[HN Gopher] Bank transfers as a payment method
___________________________________________________________________
Bank transfers as a payment method
Author : jbredeche
Score : 342 points
Date : 2021-11-27 03:50 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bam.kalzumeus.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bam.kalzumeus.com)
| ilikerashers wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
| igammarays wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| 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-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%2...
| vickychijwani wrote:
| > 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.
|
| There's been a recent development on this front: interoperable
| mobile number payments are coming to UPI in the next few
| months. The special VPA format for it is mobile-no@mapper.npci.
|
| Ref: https://www.npci.org.in/PDF/npci/upi/circular/2021/NPCI-
| UPI-...
| vishnugupta wrote:
| 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
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Oh yeah, forgot about this! NETC is also linked closly with
| UPI now. netc.vehiclenumber@bankupihandle
| AJRF wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 1EUR 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).
| thweorui234 wrote:
| +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 wrote:
| 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).
| elric wrote:
| 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 EUR1.25). 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.
| vesinisa wrote:
| > Most banks charge a hefty fee for an instant payment (mine
| charges EUR1.25).
|
| Interesting. In my country (Finland) all banks that have joined
| the TIPS (SEPA Instant Settlement) always use it automatically
| if the destination bank supports it as well - at no extra
| charge to the account holder of course. Are you sure you are
| talking about TIPS / SCT Inst payments? Either way, your bank
| is not allowed to charge _extra_ fees for cross-border SEPA
| transfers (as compared to domestic.)
| ThrowAwayIRUK wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| So, TIPS is just one of the available clearing mechanisms
| available for the SEPA Inst scheme. (The other one is RT1,
| which is live a little bit longer)
|
| Currently, there is no "regulatory forced" interoperability
| between RT1 and TIPS, though the 4CB are discussing it. (Esp.
| since RT1 is a private clearing mechanism, while TIPS is the
| one operated by the 4CB)
|
| And, regarding fee: You are wrong - depending on the local
| jurisdiction (esp. consumer rights), a bank may for sure
| charge for processing SEPA SCT Instant messages. Over here,
| SEPA Instant transactions are around 0,50EUR - 1,00EUR,
| currently; some are also offering them for free.
|
| DISCLAIMER: Lead Payment Engineer at an European Challenger
| Bank, i'm implementing that stuff in the backend, i'm mainly
| talking to our central bank.
| AnssiH wrote:
| > And, regarding fee: You are wrong - depending on the
| local jurisdiction (esp. consumer rights), a bank may for
| sure charge for processing SEPA SCT Instant messages.
|
| They didn't say that banks cannot charge for SCT Instant.
|
| They said that banks can't charge more for international
| than they do for domestic.
| ThrowAwayIRUK wrote:
| Then, your "universal sentence" is not matching, since
| you didn't mention the transfer way:
|
| for sure i can charge you more for a SWIFT or T2 EU-
| transaction than i do for a SEPA EU-transaction.
| sofixa wrote:
| Yep. Entirely depends on the bank - in France neobanks ( e.g.
| Boursorama, Aumax, Fortuneo, N26 ) have them for free, while
| old banks usually charge you a small fee.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Huh. N26 in Germany charges me for instant payments.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| Boursorama and Fortuneo aren't neobanks ;)
| sofixa wrote:
| Kind of. They're newer than the old classical ones, and
| don't have a physical retail network. Everything is done
| via a website or app.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| It depends on your bank. My Austrian bank charges a
| ridiculous fee of 8EUR for an instant SEPA transfer.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| The only very high fraud rate I ever hear about are credit
| cards. And that happens because Visacard just washes their
| hands from it leaving merchants holding the bag.
|
| With SEPA payments fraud would cost the banks money so any
| company abusing it would be blacklisted.
| zimbatm wrote:
| And with 2.0 banks like Monzo, the account holder gets notified
| of the Direct Debit setup, how much is likely to be debited,
| and can easily cancel it from the app. That reduces the risk of
| fraud quite a lot.
|
| In exchange, it saves a lot of time both for the customer and
| utility provider as the risks of mistakes are reduced
| considerably. Invoices get paid on time.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| With HSBC it's the same, with the added security of a TUN
| code that is generated with a physical token for bank
| transfers.
|
| That said canceling a direct debit on your end even if it's
| fraudulent isn't something you should do as it can wreck your
| credit score in the UK since you'll be in debt and depending
| on the account it can show up as a missed payment immediately
| even before it going to debt collector/judgement.
|
| If there is a fraudulent transaction you have to contact the
| bank and file a claim.
| sildur wrote:
| Revolut offers free SEPA instant payments.
| kristianc wrote:
| Not much of this applies to the UK. Faster Payments are almost
| ubiquitous here, and Authorized Push Payment fraud is a huge
| problem.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Faster Payments is the law in the UK, normal high street
| banks have to provide Faster Payments on ordinary current
| accounts. The banks actually shipped it without a working
| backend, I don't know if they completed it afterwards but
| initially it's just trust, Alice's bank tells Bob's bank she
| sent Bob PS100 and Bob's bank do the database update and
| trust Alice's bank is good for the money later.
|
| Push Payment fraud presumably subsided enormously after they
| changed the rules so it's interactive. Now you provide
| account number and name, the banks algorithmically decide if
| the name you provided is correct and if not tell the sender
| there is a problem. So push fraudsters need a fake account
| name and that's harder. Passing KYC checks for some random
| mule is do-able but good luck persuading the bank your name
| is Big Corp Electricity so that the push fraud works.
| leokennis wrote:
| In The Netherlands, over 90% of all domestic payments initiated
| by "regular people" are SEPA Instant Payments, meaning booked
| on the other persons account no matter their bank within 5
| seconds.
|
| They're free to send and receive.
|
| Source: I worked on implementing Instant Payments at the
| biggest Dutch bank.
| sofixa wrote:
| It's even worse than that in terms of correctness, because the
| author confuses the EU ( economic and political bloc), Europe (
| the continent) and the eurozone ( countries in a monetary union
| with the single currency, euro). SEPA is a thing for euro-
| denominated transfers in the EU and some extra countries ( UK,
| Norway, etc.).
|
| Belarus, a country in Europe, but outside the EU and eurozone,
| aren't in SEPA . Romania, inside the EU but not in the
| eurozone, are in SEPA. Montenegro are outside of the EU and
| eurozone, use the euro, but aren't in SEPA.
| pell wrote:
| The stories of the Euro as the main currency in Montenegro
| and Kosovo (which both don't belong to the Eurozone) are very
| interesting:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montenegro_and_the_euro
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_and_the_euro
| t0mas88 wrote:
| The fee on instant transactions is really country specific.
| Netherlands doesn't have fees and banks automatically pick the
| instant option if available. I've heard similar things from for
| example the nordics.
| [deleted]
| jkirsteins wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowAwayIRUK wrote:
| SEPA has 4 message types, currently:
|
| - PUSH: - SCT Standard - SCT Instant
|
| - PULL: - SDD Core - SDD B2B
|
| As a bank, you are not forced to support all of them; also,
| it depends on the local consumer behaviour: in some
| countries, pull mechanisms are not that widely accepted
|
| DISCLAIMER: Lead Payment Engineer at an European Challenger
| Bank, i'm implementing that stuff in the backend, i'm mainly
| talking to our central bank.
| AnssiH wrote:
| > I'm not sure if banks can turn this feature off, or if it
| just culturally never gained traction.
|
| Yes, the accounts in my bank (in Finland) default to SEPA
| Direct Debit off.
|
| For recurring utility payments etc. we instead use Finvoice
| e-invoicing (https://www.finanssiala.fi/en/topics/finvoice-
| standard/). The customer enables e-invoices on a per-issuer
| basis directly from their bank web interface, with an option
| for auto-pay and payment limits. The payments are processed
| as regular SEPA payments. The e-invoice goes directly to
| customer's bank, replacing paper/e-mail invoices.
|
| For paying one-time online purchases the user is redirected
| to their bank to authorize a one-time SEPA transfer (other
| non-SEPA payment methods like cards and MobilePay are common,
| too).
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _if banks can turn this feature off_
|
| You have to demand it. (Some of them will propose their
| solution.)
|
| > _if it just culturally never gained traction._
|
| Very few people have read the PSD2 directive. (This friend of
| mine met a bank consultant who mixed it with a gaming
| console.)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, lol, I remember when SEPA pull first came around
| about half a decade ago, and how many months later, I had
| to explain to my own bank how they were supposed to give me
| whitelist and/or blacklist options for the pullers. They
| claimed never have heard about it, while that directive was
| only a couple of pages long and readable by someone that
| didn't knew about any technical banking details !
| brnt wrote:
| If you like pull transfers, try the Netherlands. I was
| surprised at the low number of businesses offering it in
| France. In the NL, with nearly every recurring payment,
| including government, they are almost always the only way to
| pay: setting them up with an accord to direct debit your
| account.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Government payments in the Netherlands can be done in
| installments using direct payments, but the direct debit
| ones are the easiest and that is why many people use them.
| Far less chance of missing a payment. But if you want to do
| it yourself for every payment you can. Better not miss any
| though.
| brnt wrote:
| _If_ you get your salary on/before the 25th. Because
| changing the invoice date is almost never possible, and
| government agencies are even explicit about that.
| jacquesm wrote:
| If you live that close to zero you have other problems. I
| would highly recommend reviewing your finances in great
| detail to figure out how you are going to create a small
| buffer.
| brnt wrote:
| Or, you know, your employer doesn't pay you the 25th.
|
| But explaining anything outside of the typically Dutch
| circumstances is an unfortunate part of life for the not
| typically Dutch in the Netherlands. Its a deeply cultural
| thing, this extreme hang towards conformation to a
| defacto 'normal'.
|
| FYI: millions of Dutch have these kinds of problems. Look
| up the working poor, its a big group there. IMHO all
| native Dutch should be forced a few weeks internship with
| a budget council service, there are so many incorrect
| preconceptions about poverty. Including who it hits,
| which definitely includes people who thought they could
| never possibly be hit, did their finances right, etc.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I do but I still don't like having large changes in my
| "live" account. So I have an agreement with my landlord
| that I only pay around the 8th, _after_ all the money
| came in. (Via programmed to repeat SEPA push, have to
| remember to change it every spring when the rent
| increases.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| SEPA 'pull', aka merchant initiated transfers require a one
| time authorization, repeat debits require a one time
| authorization for the first payment and can be re-run
| afterwards (used for subscriptions), and can be revoked up to
| 90 days after the payment was done.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Were old transactions grandfathered in, or did Germany
| implement the laws differently? Because I never had to do
| any authorization besides checking a box that I allow them
| to debit my account (either on paper or online). All my
| existing ones predate PSD2, though.
| grncdr wrote:
| I'm fairly certain that SEPA mandate identifiers for
| recurring direct debits existed for years before PSD2.
| the way it works from the merchant perspective is you
| include the mandate identifier and a "type" to indicate
| if this is a first/recurring debit. The merchant only
| finds out about any problems some days (or months) later.
|
| How your bank presents (or doesn't present) a new SEPA
| mandate to you for approval is up to them. I'd guess that
| at least some of them never show you anything, and assume
| that you will notice and revoke the payment if it was
| unexpected or fraudulent.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Neither Postbank, N26, nor the 2 Sparkasse branches I've
| been a customer of ever showed me anything for approval,
| so I guess it's not very common.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _a one time authorization_
|
| Yes, but how well defined, or how loose, is that
| "authorization"?
| elric wrote:
| The account owner can control the frequency and the
| maximum amount per period. It's not the case that some
| random entity can just grab all your money.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _The account owner can control_
|
| Unfortunately, that depends on the implementation of
| security the bank adopted. I assume you are mentioning a
| detail in the PSD2 directive. The banks, especially after
| national legislation following the directive, may adapt
| but not overlap it.
|
| Take as an example the rule in the directive, that NFC
| based payments should require PIN based confirmation
| every five transactions: not all banks implemented this.
| jacquesm wrote:
| With my bank that requires me to use a device they sent
| me (a hardware token), my bank card, my pin and a
| secondary authorization where I use the hardware token to
| process a challenge and then type in the response.
| ErrantX wrote:
| Pretty good now; the legislation mandates multi-factor
| authentication by the issuing bank. So customer has to
| prove presence directly with their bank to authorise the
| payment.
|
| There is also dynamic linking (ie you are shown the
| amount but also a unique code that the payment requestor
| also showed you) so you are confident it is the same
| transaction.
| narag wrote:
| _In fact it is so cumbersome, that I prefer to pay for many
| services by credit card every month)_
|
| Phone and the gym are the only services that I do _not_ pay
| by card, but not even by my choosing. Netflix gave me no
| option. Utilities are bulk included with the rent (transfer)
| so yeah, just those two.
|
| Oh and I know the card number and codes by heart in case I
| need to buy anything. Verification is done by SMS.
| [deleted]
| grncdr wrote:
| > Given that these direct debit agreements are revokable at any
| point in time, I doubt the claims of very high fraud rate.
|
| I think the claim is that because SEPA direct debits can be
| revoked within a very long window after settlement, it's more
| common that payments are revoked after goods/services have been
| provided (leaving businesses holding the bag). Whether this
| fits the precise definition of fraud I'm not sure, the payment
| _was_ valid and successful, but later reversed. It would be a
| more interesting claim if there were some empirical comparisons
| included, but it certainly matches my experience.
|
| Edited to add: another common form of fraud is somebody
| providing legitimate bank details of an unwitting victim. At
| least for some banks in Germany, the bank does not actually
| enforce authorisation from the account holder when a new direct
| debit mandate is introduced. The fraudster receives
| goods/services for free as long as the victim doesn't notice
| the charges.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| And here is a life pro tip: if you struggle to get end a
| contract, even though you are right. Just tell them you will
| talk to the bank and remove the mandate for sepa from your
| account. Doing this isn't an issue. But, if it happens to
| often, it will rise a fraud flag at the bank, firms usually try
| to avoid that :)
|
| Did that two times already. They act real quick, out of a
| sudden :)
| MilaM wrote:
| Because the rules governing SEPA Direct Debits are very
| consumer friendly, it might be somewhat risky for businesses to
| use this payment method. To keep fraud at check as a creditor,
| you have to do some due diligence like checking credit scores
| or know your customer very well.
|
| From the consumers perspective though, at least where I live,
| direct debit is regarded as a secure and convenient method for
| recurring payments. A consumer can revoke a fraudulent payment
| within 8 weeks. It's as easy as clicking a button in your
| online banking. If the counterparty can not prove that it was
| explicitly authorized by the consumer to make SEPA Direct
| Debits, the payment can be revoked for up to 13 months.
| ThrowAwayIRUK wrote:
| SEPA SDD Core has one big advantage for (trustworthy)
| customers of a merchant:
|
| it's fucking cheap for the merchant :-)
|
| and with cheap, i mean, reeeeeaaalllyyyy cheap (well,
| depending on your PSP/etc.)
|
| for a bank, the "purchasing costs" per one SEPA SDD at your
| central bank is in the fractions of the fractions of a cent.
| (you can check the rates on your local central bank website)
| ThrowAwayIRUK wrote:
| Not really:
|
| SEPA has several message types:
|
| - SCT Standard is a push - SCT Inst is a push - SDD Core is a
| pull - SDD B2B is a pull
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I'd have to agree. Everything in the article about Europe is
| technically correct, but it is such a small slice of the SEPA
| payments. The article is so misleading it might as well be
| wrong.
|
| I make payments to the benelux, france, germany, spain and
| poland, and they go all over the push mechanism. Direct debit
| is for utilities, and that's about it.
|
| For fraud, my bank provides a gui with active agreements. While
| I can't cancel an agreement there, I can set a maximum
| frequency and amount. I put them at once per year max 0.0001
| Euro until they get removed.
|
| Non recurring payments over direct debit (Or even worse Clarna)
| is an instant no. I take another payment method. If grabbing
| money from my bank without my control is the only option,
| that's a red flag. I consider the company sleazy enough to go
| find a competitor, even if it raises the cost.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| My bank in Norway (SBanken, formerly Skandia Bank) allows me
| to specify a maximum amount that any creditor can ask for per
| month when using the equivalent of direct debits (and I also
| get notified in advance of every payment so that I can cancel
| either the individual payment or the whole agreement if I
| wish. This is all done via the web or app and takes effect
| immediately, no need to ask anyone at the bank to do
| anything. Here it is called AvtaleGiro.
| kentrf wrote:
| <<AvtaleGiro>> is such a time saver. Utilities,
| electricity, internet, road tax, insurance and almost all
| kinds of recurring payments happens automatically and
| electronically.
| [deleted]
| l33tman wrote:
| Klarna has been aggressive in trying to push consumers into
| acknowledging Klarna to pull from their accounts lately.
| People are used to Klarna here (Sweden), with their "pay on
| invoice in 14 days for no additional fee" since long, but now
| they're trying to leverage that into getting customers setup
| with their bank accounts. Of course they are not going to use
| this to explicitly steal from customers but still you wonder
| what can go wrong giving other entities this access..
| Findecanor wrote:
| I would not trust Klarna for anything.
|
| Klarna's use of dark patterns on the web for leading people
| into debt over choosing other payment methods has been
| outlawed in Sweden, but I've read that they have continued
| doing it in other countries.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Quite frankly the practice of requiring bank credentials
| from consumers should be entirely banned via some laws.
| It pries on gullible people.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Direct debit is for utilities, and that 's about it._
|
| I think the only party that can draw money directly from my
| bank account is my bank itself for my mortgage. For
| everything else, I have e-invoices, where the invoice comes
| directly to my bank account, so I receive a paper invoice
| maybe once a year from somewhere. And for e-invoices I can
| just set auto-accept limits, so any phone bill that is less
| than 10EUR will get automatically accepted and for any phone
| bills greater than 10EUR, I need to manually accept it on my
| bank's website/app.
|
| Actually, I have SEPA Direct Debit disabled on my bank
| account settings now that I checked it, so I guess I've never
| used it. I guess my bank just has direct access anyways for
| mortgage payments.
| ThrowAwayIRUK wrote:
| Not correct:
|
| SEPA SDD Core + SDD B2B are working crossborder; though
| you're right that these are not deployed regularly/seldom.
|
| DISCLAIMER: Lead Payment Engineer at an European Challenger
| Bank, i'm implementing that stuff in the backend, i'm mainly
| talking to our central bank.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > Direct debit is for utilities, and that's about it.
|
| Here in Germany, bigger online stores offered it as well. I
| used to use it for Amazon several years ago.
| odiroot wrote:
| > I make payments to the benelux, france, germany, spain and
| poland, and they go all over the push mechanism. Direct debit
| is for utilities, and that's about it.
|
| SEPA direct debit is a really really popular thing in
| Germany. Most utilities prefer (quite understandably) to pull
| from you instead of waiting for your transfer. Even landlords
| usually give you an agreement form to pull your rent out of
| your account.
|
| I got used to that and recently tried to use a Polish bank
| account to pay on Amazon and surprisingly it didn't work.
| Amazon has sent me an automated email with a demand for a
| (push) transfer, sadly with added fee for the trouble.
|
| Most people in Poland actually do transfers manually, direct
| debit is not really a thing. On the other hand there's this
| BLIK thing for instant transfers, even across banks.
| sc11 wrote:
| > SEPA direct debit is a really really popular thing in
| Germany. Most utilities prefer (quite understandably) to
| pull from you instead of waiting for your transfer. Even
| landlords usually give you an agreement form to pull your
| rent out of your account.
|
| Landlords benefit from it because it makes it harder for
| your to lower your rent in case there are issues with the
| place that warrant it. If they can withdraw the rent
| directly, you'd have to undo that payment, pay the lowered
| amount manually etc. which makes it more hassle for you and
| also increases the risk of screwing up.
| dtech wrote:
| I'm not sure how it's with other banks, but on both my NL
| banks revoking the permission is 2 clicks away. If there
| is an issue that escalates to the need to partially
| withhold payment, that is the least of your hurdles in NL
| since you need to get permission from an independent
| government commission.
| ThrowAwayIRUK wrote:
| Not exactly:
|
| You could sign a contract with your landlord, then revoke
| the so called "SEPA mandate" afterwards and you can
| forcibly switch to "manual payment" each month, since the
| SEPA mandate is not necessarily required or a "legally-
| necessary intrinsic component of the contract" (check for
| example: https://deutschesmietrecht.de/mietvertrag/662-mi
| etzahlung-ei... )
|
| Tough, depends on which type of relation you want to have
| to your landlord ;-)
| sc11 wrote:
| True, that works as well.
|
| Either way as a tenant it's best to do manual payments
| (even if they're automated on your end) each month so
| that lowering rent, if necessary, is straightforward.
| miki123211 wrote:
| I find Blik to be one of the best payment methods ever
| invented.
|
| It gives you a one-time-use 6-digit code that is valid for
| no more than two minutes. When the code is given to a
| merchant, either on line or in person, you get a popup with
| the amount and merchant name which you need to manually
| approve. You can give that code out over the phone to a
| family member who's currently at the store buying things
| for you, or to a child who's trying to get something for
| themselves. This is extremely convenient while still being
| secure, and it allows for secure payments on shared,
| malware-infested computers.
|
| Some online services also give you the option to remember
| your device for future use. If you decide to do so, you
| will get a notification the next time you're trying to pay
| there, which you still need to approve. This is more
| convenient than typing in a code, while still being as
| secure.
|
| This system is pretty resistant to fraud (you always need
| to approve the amount in your banking app), while allowing
| for irreversible payments, which merchants like.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| There are also some third parties which utilize the fact
| that transfers within the same bank are instant - they have
| bank accounts in all of those and a settlement system built
| on top of that. You transfer the money to them, and then
| they send a transfer directly from the bank of recipient.
| It's nearly instant, but has some limits to it (several
| thousand euros).
|
| In fact it's quite jarring when you have companies try to
| do something in Polish market and they don't do basic
| research into payment methods.
|
| Take for example Luxxotica - I was buying some glasses as a
| gift yesterday, and they support two payment methods:
|
| - card payment
|
| - PayPal
|
| Paypal hasn't been popular for years with all the other
| alternatives, and many people are wary of using cards to
| buy goods over the internet. In fact my card payment was
| blocked (which essentially never happens in any other
| methods) and I went to buy the glasses physically at a
| reseller.
| realityking wrote:
| > I got used to that and recently tried to use a Polish
| bank account to pay on Amazon and surprisingly it didn't
| work. Amazon has sent me an automated email with a demand
| for a (push) transfer, sadly with added fee for the
| trouble.
|
| That might be a function of Poland not being in the euro
| zone. AFAIK SEPA Direct Debit is only for transfers in
| Euro. Even if you tried to use a Euro bank account in
| Poland, either your bank or Amazon might not have bothered
| to implement it.
| odiroot wrote:
| Yep, I did use an EUR account. You may be right about the
| lack of proper implementation.
| antaviana wrote:
| Did you have Marketplace charges? These are USD only.
|
| When they launched the SEPA direct debit option a couple
| years ago I tried it and the debit bounced back.
|
| Eventually I did not have the need for marketplace
| instances anymore, then I tried it again and it worked.
| riedel wrote:
| From what I know there is also a different reason for the
| weirdnesses in Germany. Banks actually charged quite a lot
| for online transactions from your bank card. German shops
| are very cost sensitive here (why in many some time ago in
| most places you could not pay with credit card). So what
| they do is they use an intermediate that collects all those
| signed mandates. It even worked fully offline like with
| credit cards in the old days. It is crazy if you try to
| read the terms and conditions on a standard supermarket
| bill.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Fully agree. In Germany we have a widely used push mechanism
| (giropay) where you approve the online payment using an app
| or a dedicated hardware device. It's instant, free for buyer
| and seller, push, and requires explicit consent for each
| transfer from the buyer.
|
| It's supported by all major electronics stores. The only
| exception is Amazon who will do a SEPA pull instead. But
| there the bank grants you 6 weeks to cancel the deduction if
| you want to.
| ThrowAwayIRUK wrote:
| Not correct:
|
| Giropay does in fact include fees, though these are usually
| covered by the seller. (check for example:
| https://www.unternehmerportal.info/giropay/)
|
| DISCLAIMER: Lead Payment Engineer at an European Challenger
| Bank, i'm implementing that stuff in the backend, i'm
| mainly talking to our central bank.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised. I've been using it as the seller
| with a Deutsche Bank business account for a few years now
| and I never paid any per-transaction fees.
| xioxox wrote:
| Interestingly, some of the in-person debit card payments I
| make from my German bank appear to work internally as direct
| debits. They appear as "SEPA-ELV-LASTSCHRIFT" on statement.
| Other card payments are just called "KARTENZAHLUNG".
| Interestingly, the Lastschrift (direct debit) payments seem
| reversible on my bank interface, so I could get the money
| back (presumably invoking letters from the company and debt
| collectors).
| ThrowAwayIRUK wrote:
| Depends on which card you have used and which scheme was
| used to process;
|
| In general, "double scheme cards" (MC + Maestro on one
| card) should offer you the option to choose, while at the
| POS, which scheme should be used; the thing is, the
| merchant is not required to offer you this question, and
| there is a "default scheme" on such cards. This means, in
| cases the merchant does not ask you, the default scheme is
| chosen, which is usually the one that brings in more fees
| for the bank/PSP.
|
| And: Depending on the contract between you and your bank,
| it maybe that you couldn't revoke the "lastschrift", yes.
| amaccuish wrote:
| When using the girocard there's two ways the retailer can
| take the amount. Either instantly, or using Lastschrift.
| The latter is cheaper, but the retailer doesn't have the
| guarantee that your account actually has sufficient balance
| to pay. If I remember correctly, the latter method requires
| you to sign the receipt.
| ThrowAwayIRUK wrote:
| Actually, in the first case, its not instantly take,
| instead it is marked as a "abgesicherte laschrift", which
| is equivalent to enter card+PIN, meaning you can't revoke
| those. Though, sure you can, but it will end up with nice
| discussions with your bank :)
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Yeah, that's where the fun algorithms trying to predict
| reliability from the set of products you're buying comes
| in...
|
| It's getting rarer, though. The cost difference is
| eroding and signing is too slow for supermarket checkout
| lanes.
|
| The tables have also turned and some retailers now earn
| money from the banks for supplying their customers with
| cash (i. e. you pay by card and get an extra x00 in
| cash).
| neom wrote:
| Cazy how civilized the Canadian system is. You can whip open
| your banking app, enter the email of anyone with a Canadian
| bank account, link is generated, money is instintly deposited.
| People basically use this for everything except regular debt
| purchases (and even then, in instances that you forget your
| wallet, non-chain stores will usually let you etransfer
| someone). It's how I pay rent etc. No fees. It's been like this
| for ~15 years
| OJFord wrote:
| So instead of 'which number do you want me to send your money
| to' it's 'which email address do you want me to send your
| money to'? Great?
| moberley wrote:
| The recipient token can also be a phone number capable of
| receiving a text message.
| OJFord wrote:
| Sure fine, to be clear I meant bank account number -
| using an email address (or phone number) isn't clearly
| better to me (I think it's worse?) in any way, that's
| all.
| neom wrote:
| Don't you need more than just an account number? Either
| way yes, it's a lot easier to put someones email address
| into a box and a number and hit send. I'd love to know
| who you bank with that you can just give an account
| number, no name etc and have the money move, in my 30
| years of banking (Scotland, Canada, USA) I've never heard
| of that.
| ThrowAwayIRUK wrote:
| >> ..In most countries, payments within the same bank have been
| instant (and free).. <<
|
| Which is quite simple: First, its internaly only an exchange of
| liabilites in your balanace sheet.
|
| Second, it does not involve any outgoing gateways/interfaces.
|
| Third, if you are using a SaaS-corebanking-solution, those
| types of transactions are usually excluded in your contract.
|
| From that perspective, it is absolutely useful.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Also, in the case of push, depending on the bank it might take
| two business days for the target account to be added as a push
| option.
|
| (So that you have time to notice that someone has breached your
| account and stop them from emptying your accounts ?)
| ErrantX wrote:
| 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/
|
| 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.
| ErrantX wrote:
| Follow up; I've looked into UPI a bit more.
|
| It's... Interesting.
|
| I think it's basically solving a very widespread and local use
| case - which is very low value transactions which are normally
| done in cash. The AVG value of transactions look to be around
| $2.
|
| Anything of reasonable value (say $10 still tends to be card-
| based. This makes sense; fees on cards make anything under $5
| cost ineffective, plus you need relatively (to the margin)
| costly hardware. Margin-based street sellers like those in
| India can't afford the overhead.
|
| Looking at the implementation; it's interesting there is very
| little shared about fraud (I couldn't find any specific numbers
| but based on lots of articles it seems widespread).
|
| Low financial literacy coupled with a system that encourages
| you to enter your PIN in various interfaces probably makes this
| something you wouldn't allow high value transactions. Hence the
| continued dominance of card networks.
|
| If is neat though, although it feels like it's quite a local
| use case.
| anticristi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| fredkelly wrote:
| exactly. A2A payments are already here in the UK with Open
| Banking rails and VRP/Sweeping coming in the next year (or so).
| ErrantX wrote:
| Post Brexit implementation of VRP has been "fun" but I am
| pleased to see it nearly there!
| markdog12 wrote:
| Surprised Canada's Interac system was omitted from this post.
| quelltext wrote:
| > 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
|
| > 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.
| otar wrote:
| 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.
| m_km wrote:
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| cbg0 wrote:
| 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.
| ericcholis wrote:
| 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.
| justincormack wrote:
| Thats because the EU regulates fees.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| 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
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
| krinchan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| krinchan wrote:
| Yeah it's pretty inconsistent. I can request money
| through USAA but my barber's bank doesn't let him
| request, so he does the whole "Send $1" dance.
| baby wrote:
| 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.
| mrb wrote:
| The biggest problem with Zelle is the low limits. I cannot
| send more than $2500/month. One time I paid a contractor
| about this amount, and then, well, I couldn't use it for a
| WHOLE month until the limit reset itself...
|
| Very, very annoying. One of the many reasons I prefer
| crypto currencies. No one restricts me about what I can do
| with my money
| Symbiote wrote:
| For what it's worth, the limit on MobilePay in Denmark is
| 15,000DKK/day, $2300.
|
| Through the website, transfers with similar speed are
| limited to 1,000,000DKK a day ($150k).
|
| In person (showing identification at the bank) I don't
| think there's a limit.
|
| You will note the restrictions apply also to anyone who
| has successfully stolen your credentials, or is holding
| you at gunpoint, etc.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why not a stablecoin with lower fees?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Because you should be skeptical about their claims about
| being backed by real money.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| Ekaros wrote:
| How do stablecoins make money? That is how do they pay
| for everything they do? It either has to be fees or some
| sort of investment. And investments can always crash,
| thus resulting loss of money...
| yokem55 wrote:
| Circle makes money on the yield they get from the
| treasury bills they hold. If US treasury bills crash, the
| stability of USDC will be the least of our worries.
| yashg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 1. India is a single country, cryptocurrencies are global
|
| 2. Nobody uses proof of work anymore (besides bitcoin)
| purple_turtle wrote:
| > 2. Nobody uses proof of work anymore (besides bitcoin)
|
| And Ethereum and...
| Silhouette wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This seems out of touch with modern offerings e.g. wise.com.
| Easier than PayPal with none of the crazy bank transfer fees.
| blntechie wrote:
| Wise is too slow (especially for transactions involving the
| US) and still expensive.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Wise fees are still too high for international transfers.
| They are doing currency arbitrage to sweeten the deal they
| get.
| rasz wrote:
| US? Bank transfers are couple clicks with zero fees in most
| of Europe.
| bserge wrote:
| *EU, that's the point. Outside SEPA, people still use
| SWIFT.
| known wrote:
| Payment method need an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escrow to
| scale
| yyyk wrote:
| >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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| > 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.
| alkonaut wrote:
| 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.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| 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.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Sweden. And anything. The same seems to be the case when
| buying from other Nordic retailers.
| SonicTheSith wrote:
| 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.
| config_yml wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| homelessgolden wrote:
| 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.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| 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.
| rognjen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| spir wrote:
| 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
| DenseComet wrote:
| - Customer UX: This really isn't as straightforward as you put
| it. The main issue for customers is that if they loose their
| wallet, they loose everything. This has to be accounted as part
| of UX, even making transactions is simple and straightforward.
|
| - Settlement/Certainty time: Blockchains combine these into
| one. They depends heavily on the specific chain. For some
| networks, its basically instant. Eth seems to be around a
| minute or so. Bitcoin is around 60 minutes.
|
| - Reversibility: Agreed, although whether this is good or bad
| depends on the user.
|
| I like the way it was said in the article, these are all axes
| of comparison. Consumers choose products based on a set of
| criteria. For many, irreversibility or the risk of loosing
| everything due to a lost wallet is a dealbreaker, even if
| transfers may be much faster than other methods.
| baby wrote:
| > Customer UX: This really isn't as straightforward as you
| put it. The main issue for customers is that if they loose
| their wallet, they loose everything. This has to be accounted
| as part of UX, even making transactions is simple and
| straightforward.
|
| At scale people will want to use custodians for large amounts
| of money. So basically banks will always be a thing. Only the
| backbone is changing.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Just to be clear for anyone not familiar with the space, poster
| is describing the bright future of tomorrow, not the difficult
| reality of today. So _right now_ an ETH withdrawal on Binance
| costs ~ $20.
|
| A lot of people have expressed the sentiment that "the GAS
| price is too damn high". It is so high that interacting with
| "useful" stuff like swap contracts or liquidity pools costs $50
| - $100 per shot and lots of interesting use cases are shut out
| because network fees render them uneconomic. It is sort of a
| burning problem that leaves the ETH of today as a network
| mainly for purists and whales.
|
| I agree with parent that long term the future looks much
| brighter.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| > - 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
|
| Reduce, not eliminate. Maybe, maybe it would stop having
| additional negative over regular money transfers but
| "completely eliminate" requires magic (negating effects with
| credible offsets is viable).
| anchpop wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Tepix wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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=29041030
| dang wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ah, so it's marketing then. Got it.
| patio11 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a good one!
| ic4l wrote:
| In Thailand most in person transactions are done by bank transfer
| via QR code:
|
| 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.
| kalleboo wrote:
| 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)
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Mobile_Payment_System...
| joshuaissac wrote:
| 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
| noisy_boy wrote:
| PayNow in Singapore: https://www.abs.org.sg/consumer-
| banking/pay-now
| Symbiote wrote:
| Not just casual payments.
|
| I bought concert tickets last week, for almost 1000DKK
| (130EUR). I'd already entered my phone number, so paying by
| MobilePay was faster and easier. I usually use this if I have
| the option.
|
| To use it, I pressed the MobilePay button on the website,
| pressed continue since my phone number is already present and
| correct. I unlocked my phone, and there was a notification
| waiting for me, with the amount and recipient stated.
| Fingerprint and swipe to approve.
|
| I didn't need to type in any card details, or authenticate
| within the web browser. A 1000kr debit or credit card purchase
| would require me to enter my 20+ digit bank password, then do a
| similar process to unlock the phone for 2FA.
| Aaronmacaron wrote:
| Yes. In Switzerland it's Twint. It's easy to use, instant and
| free for the user. It started out as an easy way to move small
| amounts of money around among family and friends without the
| hassle of doing a bank transfer. Now large grocery stores and
| online shops support it too. I don't see it overtaking the
| whole payment market because of the exclusivity to Switzerland.
| It'd be great if something like Twint would exist but usable
| and prevalent all over the world.
| jagrsw wrote:
| > free for the user
|
| Overall it's not free, the receiving party will still pay the
| fee (so, probably not that different from Debit/Credit Cards
| for merchants), and shops might increase the price
| preemptively to account for that.
|
| See this drama for more:
| https://www.twint.ch/en/press/digitec-galaxus-spreading-
| fals...
|
| PS: However, it's probably free for user2user payments, using
| phone no as identifiers. And it's useful to settle lunch
| debts among friends. I guess they (banks) want users to
| install twint apps for that, make it then easy to pay at
| businesses.
| mderazon wrote:
| MBWay in Portugal https://www.multibanco.pt/operacoes/mb-way/
| alexott wrote:
| MobilePay in Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobilePay
| fogihujy wrote:
| Also in Finland.
| Hamuko wrote:
| There's also Siirto to some extent. It doesn't work with
| all banks, but I think that the banks that are part of it
| are like 70% of the personal banking market share.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Tikkies are the Dutch equivalent.
|
| https://dutchreview.com/expat/tikkie-netherlands/
| fbrncci wrote:
| It's pretty great. These transfers sometimes arrive within
| <1s. The speed and ease of use is something that
| cryptocurrencies are "trying" to "solve" (Among other
| things). Most aren't aware of the wide adoption here already,
| of course there are other aspects crypto's score better on.
| But if all bank transfers would be a Tikkie, then what would
| Crypto's, in terms of ease of use and speed have to offer?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Nothing, those were never claimed as cryptocurrency
| strenghts, the opposite in fact, were accepted as
| weaknesses that were still worth it considering the other
| benefits.
| zoover2020 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jacekm wrote:
| In Poland we have "Blik" [1]. It's immensely popular here,
| especially for online transactions and p2p transfers. Recently
| it started expansion to physical stores too. Seems to be quite
| similar to Swish.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik_(payment)
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Swish works for person to person transactions, physical store
| payments, and I've also seen some companies starting to use
| it for monthly bill payments (ie, send out a paper with qr
| code, user scan it with app and signs it, and bill is paid).
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| Vipps is the Norwegian equivalent, I guess...? [1]
|
| [1] https://vipps.no/
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Vipps in Norway. https://vipps.no/
| bighead777 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Any details?
| Taniwha wrote:
| Here in New Zealand we've ditched checks as a payment method,
| bank transfers have been the norm for paying bills for years now.
| manmal wrote:
| 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?
| hjtkfkfmr wrote:
| According to article there is a huge amount of SEPA fraud going
| around because seller receives you banking details.
| Unauthorized direct debit maybe?
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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).
| riffraff wrote:
| 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.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| The article misrepresents how direct debit works. Just having
| your bank details is absolutely not enough to initiate a
| transfer: the user must confirm it by issuing so called
| direct debit mandate. This mandate usually has a limit on the
| amount, and can be revoked at any time. Also, the business
| faces penalties for repeated failed transfers.
| pjerem wrote:
| The point is that SEPA direct debits are revokable. And by
| revokable, I mean they are revokable up to 13 months after a
| transaction. How easily it is depends on your bank : on some
| banks you need to send a paper letter, on one of my banks,
| you need to contact the customer service, on the other,
| reversing a SEPA debit can be done with a simple button on my
| web interface.
|
| SEPA push, whose are, by definition, manual actions from
| yourself via the web interface of your bank are not
| reversible. But that's probably not the most frictionless
| method so it's rarely used other than people to people
| transactions, between your own bank accounts, or for really
| big purchases like buying a car.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I pay all my bills with push method. Thankfully most of
| them appear as digital bills in my bank so I just get list
| and accept them if they look about right. I would never set
| up direct debit. I don't trust anyone enough for that.
| raverbashing wrote:
| SEPA goes both ways, as opposed to what the article says
|
| It goes in the "direct debt" way as described, so your
| electricity or broadband supplier can charge you every month
| automatically
|
| But you can also "push" a payment to someone else (or yourself,
| of course)
|
| Not sure about fraud, from what I know, everyone that does a
| direct debt has an identifier that can be revoked in case of
| fraud. So it can happen, but there are ways to block fraudulent
| chargers.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ThrowAwayIRUK wrote:
| Leading Payment Engineer of one the most aggressive challenger
| banks in EU here:
|
| - first, SEPA has several message types
|
| - SEPA SCT: A standard transfer, usually settled the next day -
| SEPA SCT Inst: a realtime transfer, to be settled within 10
| seconds max (check rulebook on ECB website) - SEPA SDD Core:
| Direct debit, this can be used to pay your utility bills e.g.;
| though you can revert this one up to a couple of month - SEPA
| SDD B2B: Direct debit for businesses, this one can't be
| reverted as you gave an explicitly signed permission to execute
| those (this one is used between businesses)
|
| So, my idea here would be that COINBASE is supporting/using a
| partnerbank/PSP which allows SEPA SCT Instant.
|
| Regarding fraud: - if one gets aware of your IBAN, the other
| party can try to pull an SDD, thats right. But: you can claim
| this one at your bank and you will be refunded immediately.
| (with SEPA SDD B2B, this wouldn't be possible as you would have
| a signed a permission) Though, unless a fraudster is
| counterfeiting your signature, no one will pull a SEPA SDD B2B.
| But, sure: Check your accounts regulary.
|
| - regarding SEPA SCT Instant: To execute such transaction, you
| need to verify it by 2FA. If you give permission on your 2FA
| device, the money is send out.
|
| - what if you do a typo with SEPA SCT Instant or if someone get
| somehow around your 2FA? In this case, you could reach out to
| the other bank with a so called R-Transaction, though if a
| fraudster is aware of all this, i'm pretty sure the person is
| capable of managing the rest of the track to pull the money out
| by doing additional subsequent transfers to other banks
|
| P.S.: As far as i can see, Coinbase is not running through us,
| you may check your bank statement to see which way the money
| went ;-)
| manmal wrote:
| Thanks for this comprehensive answer!
| superzamp wrote:
| SEPA SCT Inst is really great but banks seem to be dragging
| their feet on implementing it or charge a premium for using
| it. Probably the prospect of losing their juicy payments card
| issuer transaction fees isn't super appealing.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| 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.
| louwhopley wrote:
| 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]
| zuppy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| woobar wrote:
| "Second World" was the Soviet Union and its allies. SA most
| likely was a part of the First World.
| louwhopley wrote:
| I think having a dualistic economy plays a big role in this.
| zxspectrum1982 wrote:
| 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/
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 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
| xyst wrote:
| 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)
| kalleboo wrote:
| Doesn't using cryptocurrencies just mean you have even more
| conversion fees?
|
| In the current reality where nobody else uses cryptocurrencies,
| you're going to be converting at both ends to national
| currencies (if anything at least to pay tax)
|
| Even in a hypothetic crypto utopia, there's no chance that
| we'll get one single currency to rule them all, so you're going
| to have to convert every time you pay for something (every
| market is going to have it's own currency)
| yyyk wrote:
| > transactions between entities of different currency types.
|
| Because crypto->USD doesn't have any conversion fee. Right.
|
| >Plus the added benefit of not converting your money into an
| unstable currency (ie, Turkish Lira)
|
| You mean, 'unstable' like Bitcoin, right?
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| bogota wrote:
| .. wait until you find out what cash is used for.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Banh mi?
| p2p_astroturf wrote:
| I use it for buying groceries.
| marsdepinski wrote:
| Or precious metals
| timbit42 wrote:
| Spreading cocaine dust?
| TMWNN wrote:
| >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.
|
| When trying to send about $2000 from the US to Canada earlier
| this year, I found that the cheapest and fastest method was to
| do it via BTC (and within Coinbase, so free).
| Robotbeat wrote:
| You could also just have a bank account with money denominated
| in USD or Euros or something.
| everfree wrote:
| You can have a cryptocurrency wallet with money denominated
| in USD or Euros, too (asset-backed stablecoins).
| Robotbeat wrote:
| ...which is the same thing as a bank account but not FDIC
| insured and now you have to pay cryptocurrency transaction
| fees.
| kalleboo wrote:
| 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!
| rohithkp wrote:
| 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.
| chintler wrote:
| I took a trip last month(within India) with about [?]600 cash
| and returned with [?]560, with UPI for everything from chai to
| flight tickets. It's just so frictionless.
|
| UPI was built around mobile phones, and a significant part of
| the trust comes from the KYC that was enforced from the
| beginning for mobile connections. I'm not sure how well that
| process will scale across countries and across currencies.
| Still, with the international partnerships coming up, I'm
| excited for the possibilities that are presenting in the
| payments space.
| nine_k wrote:
| I suppose that various KYC / AML checks are a significant
| obstacle to frictionless international payments; another is
| fraud protection.
|
| I bet it's seriously harder to get two countries agree on the
| lists of undesirables, and streamline e.g. court protection
| across jurisdictions.
| melony wrote:
| Will this suffer from the usual payment restrictions imposed by
| PayPal/Stripe?
| kalleboo wrote:
| VISA/MasterCard-based services suffer from US regulatory
| pressure, applying US norms across the planet. Non-US-based
| payments systems will instead have pressure from their
| respective countries. For instance they may care less about
| WikiLeaks pulling the pants down on US intelligence, but may
| be even more strict on porn.
| devnull3 wrote:
| Actually the India-Singapore link will start in 2022 [1]
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/13/india-and-singapore-to-
| lin...
| dustintrex wrote:
| 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.
| eisbaw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lubien wrote:
| 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
| soneca wrote:
| 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-mobil...
| lubien wrote:
| Dropping in https://github.com/bacen
| blntechie wrote:
| 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.
| anormaluser wrote:
| Scanning a QR code to make a payment in China is also very
| interesting.
| devnull3 wrote:
| 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
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Indeed, UPI is a culmination of several years of ground work
| laid before it (IMPS, Adhaar etc.,)
|
| Let me add one thing here though.
|
| > Low cost of payment infrastructure to the banks
|
| The cost is low primarily because it's is borne by tax payers
| [1] and the issuing banks. Issuing banks aren't too happy with
| forgoing a good chunk of their profits that they earn through
| issuing charges and also having to maintain the infrastructure
| free of cost.
|
| A new for-profit payment consortium [2] has been proposed to
| compete with NPCI. Will be interesting to see how this plays
| out.
|
| [1] https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-
| policy/mdr...
|
| [2] https://m.rbi.org.in/scripts/bs_viewcontent.aspx?Id=3832
| xyst wrote:
| I could do without #5 to be honest. Should be working towards a
| more decentralized approach.
| yashg wrote:
| 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.
| TheProbes wrote:
| Because....because.....well....because THEN I COULDN'T
| SHILL YOU A CRYPTO TOKEN. There. I said it.
| onion2k wrote:
| _It obviously costs money to banks to maintain the infra
| that makes UPI possible._
|
| Cash printing, distribution, and handling is _super_
| expensive. Replacing a big chunk of that with some servers
| and data costs would be a _huge_ win.
|
| Plus they get all that valuable data about what everyone is
| doing...
| captn3m0 wrote:
| 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-.... 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-
| competi...
|
| [1]: https://inc42.com/buzz/rbi-defers-its-plans-to-
| distribute-li...
|
| [x]: https://dea.gov.in/sites/default/files/watal_report271
| 216.pd...
| purple_turtle wrote:
| > NPCI also is pushing heavily to move from a non-profit
| to a for-profit model
|
| This is unlikely to end well.
| sumedh wrote:
| > What is so evil about a central bank?
|
| Don't know about India's central bank but US Fed plays with
| interest rates, bails out risk taking companies or their
| close friends creating moral hazard, prints money
| recklessly destroying your savings.
| yashg wrote:
| //US Fed plays with interest rates// That's what central
| banks are for. That's how they control inflation or make
| the wheels of economy moving by printing more money.
| That's literally the reason for their existence,
| controlling money supply in an economy.
| sumedh wrote:
| and by playing recklessly with interest rates, they
| inflate assets like stocks and real estate while destroy
| savings. While making these decisions they decide winners
| and losers and then privately trade stocks to get rich
| using insider information.
| johnsolo1701 wrote:
| But aren't most Americans' biggest asset their house, aka
| real estate? And their savings is their 401(k), aka the
| stock market?
| sumedh wrote:
| Does the US Fed have a some kind of official charter
| saying that they will keep on inflating assets by keeping
| interest very very low?
| victor22 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| askvictor wrote:
| 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-payme...
| seb1204 wrote:
| There is a delay of first transactions. PayID is what it it is
| called for most banks.
| laurencei wrote:
| I believe it is 24 hours for the first, then instant after
| that.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| 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.
| zizee wrote:
| FWIW what GP wrote is not true of all banks in AU. I have
| made several transfers to new payids recently and they
| have all gone through immediately.
| elyobo wrote:
| That's at the bank's discretion, rather than something
| enforced by the system.
| plantain wrote:
| 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.
| elyobo wrote:
| PayID is the service that let's you pay to a mobile / email /
| ABN, but it's not the only use - smaller value transfers to a
| standard BSB are also often instant thanks to Osko which is
| also using the New Payment Platform.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| Depending on the bank large transfers are delayed to prevent
| fraud.
| stephen_g wrote:
| I've never experienced that with any of the banks I have
| accounts with...
| stephen_g wrote:
| Also there's BPAY for bills and things which must be pretty
| cheap to vendors because it's almost always an option for any
| kind of internet/phone/utility etc. invoice and never has a
| surcharge unlike credit card payments sometimes do.
|
| I've seen it for web payments but it's not ideal because of the
| delay (usually like next business day) in processing.
| eisbaw wrote:
| 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)
| Symbiote wrote:
| https://developers.danskebank.com/ though "Requires a
| QWAC+QSEAL issued by a QTSP".
|
| (Does any bank anywhere have a truly public API?)
| [deleted]
| avianlyric wrote:
| https://truelayer.com/
|
| https://developers.monzo.com/
| rambambram wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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.)
| kuschku wrote:
| Most banking apps support SEPA QR codes as well, specifying a
| receiver, amount, and subject line. Which makes payment super
| easy.
|
| If I'm sharing a bill with friends, I'll just generate the QR
| codes, the friends scan them, click pay, verify with
| biometrics, and are done.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code
| rambambram wrote:
| Oh definitely, it's not for every use case. If one just
| shuffles boxes through (roughly speaking) and competes on
| price, an automated system with all the well-known payment
| providers is better.
|
| If you want to go bare bones, spend as little money as
| possible (on fees, setup costs and setup time, brain cycles)
| then I just want everybody to know that - at least in Europe
| - that's possible. Even with only a personal bank account
| (and some good bookkeeping, that is)!
|
| > that for many freelancers who send just a few dozens of
| invoices per year
|
| Let me be clear I'm not talking about invoices from
| freelancers who already did the work, I'm talking real
| webshop stuff (you buy and pay for goods and/or digital
| services on the spot).
|
| The only 'problem' is that you have to wait one or two days
| (and three when there's a weekend) before you can start
| fullfilling an order. That's not for every use case, but
| definitely can work for a lot of use cases I think.
| wila wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Had the same conclusion for a while for my webshop. It bothered
| me to say no to people from the UK, so ended up setting up a
| reseller account and chose to use that for the UK.
|
| Which - while not free - has now changed to my main payment
| system as it reduced my overhead drastically. Plus now all my
| sales is compliant with all tax laws everywhere. Not just VAT
| within the EU, but also sales tax in the US etc.. without the
| additional overhead as the reseller is the one who handles all
| the taxes.
| rambambram wrote:
| > It bothered me to say no to people from the UK
|
| Agree. I'm in a very lean situation now and can use my time
| better, otherwise it's worth looking into. There's a lot of
| good customers there, who also didn't ask for this Brexit
| thing.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| 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.
| digital2568 wrote:
| The only exception is Amazon who will do a SEPA pull instead.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| 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 ...
| rdtwo wrote:
| Does nobody here have a target red card? That's what they do and
| they give you 5% back
| grecy wrote:
| This is already very common in Australia and Canada. I'm sure a
| ton of other countries too.
| ashconnor wrote:
| Bill payments sure, but not many businesses accept Interac
| e-transfers.
| timbit42 wrote:
| 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.
| grecy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| DeathArrow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| In the US, there is a difference between debit cards, ACH, and
| bank transfers. They are three separate things.
| kgdinesh wrote:
| care to explain?
| ErrantX wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kuschku wrote:
| The maestro cards in Germany aren't real maestro cards, but
| co-branded girocards that only use the maestro network
| outside the EU.
|
| They end up making an actual, real chip+pin authorized bank
| transfer.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-27 23:02 UTC)