This is already very common in Australia and Canada. I'm sure a ton of other countries too.
Bill payments sure, but not many businesses accept Interac e-transfers.
Bank transfers as a payment method
21–30 of 335 posts
Re: Bank transfers as a payment method
#22It'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.
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
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.
Re: Bank transfers as a payment method
#23Wait, 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
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, w…
That's a good one!
Re: Bank transfers as a payment method
#24It'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.
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
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.
Re: Bank transfers as a payment method
#25It'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.
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
This seems out of touch with modern offerings e.g. wise.com. Easier than PayPal with none of the crazy bank transfer fees.
Re: Bank transfers as a payment method
#26Let'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
Re: Bank transfers as a payment method
#27UPI 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 U…
Will this suffer from the usual payment restrictions imposed by PayPal/Stripe?
Re: Bank transfers as a payment method
#28When 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...
Re: Bank transfers as a payment method
#29Just 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?
Re: Bank transfers as a payment method
#30In 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