Your Mother’s Maiden Name Is Not a Secret

In Sweden we can transfer money instantly between banks. You essentially register a service tied to your phone number, and people can use that phone number to instantly transfer money to persons or companies without any fees. The service is called Swish [0]. The only requirement is that the receiver has registered the service to his/hers phone number, and that you can authenticate yourself using mobile BankID [1].

[0] https://medium.com/@etiennebr/swish-the-secret-swedish-finte...

[1] https://www.bankid.com/en/

Edit: Clarification of who can receive your money transfer.

Sites? When I call my bank to de-block my debit card after 3 wrong PIN attempts, they use the same 'security questions' to 'secure' the call (establish that it is truly me calling).

Most other countries allow direct person-to-person transfers with just a name and account number. In Australia you can put in someone's details and payment for something and it will be there the next morning, with no fees, directly through the government interbank system.

In the US if you want a fee-free transfer, you need to use your bank's app and take a photo of someone's check. And no, Paypal/Vinmo are not good alternatives. They're private transfer systems that are not federally mandated and regulated bank-to-bank transfers. I wrote a full post about this:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking-system-is...

I am not aware of a country in Europe where the online banking interface is not able to transfer money, both domestically and internationally vi e.g. SEPA and other methods - it’s called “online banking”...

Phishing and other things were a large attack vector until 2FA mostly did away with it.

> ACH in the USA is free and fast (one business day)

One business day is slow. Not as ridiculously slow as the three business day arbitrary bullshit, but still slow. Why aren't the transfers instant? There's no reason for them not to be.

> Is Europe really any better in this regard?

Oh god yes. Europe has had Giro for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giro

Every bill comes with a receiving account number, and where I'm from all bills have been using a standardized OCR-friendly format since the 80's, which means that the payment slip of every bill is identical, which means that when we got internet banking in the mid 90's, you would just type in the numbers from the standardized fields at the bottom row of the bill to set it up. Of course, you've been able to sign up for automatic bill payment since the 90's as well, and on the off chance that you get a bill from someone you normally aren't billed by, all mobile banking apps have the option of using your phone camera to OCR the bill and pay it.

Whereas in the US, sure, most large companies can do automatic ACH withdrawal, but most small companies can't. And if you get an actual bill, no two bills look the same, so you have to figure out what the amount is and where it goes, and you only get the physical address of the receiving company, so if they aren't able to receive ACH tranfers for whatever ridiculous reason, your bank has to mail them a check, which takes five days, for some other ridiculous reason, so you have to make sure the money leaves your account five business days before the due date. (Giro payments are, of course, instant)

> No one uses paper checks here either...

It is possible to never write a check in the US, but it's actually pretty hard. There's a ton of systems and companies and organizations that require you to use checks.

I had to pay my apartment building org $50 for reserving the moving elevator for a whole day. Payment by check only.

I had to pay the final amount for my moving company when they showed up with my furniture. Cashier's checks only. Oh, and cash tips for the movers.

Do you know what I had to do to get a cashier's check? I went to my bank, and I had to WRITE THEM A CHECK for the amount on the cashier's check + their fee, for them to be able to take money out of my account and give me a cashier's check. It's absolutely fucking ridiculous, and noone there saw anything weird about it.

When you move to the US, you cannot file your taxes electronically the first year, and you cannot pay electronically either. So you have to write a check to the IRS. I had to google that shit the first time, I had never written a check in my entire life before that.

I'm renting my apartment from an individual, and she expects a check in the mail every month. Now, I've set it up to pay automatically through my bank, but my bank actually prints and mails her a check. Ridiculous.

The complete and utter shittiness of banks in the US is, for most Americans, an unknown unknown. You don't know it's shit, and you don't know how shitty it is, because you've never experienced non-shitty banks. Since you have nothing good to compare them with, you don't do the comparison, and you don't expect them to not be shitty.

I mean, look at you, you have complete goddamn Stockholm syndrome above where you think a one business day transfer is fast!

(Sorry for the rant, I'm not angry at you, I'm just so frustrated with how shitty shit shit American banks are, and that they never seem to improve.)