecure versions of Android/iOS). The security/fraud prevention mechanisms rely on proving that your device has a SIM card with the phone number linked to your bank account - and the same phone number is tied to your identity via Aadhaar. These guarantees are presumably much harder/costlier to ensure on such devices. EDIT to add: There is also an economic angle here: the above description of reliable, low-cost KYC in UPI also reduces the cost of operating the network (both directly by simplifying KYC, and indirectly by making fraud harder). Source: I work on a UPI app (although I am by no means a security expert).
• louwhopley 5y ago
  Bank-to-bank money transfers in South Africa is a mostly solved problem. (Electronic funds transfer/known as EFT locally) - payments above coffee-shop prices often happen by EFT. - it arrives within 2 days, bank sends proof of payment instantly and sellers accept that as sufficient proof. - can opt to send instantaneously which reflects within seconds to minutes (for a small fee, like ~$1). - non reversible - need bank account number and bank name That’s for push, for pull, debit orders exist, but they are luckily easily reversible. Unfortunately fraud on this is super high. Always strange when in the US and the landlord asks me to pay by cheque. Something we havent seen in SA in ~15 years.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • zuppy 5y ago
    Guy from Romania here: we can even pay to phone numbers if you’re on ING (Dutch bank) or Revolut (from UK). They will get their client’s IBAN for you. At least in Bucharest almost every person around me has an account on both of these.
    • CaptainJustin 5y ago
      In South Africa you can send money to anyone's phone number from several of the big banks. They can even be 'unbanked'. Regulation allows them to receive up to a certain amount before having to KYC and go through AML checks etc. To access their money they go to an ATM and a challenge response is sent to their phone number.
  • csomar 5y ago
    For a "third-world" country, South Africa has a quite developed financial infrastructure. This might be due to its historical links to the UK or by having a wealthy and connected elites.
    • oblio 5y ago
      South Africa was the first "second world" country in the economic sense, from before apartheid. Rich elites living roughly Western lifestyles and everyone else super poor.
• deleted 5y ago
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• elric 5y ago
  The article is factually incorrect when it talks about "SEPA payments", claiming they are a "pull" mechanism. What it probably meant to talk about, is SEPA Direct Debits -- where the counterpart charges your account, as opposed to you paying the counterpart. Given that these direct debit agreements are revokable at any point in time, I doubt the claims of very high fraud rate. A normal SEPA payment, is a "push" affair. These have (for all intents and purposes, though not technically) been a thing ever since the euro was introduced, whereas SEPA Direct Debit is more recent, replacing many of the existing domestic direct debit schemes. Then there's the Instant Payments bit: these are a thing but they're not used all that often (yet?). Most banks charge a hefty fee for an instant payment (mine charges €1.25). Some banks don't offer them at all. Adoption will grow and costs will decrease over time. In most countries, payments within the same bank have been instant (and free) for a very long time. This is one of the reasons why many companies have accounts with multiple banks. I'm sure some "weaker" european countries may have laxer fraud controls, but that's a temporary problem. ECB reporting is quite strict, and most banks do take fraud detection very seriously. Reputation is important for a bank, and if you're a truly disreputable bank you'll soon find yourself without friendly correspondent banks. Then you'll have a choice: fix your fraud problems, or become a useless island.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • jkirsteins 5y ago
    I think it's less "factually incorrect" and more "nuanced and incomplete". As a European that moved between countries, I was very surprised when I learned that SEPA allows a "pull" mechanism even exists. I lived 30 years in Latvia without knowing this is a feature in SEPA because every single payment is a "push" mechanism. I'm not sure if banks can turn this feature off, or if it just culturally never gained traction. On the other hand, payments via banks are fairly widespread C2B, because every bank offers a (custom and horrible) API that merchants can implement. So users can authenticate directly with their bank as if it were PayPal, and authorize a SEPA payment to the merchant's bank account. In fact, services that care about user identity, will often use these bank APIs to perform authentication with a high degree of confidence about the received user information. Then I moved to France, and every bank interaction is "pull" based. While friction in Latvia came from authenticating before initiating the "push", in France the friction comes from agreeing to direct debiting, and signing various authorization slips. Sometimes electronically, but sometimes you have to send them by mail before you can start paying for a long-running service by bank (this makes it very undesirable for one-off purchases. In fact it is so cumbersome, that I prefer to pay for many services by credit card every month) > I doubt the claims of very high fraud rate. If I provide my account number to a service provider, they can debit it without me explicitly authorizing them (I have to sign an authorization usually, but there's nothing "technically" blocking the counterparty). I suppose that could lead to high fraud rates.
• quelltext 5y ago
  > result in the recipient learning two things about the sender (name and phone number, both of which are configurable at transaction time) The recipient of Japanese bank transfers only gets the name. The phone number is only for the sending bank's side to reach out to the sender in case the transfer failed. Particularly of importance when you make transfers without owning an account at the sending bank (not sure how common that feature is outside Japan). Also of note, the Zengin system actually allows additional metadata in so-called EDI messages. However it's somewhat rare to see this offered by interfaces, and so likely not generally suitable. Here's one example: https://faq-chibabank.dga.jp/faq_detail.html?id=31 https://faq-chibabank.dga.jp/faq_detail.html?id=31 > The Single Europe Payment Area (SEPA) offers free, instant transactions between European banks. They’re pull based There are also push based SEPA transfers. Not that the article claims there aren't, just seems incomplete to present only the push based version for Japan (and not furikae and its challenges) and only the pull based version for Europe.
• known 5y ago
  Payment method need an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escrow to scale
• emodendroket 5y ago
  > n the U.S., I expect bank transfers will struggle to see general adoption as a payment method, even after the release of FedNow, but who knows what will be built on top of them. Cards are very popular and entrenched, and the economic model allows them to outcompete free on price alone. New payment methods will need to find something very interesting to offer to capture the user’s interest, and some participant in the transaction to pay for it; Buy Now Pay Later had the interesting insight that some businesses would happily underwrite their customers’ use of credit if someone else took the payment risk. Perhaps we’ll see similar experiments in applications using bank transfers as the underlying payment rail but with more complicated economics split creatively between the parties. Well, yeah, the other thing is, what interest do I have in letting the merchant get my funds directly without a middleman who promises to step in in the case of fraud? I am quite happy to continue paying with credit.
• Taniwha 5y ago
  Here in New Zealand we've ditched checks as a payment method, bank transfers have been the norm for paying bills for years now.
• askvictor 5y ago
  Australia's New Payment Platform performs bank transfers instantly, and can use email address, phone number, or business ID as a destination (the recipient must first have registered this with their bank). No fees. It's pretty decent. https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/new-payments-platform/ https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/new-payme...
  • seb1204 5y ago
    There is a delay of first transactions. PayID is what it it is called for most banks.
    • laurencei 5y ago
      I believe it is 24 hours for the first, then instant after that.
      • elyobo 5y ago
        That's at the bank's discretion, rather than something enforced by the system.
        • plantain 5y ago
          It still totally undermines the system. I went two hours out of town to pickup a car, expecting to pay on the spot with PayID instantly, just like dozens of times before. It triggered the mysterious 24 hour waiting period of my or their bank (the biggest in Australia), and of course the sellers wouldn't let me take the car. Dozens of calls to the bank, escalations - nothing can be done. I had to cancel the transaction (by lying and saying it was fraudulent), drove to the bank, withdrew the money in cash, and paid the good-old-fashioned way. headdesk. PayID is useless as a payment system if you can't actually rely on it to make a payment in a timely manner.
      • akdor1154 5y ago
        What a coincidence, a fraud protection scheme that happens to make NPP unsuitable for retail payments right off the bat. Surely unintentional and nothing to do with banks and credit cards wanting to preserve their racket of skimming every purchase in the country.
• throwawaysea 5y ago
  I would love to see direct transfers replace payments via credit cards, which provide very little utility to customers in the end. I would also like to see this serve as an alternative to PayPal or Stripe or other such intermediaries. All these companies simply create unnecessary centralization points. And that also means they come with a central authority. And what do these authorities like to do? They like to build up market power, shelter themselves from competition, seek rent, and impose their political/moral will on their customers and on businesses. We saw it with porn. We saw it with Wikileaks. We seek it regularly now in the age of deplatforming. It’s time to move past them, and crypto does not have to be the only answer.
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  If pay with debit card you are doing a bank transfer. Maybe in the US most people are using credit cards but in EU many are using debit cards.
  • klodolph 5y ago
    In the US, there is a difference between debit cards, ACH, and bank transfers. They are three separate things.
    • kgdinesh 5y ago
      care to explain?
  • ErrantX 5y ago
    Sort of in the sense it comes from your bank account; but the settlement process is different, and can take longer. Faster Payments (bank transfers in the UK) for example settle 3 times per day and are intended to be instant. Debit cards usually settle daily and there can be a delay; which is why you will see an Auth on your account (card payments go; Auth to lock the money, Payment to set up the payment, and Settlement to move the actual cash). This is why the EU mandated banks start to show actual funds available (balance less all auths and other pending payments) as it can sometimes take days to settle debit card payments and people can be unsure of their balance. In general, finance is an example of the "99 standards" error; in that every so often new standards come in to fix things but just add another approach to the mix (don't get me started on Direct Debits!)
  • avianlyric 5y ago
    Not really. From a purely technical perspective there’s no real difference between a credit card and a debit card. The mechanism for moving money is identical. The only difference is that one moves money from a credit account, the other moves it from a debit account. The costs via Visa/MasterCard are broadly the same. The clearing and settlement process is also broadly the same. Neither are as quick or finite as a bank transfer. One big difference for a merchant is that debit/credit cards have a dispute process (called chargebacks), whereas bank transfers generally don’t.
• ErrantX 5y ago
  Odd not to touch on Open Banking and PSD2 in Europe; as that is basically the future he is talking about. In essence; financial institutions are legislated to add customer friendly UX and fraud prevention on top of standard bank to bank transfers. It's effectively a set of APIs that orchestrate it all, with things like dynamic linking to the payment and secure authentication rules for anti fraud. The idea is for commercial offerings to build on top of the standard APIs (for example, to offer bank transfers in checkouts). In practice it's taking a bit to get off the ground - but providers like Tink (sold to Visa for a lot of money) and Truelayer and starting to get traction. Australia and MENA region are heading down the same route. https://www.openbanking.org.uk/ https://www.openbanking.org.uk/ Edit; for clarity, SEPA was the early moves to normalise what the European banks were doing from around 2008 onwards - and ended up with PSD1 rationalising it. As others have said this blog mostly only actually focuses on the direct debit element of SEPA not the credit payment side.
  • anticristi 5y ago
    Cynical me reads this article as follows: Shit! We promised investors that Stripe will be the sh*t, the Global Payment Network. Now banks and regulators have woken up and we are commoditised in India, Japan and EU. Sure hope FedNow won't follow suit. Sorry VCs. Please exit Stripe before it's too late.
    • ErrantX 5y ago
      I respect Patrick and his content/judgement. So Hanlon's razor (and I don't mean that in a mean way to Patrick) probably applies. I assume there is a Stripe echo chamber which might explain the focus (I've read several of his money articles and most of them suffer from an incomplete picture). Also; I'm not sure Stripe and Open Banking are incompatible. Realistically it eases stripes integrations in the EU (Ive not checked if they are a registered payments provider under the legislation but I assume they must be). In addition; the thing that springs out of this article is how incompatible we are on a global scale. So there is a market there for them. In the end, SEPA for all it's faults drove European standardisation. Global legislation on that scale is not gonna happen (it's sort of a shame he didn't draw that conclusion)
• bighead777 5y ago
  the article completely missed the talking about the online payment system in China which is at least 10 years advance than the counterpart in US or india or any other countries in the world.
  • isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
    Any details?
    • Epitom3 5y ago
      "trust me bro"
• lubien 5y ago
  Worth mentioning Brazil has new transfer method called Pix that takes mostly 10 seconds to exchange money to another bank account and you only need the other person/company ID or email or phone number or a random key (the account owner choose which ones they want to allow). It came just a few years ago but basically everyone has it now since it's a payment method directly coming from the Central Bank and all banks implemented it by now. It's pretty easy to generate a QR code and bill someone but you can also set it up on your website in a way that you can check when it's paid programatically. Worth mentioning: it's free of costs except if you're a company that want to use the REST API. By the way, they even use GitHub to discuss things and document their API, really nice
  • lubien 5y ago
    Dropping in https://github.com/bacen https://github.com/bacen
  • blntechie 5y ago
    I believe UPI of India and Pix of Brazil actually cross absorb features from each other which is nice to see. UPI is getting from 1st December a way to send payments by phone number or random number(key) which I believe are partly inspired from Pix. Earlier phone number lookup was a layer on top of the UPI built by the fintech companies and now it will be part of the base system. Now that UPI's operator NPCI is focusing on cross border transactions, some day Pix and UPI can interoperate. UPI is already integrated with Singapore's payment system and similarly in discussions with few other countries.
  • soneca 5y ago
    I agree. Patrick should take a look in how Pix works (and how it was deployed and had immediate traction and explosive growth, a rare good innovation from the state). Pix is incredible and revolutionary. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-06/pix-mobile-payment-how-brazil-s-central-bank-launched-platform https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-06/pix-mobil...
• rambambram 5y ago
  > I expect we’ll see bank transfers as a more prominent part of the payment mix in much of the world. Interesting read. I have multiple clients in Europe who use my webshop system with simple bank transfers as the only payment method. It's so easy. No setting up shit like iDeal or Stripe or anything like that, no fees, just paying from one bank to the other. It comes so close to paying with cash. It's not instant so you can't really program against it (as with iDeal here in The Netherlands, your country has probably something similar), so it's not really suitable for big automated webshops. But for small businesses and/or freelancers who want to make money online it's such a game changer. Let's say you just started a small business selling digital or physical goods, the only thing you need to do is enter your IBAN bank account number and you can get paid within a workday or two. Customers place an order, click a button that says 'I just paid', you as the business owner check your bank account on a daily basis (just from your smartphone) to see if you received their money, if you receive their money you click another button and can fullfill the order. From experience I know I'll receive money from Germany within one business day, and from the rest of EU within two business days. It depends on the banks I guess, because sometimes even customers from EU with IBAN bank accounts tell me they can't make the payment. Still, it's so easy. Even for filing your VAT as a business it's stupidly easy in EU, because whatever you sell to Spain or Poland or Ireland, if you stay under a certain threshold (which is pretty high for a one person company) you can just do the taxes in your own country according to the rules you know. I just really miss the UK, stupid Brexit. I have to quadruple the amount of paperwork if I want to sell to the UK. It's not worth the hassle. Just not worth it.
  • berkes 5y ago
    > It's so easy. No setting up shit like iDeal or Stripe.. While true, the friction with iDeal or Stripe is a lot lower than with bank-transfers. I've helped set up such payment systems (backends): the rate of non-paying (send reminders, etc) is far higher with bank-transfers than with iDeal. So much, that for many freelancers who send just a few dozens of invoices per year, it pays off (pun intended) to include an iDeal QR code and link in that invoice. People are so much more likely to click and link and pay than when they have to type over payment details. The latter often ends on the "TODO pile" the former is often payed within minutes after emailing. (Do note that in Western-Europe it is common business(to-business) practice to send an invoice after the goods or services are delivered. This invoice acts as a payment-request.)
• tibbydudeza 5y ago
  We have such a platform but they screen scrape your bank website in order to do direct payments to a merchant - it is a pain to do this yourself because you need to fill in so much detail i.r.o account nr and reference id. I have 2FA enabled so I still need to authorize the payment via my cell. Wish our banks would expose functionality securely without me giving them my bank web login details.
• eisbaw 5y ago
  Does anybody know of a way to make recurring SEPA (push) payments? My bank requires manual interaction, so I have been looking for a card-to-SEPA gateway - without succes. Reason: Binance offers recurring DCA but with hefty fee for Visa/Mastercard. Binance partnership with AdvCash makes SEPA "zero"-fee possible. AdvCash accepts SEPA, but my bank cannot make recurring SEPA payments.
  • Ekaros 5y ago
    It depends if your bank supports such. For me it does. I for example have setup my rent to go on same day each month for up to year or more to my landlord. Each of these is separate repeating push payment with same details(message/reference number). And all of them are pre-approved.
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    That must be down to your bank's specific system. I've been paying my rent that way for... Closer to two decades than one, I think. If theirs is really that stupid, maybe you should switch to another bank. Ask around if anyone you know has a better one.
• anormaluser 5y ago
  Scanning a QR code to make a payment in China is also very interesting.
• eisbaw 5y ago
  Does any European bank actually have a public API? My bank (Danske Bank) does not. Even the first step of logging-in with our digital sign-on (NemID) is a bit tricky to automate. (MitID's rsa key fob might make it easier)
  • avianlyric 5y ago
    https://truelayer.com/ https://truelayer.com/ https://developers.monzo.com/ https://developers.monzo.com/
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Symbiote 5y ago
    https://developers.danskebank.com/ https://developers.danskebank.com/ though "Requires a QWAC+QSEAL issued by a QTSP". (Does any bank anywhere have a truly public API?)
• ngcc_hk 5y ago
  Not sure what rubbish he is talking about. No doubt some money transfer need a caution media like property sale and Bitcoin etc. Most just a matter of efficiency. We can use cheque in one stage. But move to credit card. Then for quit awhile nos many places use debt card. And many places has its location specific stored value card Oyster card, octopus card, .. Credit card elimination is a possibility in fact. Hence these days even credit card for low value transaction so to involved. Elimination of middle man and use it in an appropriate manner by finding suitable way is always. From shell to …
• alkonaut 5y ago
  Another article describing what sounds like science fiction in the US but is established in a lot of the rest of the world? Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the article but when I purchase stuff online the checkout options are “bank transfer”, “credit card” or “invoice”, with the direct bank transfer often being the default choice these days.
  • SonicTheSith 5y ago
    Close, In Germany for example most German stores have the following payment options: 1 You get an invoice and transfer money before shipping 2 lastschrift - vendor pulls money directly from your bank 3 Invoice ( rechnungskauf) - you order, get the product together with an invoice and you got 14days or 30days to pay. 4 Klarna 5 PayPal 6 Credit Card Amazon for example send me an invoice once a month for all the products I bought. The Lastschrift 99 percent of the cases does not check authenticity, since banks are required to get you the money back in case of fraud, and since only German banks support Lastschrift, the vendor using lastschrift will be also using a German banks. This making unrecoverable fraud impossible. And about option 3, package theft is no problem, since DHL FedEx ups, etc. All require a signature and are not allowed to leave the package on the door step. DHL brings the package to the post office or neighbour if your not home. Of course you can designated drop locations as well but they are not allowed to be in plain sight e.g. put it in the shed or something. Bigger problem is here that people use your name with a fake address for purchases, and after the vendor contacts the police they give them your address based on name. Don't know how often it happens but it is not on scale to be scared off. Oh and in case your login data for a shop gets stolem by scammers, if they change the delivery address German stores require that you reenter payment info to prevent fraud.
  • jokethrowaway 5y ago
    In which country and what are you buying? In my experience (UK) the only services accepting bank transfers are financial institutions (Coinbase, Revolut). Most stores prefer to pay CC fees and have a smoother checkout experience, probably to grab those extra % points of customer converting. A lot of e-commerces online even offer Paypal (even more ridiculous fees and infinite hassles for sellers) just because it's more user friendly and can help conversions a bit more. A couple of years ago, I even opened 2 cash isa saving account for 20k each paying by credit card because that was the only option the bank accepted.
• _xnmw 5y ago
  One of the most surprising things about moving to Eastern Europe (being born and raised in Canada and worked in the US) was how much better the payment systems are, from a consumer's perspective. Instant P2P bank-to-bank transfers, confirmed with a 2FA notification on my smartphone, are the default way to pay for everything from my monthly rent to clothing stores (which don't have a credit card terminal) to random ecommerce websites. ACH/Wires and Canada's Interac e-Transfer system seem archaic in comparison, and rampant with fraud (I still get fake texts about e-Transfers to my Canadian voip number weekly, and I still find the US system of wiring money ridiculously slow).
  • oblio 5y ago
    These things are even more glaring for us, in Eastern Europe. A lot of people go: they're so much richer than us, why don't they have space lasers and flying cars and instant bank transfers now??? I guess at the end of the day we remember we're all only human, after all :-)
  • djmips 5y ago
    Counterpoint. I use Interac e-Transfer all the time. Zero problems. No spam. No fraud. Works fast. There is auto-deposit now so it's even more frictionless than before and it's sped up to essentially instant on regular purchases. And yes, I pay my rent with e-Transfer.
    • srhngpr 5y ago
      Agreed and it's free across all banks, and some have even raised daily transfer limits to $7000 or more. It's also one of the easiest and fastest no-fee methods to transfer money into crypto exchanges/platforms in Canada.
      • moberley 5y ago
        It is not free with all participating institutions in the Interac system. At the credit union I use they charge a transaction fee for e-transfers.
• AJRF 5y ago
  I am a complete noob when it comes to this stuff, so forgive my ignorance, but doesn't the U.K already have all of these things? Is it a global leader in payments/banking/fintech or is the US just so far behind the rest of the world?
• 2ion 5y ago
  Interesting idea, but banks block this. My German bank until recently offered SEPA "instant" bank transfers, which make the cash appear on the receiver's end if both the sending and receiving bank support instant payments, for free. Recently they set the cost of instant payments to 1€ per transaction, without guarantees that it will complete as an instant transaction (depending on the receiver's side). Nobody will pay that money without the guarantee that the service bought is also rendered as such. On the web, waiting until the next clearing window completes, or the next bank business day, is not a payment option and has impact on the supply chain (when the merchant is confident enough to start the shipping process depends on if he has payment guarantee or not).
• rognjen 5y ago
  In Southeast Asia, bank transfers as payment are part of the norm. On our platform much more than half of all payments use bank transfers. For Malaysia specifically this is facilitated by a nation-wide provider in which all banks must participate. Because of that payment gateways can just integrate with that provider and not with individual banks. The maximum fees are also set by the government. Transfers must be free for GIRO clearing and are very low for instant clearing and have been required to be waived since before covid. The result of this is exceedingly positive in my opinion. For instance one bank has a QR code that you can print (which contains basically just the account number) and you can pay in shops by scanning it. But besides that for random other things people will accept bank transfers. For instance, plumbers, AC repair, etc typically only take cash but in my experience will accept a bank transfer.
  • rntksi 5y ago
    Southeast Asian resident here as well. We even pay shipping fees by bank transfer to our motorcycle drivers (!). This is like 0.5$ or 1$. Everyone has a bank account and transfers happen instantly thanks to a free, 24/7 platform that all Banks partake in.
• Tepix 5y ago
  In Germany we have a bank transfer based system called Giropay. As part of the purchase process after picking Giropay as the payment method you get asked what bank you're at and then get redirected to a special version of the bank site (for my bank it is giropay.normal-bank-domain.de instead of the usual www.normal-bank-domain.de) where you log in using 2FA etc as usual and proceed with the bank transfer. Once you are finished you get redirected back to the merchant. In the background, Giropay confirms your payment with the merchant so that the merchant knows she will receive the money soon. I think it's a good system. Not all banks participate in it, however.
• zxspectrum1982 5y ago
  Bizum in Spain is awesome: associate your bank account to a mobile phone number, send and receive money with just the phone number. Both for individuals (free) and businesses (very low fees). Since every bank in Spain supports Bizum, it has been a turning point for everybody. Of course VISA and MasterCard are not happy since they are losing more and more transactions. https://bizum.es/en/ https://bizum.es/en/
• ilikerashers 5y ago
  I like how truelayer operates. Takes me to my banking app where I authorise the payment using my bank auth. No middlemen "value-adds" -X%, no keying in card details, no crappy browser autofill and CVV. Admittedly this only seems to work via mobile at the moment and haven't seen it on the web yet. The Amazon VISA announcement shows that maybe card providers and their payment service providers are next on the disrupt list. They might go the way of the dodo.
  • jokethrowaway 5y ago
    I like TrueLayer as well, albeit it's not free for the provider. TrueLayer is the middleman. They probably don't get as much money as CC payments though. Revolut topups / Nectar / Chip are now all using TrueLayer. On the cons side, it doesn't work so well on all devices (I had problems going from app -> browser -> app on older devices, probably because of RAM limits). Ideally, we could just have a free open-source wallet application that connects to all the different banks via Open Bank API (same as TrueLayer) and then just have a special walletOS://revolut/topup/250/gbp link in the app which opens up your wallet and allow you to send an instant bank transfer. Zero fees, zero middlemen. I've been toying with the idea of building it but it's not immediate to monetise, so I'll do it once I'm rich and bored and keep selling simpler services to business for now. You could potentially upsell a saving / personal analytics premium service once you have enough adoption or resell transaction data (even if the latter won't probably be a very popular model, given modern concerns with muh privacy) The main problem it would solve for me is that I have something like 8 different banking apps on my phone which I hate with a passion and I hate Credit/Debit Cards: sharing your single secret everytime you're paying for something is just plain retarded plus we're just enriching Visa and Mastercards, which produce zero innovation in FinTech.
    • ilikerashers 5y ago
      I don't think that sounds like a bad idea at all. The payments market is massive and there is plenty of pie to go around. Smaller transaction size sites and apps that struggle with payment fees might interested in that as TrueLayer seem to focus on major players.
• sagivo 5y ago
  > ACH payments are generally free to end users in the U.S., though a few banks will attempt to monetize them. (Looking at you, Bank of America.) Stripe also charges for ACH. ACH payments on Stripe cost 0.80%, capped at $5. [1] https://stripe.com/blog/accept-ach-payments https://stripe.com/blog/accept-ach-payments
• yyyk 5y ago
  >family fraud (child and parent disagree with respect to desirability of purchasing the video game; bank backs parent; video game seller loses out), 'Fraud' is not a name for everything a seller doesn't like. This can happen without any bad intent, and the seller lost nothing. And frankly, if a video game seller didn't allow this type of refunding, they'd have much less of a market.
• ic4l 5y ago
  In Thailand most in person transactions are done by bank transfer via QR code: https://www.bangkokbank.com/en/Personal/Digital-Banking/PromptPay https://www.bangkokbank.com/en/Personal/Digital-Banking/Prom... The local sellers pay little to no fee, and the transfer is instant. All of the popular banks here support this form of payment. It's also very common for people here to do bank to bank transfers, and they are all instant. The US is behind in many ways.
• homelessgolden 5y ago
  UPI has been truly revolutionary for me here (in a mid sized city in India). I almost do not remember using Cash from the time the Pandemic started. 5 Years ago if someone had told me I could live Cash free for 18 months I would have thought that future is decades away in here. One point I would like to add is the recent changes with UPI Autopay have significantly reduced the friction of recurring payments. It is not made completely friction less as the India financial regulators believe that some friction in recurring payments flow is better for consumers even if it is worse for business.
• digital2568 5y ago
  The only exception is Amazon who will do a SEPA pull instead.
• config_yml 5y ago
  In Switzerland, most (e-commerce) businesses allow to buy on invoice, e.g. you just pay by providing your name and address. Is this prevalent in other countries? The shop usually provides 2-4 weeks of credit until that invoice gets paid eventually. There's a whole industry behind that, where businesses can sell the risk to a third party and receive the money instantly by paying a commission based on the risk assessment of the buying party. Is there a name for that?
  • pylon 5y ago
    How is fraud handled in this case? Name and address is relatively easily accessible public info. Do they notify the person that there is an invoice against them before they ship the product?
• victor22 5y ago
  Someone please tell Patrick about bitcoin... Jk, he works for stripe/banks so he has to turn a blind eye. Feels like I'm watching Kodak resisting the digital camera all over again
  • theptip 5y ago
    Bitcoin lacks reversibility, which turns out to be a necessary property for a payments network to cover all use cases. This (as well as expensive fees, until lightning, and wild price fluctuations) is why it never really caught on as a SWIFT/Western Union replacement.
• rdtwo 5y ago
  Does nobody here have a target red card? That’s what they do and they give you 5% back
• jpgvm 5y ago
  Paying by bank transfer is pretty much universally accepted in Thailand now after the pandemic severely reduced reliance on cash. even tiny vendors will do bank transfer with a QR code now. Better yet there are no fees so it's great for merchants too. Unfortunately online is a different story. For now even bank transfers are usually mediated by a 3rd party that charges fees and is generally a nuisance. hopefully that is fixed soon too.
• Sami_Lehtinen 5y ago
  Nobody mentioned GoCardless, so I do. I think it's a nice option compared to all of these payment methods which are just additional cake frosting ton credit card infrastructure. - https://gocardless.com/direct-debit/introduction/ https://gocardless.com/direct-debit/introduction/
• CRConrad 5y ago
  > If you don’t live in India, it is highly likely that your bank-to-bank transactions involve giving your counterparty a code representing your bank, a number for your bank account, and some metadata about yourself. No. It involves anyone billing me giving me their bank account (IBAN) number, and usually some reference number too, along with the amount and due date. > 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. Sure, maybe that also exists -- but why would anyone accept doing it that ass-backwards way around?!? All in all, one wonders whether this guy just doesn't know what he's talking about (when it comes to Europe), or if perhaps he has some reason to outright lie. > My employer Stripe... Oh. Well, I guess that answers that, then.