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The US seems to be so far behind. For example, in Poland, Europe, you've had online instant bank payments for over 10 years. You’d go to a merchant’s site, clic

The US seems to be so far behind. For example, in Poland, Europe, you've had online instant bank payments for over 10 years. You’d go to a merchant’s site, click 'pay with my bank,' and an OAuth-like mechanism would log you into your bank to confirm the payment. Now it’s even easier with the introduction of BLIK, which lets you pay in shops, online, etc. Online payments are super simple: you click 'pay with BLIK' on a merchant’s site, go to your bank app (web or mobile), click the BLIK icon, and get a six-digit code valid for 60–180 seconds. You enter that code on the merchant site, and your mobile app shows 'Do you want to pay [xxx amount] to [merchant Y]?' You click yes, and that’s it.

hnav 2y ago
Regulatory hurdles from incumbents aside, it's generally the case that a less developed, up-and-coming economy will have new stuff quicker. The US is arguably the birthplace of credit but was one of the last to get chip and then tap. Right now the US is putting internet relays in low earth orbit and teaching computers to generate text on the fly, but the wired internet offerings are inferior to some third tier city in Bulgaria and customer service is abysmal.
- markus92 2y ago
  SEPA is well established all across the eurozone though, even in countries with considerable legacy infrastructure.
  - hnav 2y ago
    Right but those countries are comparable in size and GDP to US states. The US had wire transfers since the 19th century, credit cards as we recognize them today since the 70s, online shopping since the 90s and online money transfer like Paypal since the 2000s. That eurozone countries would want to standardize on something and happen to largely escape regulatory capture is fairly predictable.
    - jltsiren 2y ago
      Many European countries had online banking in the 80s. Largely because banks were focused on efficiency, and they wanted to replace checks with wire transfers and domestic debit cards. In order to do that, they had to make wire transfers as convenient as possible. When online shopping first appeared, wire transfers were the obvious form of payment. Few people had credit cards, because most shops didn't accept them. And shops didn't accept them, because they were too expensive. (When I got a credit card in the early 2000s, one of the things they emphasized in the marketing was that you could withdraw money from foreign ATMs. And you usually got a better rate than by exchanging cash. It's kind of funny that you are not supposed to use an American credit card for that.)
      - xxpor 2y ago
        And then how do you reverse a wire transfer? What's the liability split?
        jltsiren 2y ago
        You don't reverse it. It's like a cash transaction in the sense that it's irrevocable, which means people understand it intuitively. But unlike cash, there is an effectively permanent record of the transaction, connected to the participants' legal identities. That tends to discourage scammers. And it all happens within a single jurisdiction.
        account42 2y ago
        This is not true, you can reverse SEPA transfers via your bank. You do need a reason though and there are time limits but if a seller just runs away with your money you don't have to go through the courts in the general case.
        xxpor 2y ago
        So as a consumer this sounds like it sucks compared to using Visa.
- jen20 2y ago
  > it's generally the case that a less developed, up-and-coming economy will have new stuff quicker. My credit card in the UK had chip-and-PIN in 2004 - it was probably around earlier too, though less common. Almost every bank card issued has had contactless for over 10 years too. Simply being a developed economy is not the only reason!
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    Oh come on! Everybody knows the UK didn't even have banking until Oasis released their first single! Sometimes it gets hard living in the USA, where we have to invent everything for everybody else all the time.
  - sandos 2y ago
    I was using something called "cash" (I think? Not sure) I think here in Sweden in the 90s, probably around 1998, which was chip but NO pin, ie. just like cash, if you lost your card you lost the cash.. That was supported in a very few places but I was constantly nagging shops to support it. This was then gone for a good while, whereas today I guess its back in a way, you get some kinds oy payments (food etc) without pin, and a few others, until it will require a pin, then allows a few more pin-less buys, but I think it also depends on the sum.
- seadan83 2y ago
  I don't think your argument is all that sound (1) the way to define up and coming economies seem to fit into confirmation bias and/or survivor bias. (2) why is size such a strong variable? (3) US had massive rollout of dial up, why/how did broadband get established if size of existing infrastructure is inversely correlated to adaption of new tech? (If I understand your argument correctly). Broadband should never really have rolled out. For that matter, there is a large deployment of satellite internet in the US, wouldn't your low earth satellite example also be a counterexample? (4) why would advancement in one sector be counter evidence for market capture and regulatory hurdles in a different sector? The examples just seem unrelated. (5) US internet speeds have been pretty slow for a long time. Could it be that market capture and lack of competition is a larger factor rather than the cost of adoption? Another example, Japan has been pretty far ahead of mobile phone tech for a while. If the cost of adaption of new tech were the biggest issue, wouldn't they have stagnated some time ago? That was an already saturated market for over a decade, yet still moved forward. (6) could it be more important that new markets lack existing monopolistic capture? Though, I will agree that existing infrastructure/deployments do create an inertia for stagnation. I have that view for US road infrastructure. It is all going to last many decades more, and with it the single occupancy vehicle.
  - seadan83 2y ago
    Addendum/edit: strike the word "new" on point 6.
- safety1st 2y ago
  Not saying this is who you are, but this is the argument I hear from Americans who have a vested interest in defending the illegal business practices of its cartels and monopolies. "This country is so big, that innovation is hard and will be slower." I don't believe them. I think innovation is stymied either by monopoly, regulation or both. I think specifically we allowed monopoly to encroach in an unprecedented way since the Reagan era. I think there are a lot of rich guys breaking the law, the Sherman Act and its kin are real, the DOJ and the FTC have teeth again, America can be innovative in every field and it's time for action. Enforcing antitrust law is the path to better products and services and maybe even a restoration of wealth equality to some degree, because historically starting businesses was what kept the fruits of the American economic pie more distributed than they are today.
  - SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
    Coincidentally, this point came up in another HN thread about California enacting a rule that forces companies to make subscriptions cancelable with one-click. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41644315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41644315
  - nolok 2y ago
    To agree with your point; if the entire EU, with country having completely different level of developpement and banking infrastructure and currency and language, managed to standardize and deploy unified SEPA wires including instant wires, then that argument cannot be accepted for the US. It's easier and faster (and probably cheaper) for me to instant wire money from one euro to several thousand to any random Bulgarian person or business in their own currency, or for said business to take money from my account, while retaining all banking protection, than it is for two silicon valley Californian to do it short of using a private business solution. Overall the state of the banking and payment infrastructure in the US compared to their advancement level always weirds members out. Well, not infrastructure not the right word, I'm sure the backend is great but what is exposed to people seem to suck. It's your money you should be feeling in charge not finding solution to be able to use it.
    - 2y ago
- citrin_ru 2y ago
  > up-and-coming economy will have new stuff quicker And the key for this is competition and regulation not (yet) captured by entrenched players.
- ywvcbk 2y ago
  > Regulatory hurdles from incumbents aside, it's generally the case that a less developed, up-and-coming economy will have new stuff quicker SEPA is Eurozone wide and has existed for 15+ years. Instant payments were only introduced in 2017 but it didn’t take much time for banks in Germany, Italy, Spain etc. to support them.
- _3u10 2y ago
  Bruh, the only thing the US excels at is high income / cost of living, and making cool infrastructure for the rest of the world, which for some reason it doesn’t adopt.
- fennecfoxy 2y ago
  US is an economic powerhouse due to land/population sizes, but if you look at attention is all you need paper (for example): https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 majority of it is imported talent. It's like saying that because Apple is paying a Chinese factory to build phones that Apple "builds phones".
pbreit 2y ago
Except that US commerce dwarfs pretty much all other countries. Visa & Mastercard arguably play a major role in such dominance.
neom 2y ago
We're right next door and have been emailing money to each other since 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac_e-Transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac_e-Transfer
idontwantthis 2y ago
Even Cambodia has had instant bank transfers for years now. They are trying to figure out how to get tourists into the system because locals hardly use cash anymore.
Saline9515 2y ago
This system is really subpar, because it excludes people that don't have a local bank account. I remember in Estonia not being able to book a doctor appointment because the website only had those means of payment, but no "pay with credit card" option. On the contrary, credit cards are a neutral standard, which is interoperable. It can be improved but it's vastly better than bank OAuth.
- sobani 2y ago
  I have trouble imagining how you'd get a credit card without a bank account.
  - Jochim 2y ago
    Foreign bank account that isn't part of the scheme.

hnav 2y ago

Regulatory hurdles from incumbents aside, it's generally the case that a less developed, up-and-coming economy will have new stuff quicker. The US is arguably the birthplace of credit but was one of the last to get chip and then tap. Right now the US is putting internet relays in low earth orbit and teaching computers to generate text on the fly, but the wired internet offerings are inferior to some third tier city in Bulgaria and customer service is abysmal.

markus92 2y ago
SEPA is well established all across the eurozone though, even in countries with considerable legacy infrastructure.
- hnav 2y ago
  Right but those countries are comparable in size and GDP to US states. The US had wire transfers since the 19th century, credit cards as we recognize them today since the 70s, online shopping since the 90s and online money transfer like Paypal since the 2000s. That eurozone countries would want to standardize on something and happen to largely escape regulatory capture is fairly predictable.
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    Many European countries had online banking in the 80s. Largely because banks were focused on efficiency, and they wanted to replace checks with wire transfers and domestic debit cards. In order to do that, they had to make wire transfers as convenient as possible. When online shopping first appeared, wire transfers were the obvious form of payment. Few people had credit cards, because most shops didn't accept them. And shops didn't accept them, because they were too expensive. (When I got a credit card in the early 2000s, one of the things they emphasized in the marketing was that you could withdraw money from foreign ATMs. And you usually got a better rate than by exchanging cash. It's kind of funny that you are not supposed to use an American credit card for that.)
    - xxpor 2y ago
      And then how do you reverse a wire transfer? What's the liability split?
      - jltsiren 2y ago
        You don't reverse it. It's like a cash transaction in the sense that it's irrevocable, which means people understand it intuitively. But unlike cash, there is an effectively permanent record of the transaction, connected to the participants' legal identities. That tends to discourage scammers. And it all happens within a single jurisdiction.
        account42 2y ago
        This is not true, you can reverse SEPA transfers via your bank. You do need a reason though and there are time limits but if a seller just runs away with your money you don't have to go through the courts in the general case.
        xxpor 2y ago
        So as a consumer this sounds like it sucks compared to using Visa.
jen20 2y ago
> it's generally the case that a less developed, up-and-coming economy will have new stuff quicker. My credit card in the UK had chip-and-PIN in 2004 - it was probably around earlier too, though less common. Almost every bank card issued has had contactless for over 10 years too. Simply being a developed economy is not the only reason!
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Oh come on! Everybody knows the UK didn't even have banking until Oasis released their first single! Sometimes it gets hard living in the USA, where we have to invent everything for everybody else all the time.
- sandos 2y ago
  I was using something called "cash" (I think? Not sure) I think here in Sweden in the 90s, probably around 1998, which was chip but NO pin, ie. just like cash, if you lost your card you lost the cash.. That was supported in a very few places but I was constantly nagging shops to support it. This was then gone for a good while, whereas today I guess its back in a way, you get some kinds oy payments (food etc) without pin, and a few others, until it will require a pin, then allows a few more pin-less buys, but I think it also depends on the sum.
seadan83 2y ago
I don't think your argument is all that sound (1) the way to define up and coming economies seem to fit into confirmation bias and/or survivor bias. (2) why is size such a strong variable? (3) US had massive rollout of dial up, why/how did broadband get established if size of existing infrastructure is inversely correlated to adaption of new tech? (If I understand your argument correctly). Broadband should never really have rolled out. For that matter, there is a large deployment of satellite internet in the US, wouldn't your low earth satellite example also be a counterexample? (4) why would advancement in one sector be counter evidence for market capture and regulatory hurdles in a different sector? The examples just seem unrelated. (5) US internet speeds have been pretty slow for a long time. Could it be that market capture and lack of competition is a larger factor rather than the cost of adoption? Another example, Japan has been pretty far ahead of mobile phone tech for a while. If the cost of adaption of new tech were the biggest issue, wouldn't they have stagnated some time ago? That was an already saturated market for over a decade, yet still moved forward. (6) could it be more important that new markets lack existing monopolistic capture? Though, I will agree that existing infrastructure/deployments do create an inertia for stagnation. I have that view for US road infrastructure. It is all going to last many decades more, and with it the single occupancy vehicle.
- seadan83 2y ago
  Addendum/edit: strike the word "new" on point 6.
safety1st 2y ago
Not saying this is who you are, but this is the argument I hear from Americans who have a vested interest in defending the illegal business practices of its cartels and monopolies. "This country is so big, that innovation is hard and will be slower." I don't believe them. I think innovation is stymied either by monopoly, regulation or both. I think specifically we allowed monopoly to encroach in an unprecedented way since the Reagan era. I think there are a lot of rich guys breaking the law, the Sherman Act and its kin are real, the DOJ and the FTC have teeth again, America can be innovative in every field and it's time for action. Enforcing antitrust law is the path to better products and services and maybe even a restoration of wealth equality to some degree, because historically starting businesses was what kept the fruits of the American economic pie more distributed than they are today.
- SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
  Coincidentally, this point came up in another HN thread about California enacting a rule that forces companies to make subscriptions cancelable with one-click. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41644315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41644315
- nolok 2y ago
  To agree with your point; if the entire EU, with country having completely different level of developpement and banking infrastructure and currency and language, managed to standardize and deploy unified SEPA wires including instant wires, then that argument cannot be accepted for the US. It's easier and faster (and probably cheaper) for me to instant wire money from one euro to several thousand to any random Bulgarian person or business in their own currency, or for said business to take money from my account, while retaining all banking protection, than it is for two silicon valley Californian to do it short of using a private business solution. Overall the state of the banking and payment infrastructure in the US compared to their advancement level always weirds members out. Well, not infrastructure not the right word, I'm sure the backend is great but what is exposed to people seem to suck. It's your money you should be feeling in charge not finding solution to be able to use it.
  - 2y ago
citrin_ru 2y ago
> up-and-coming economy will have new stuff quicker And the key for this is competition and regulation not (yet) captured by entrenched players.
ywvcbk 2y ago
> Regulatory hurdles from incumbents aside, it's generally the case that a less developed, up-and-coming economy will have new stuff quicker SEPA is Eurozone wide and has existed for 15+ years. Instant payments were only introduced in 2017 but it didn’t take much time for banks in Germany, Italy, Spain etc. to support them.
_3u10 2y ago
Bruh, the only thing the US excels at is high income / cost of living, and making cool infrastructure for the rest of the world, which for some reason it doesn’t adopt.
fennecfoxy 2y ago
US is an economic powerhouse due to land/population sizes, but if you look at attention is all you need paper (for example): https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 majority of it is imported talent. It's like saying that because Apple is paying a Chinese factory to build phones that Apple "builds phones".

pbreit 2y ago

Except that US commerce dwarfs pretty much all other countries. Visa & Mastercard arguably play a major role in such dominance.

neom 2y ago

We're right next door and have been emailing money to each other since 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac_e-Transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac_e-Transfer

idontwantthis 2y ago

Even Cambodia has had instant bank transfers for years now. They are trying to figure out how to get tourists into the system because locals hardly use cash anymore.

Saline9515 2y ago

This system is really subpar, because it excludes people that don't have a local bank account. I remember in Estonia not being able to book a doctor appointment because the website only had those means of payment, but no "pay with credit card" option. On the contrary, credit cards are a neutral standard, which is interoperable. It can be improved but it's vastly better than bank OAuth.

sobani 2y ago
I have trouble imagining how you'd get a credit card without a bank account.
- Jochim 2y ago
  Foreign bank account that isn't part of the scheme.