181–190 of 295 posts
Anyone know if this will work with international debit cards? E.g. if I have an debit card with my account at a Jamaican bank, can someone from the US email me cash and it arrives instantly or is this just a US service? Can't find any details about this on the site.
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Are you serious? Why would _anyone_ design a system like this? In Australia, the equivalent is EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer). You can deposit money to anyone's account by telling the bank their BSB (Bank/State/Branch number) and their account number; however this is not sufficient information to withdraw money. To withdraw money: 1. at a physical bank branch: a. you put your credit/debit card in a POS terminal and…
and they're universally free for the payer. Not quite. Vendors can now legally add a surcharge to cover the cost for payments from a credit card. Some vendors traditionally refused Amex when they had to eat the charge, since Amex was something like a 4-5% cost to the vendor as opposed to the 1-2% costs of the other cards. Why, in a small, stagnant market like ours, do we fare much better than the US system? We have s…
Yeah, the real question I was getting at was, given the Australian market is even more insular and stagnant than the US, why do we have much better systems?
What you're saying sounds plausible; a comparison of the US and Australian regulations on deposit banks would be interesting.
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They are not using ACH for this, but rather probably using the PIN-debit networks such as star, interlink, nyce and accel.
There is actually the capability to do an instant transfer over visa and mastercard networks as well, but it is somewhat expensive (>0.20) -- the pin debit networks are smaller and more willing to negotiate this sort of thing, and since most debit cards are able to process on more than one pin debit network you can get 100% coverage with just a couple of the pin debit networks playing ball. That they are not allowing…
I believe the transaction fee is higher and there's a percentage rate taken for non-pin debit card transactions.
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No kidding. That step 3 is a doozy: > The recipient will be emailed a link to easily deposit their cash to their bank. You have to wonder about the wisdom of training people to view such emails as legitimate.
They just got an email from you. Not so suss.
Since we're in the realm of phishing already, let's not forget that people still commonly enter their email address and email password into sites claiming to "Find your friends who are using this service".
The problem with social attacks is that they spread socially, and it's not enough for just "some", or even "most" people to be educated for it to be stopped.
I don't think Square are ignorant about this, but I'd like to see some confirmation that some measures are in place to counter threats like these.
The Durbin amendment regulates the cost of debit transactions over the Visa/Mastercard network. It's $0.22 + 0.05%.
Mossberg reports that Square is planning to monetize via "premium options" like international transfers. But still, $0.22+ is a lot to lose every time someone uses your mass-market service.
Good thing they raised $341M of VC money.
Who said the dot com days aren't back??
Source: http://allthingsd.com/20131015/the-money-is-in-the-email/
That got me thinking though. It's 2013. The ideal solution is not to be beholden to any centralized authority or group of 'clearing' accounts for routing. The ideal solution is security but flexibility and distributiveness. The ideal solution is a network of trust with similar 'hubs' / 'clearing firms' that one can choose to route through automatically, have all the routing be automated for you via solid protocols.
There is the chance to create clusters of payment routing networks that are more elegant. It would make money movement so much more liquid in our world. And would be a really great thing.
Maybe Square is the beginning of that solution. I hope it gets even more distributed though. It's mostly companies leading the way for this. And good for them. But there's another possibility: something very open, but given the right protocols and architecture, very secure.
There is no incentive to create such an architecture other than the amazing world that it would mean where you could travel to different countries and authenticate seemless money transactions to whoever had a phone or email endpoint (again there would have to be name servers + some sort of money equivalent of SMTP + TLS / chains of trust + distributed clusters of shared 'clearing' bank accounts + routing algorithms to these accounts, etc.).
But that didn't stop Tim Berners-Lee or the early internet folks....
This is one area where the US seems to be behind compared to the UK. I am from the UK and that service would look quite poor if it launched over here. We have a system called faster payments service that offers instant (although in some cases up to 2 hours) bank transfers for payments up to £100,000 (can differ between banks). You can use this directly if you share bank account numbers and sort codes but there are al…
Having recently moved from the UK to the US, I was quite shocked at the state of US banking. In the UK we can transfer money for free, use many ATMs free (not just the bank's own), we get free chequebooks, and there are plenty of accounts with no monthly fees. My US bank has a whole list of charges, and it's not made up by higher interest rates.
And composing an email to send someone money is secure how? What stops someone from spoofing my email address, CC'ing it to cash@square.com, and clearing me out? And if someone does get in to my email account I'm toast?
Via https://squareup.com/help/en-us/article/5144-square-cash-sec... > Square verifies each Square Cash email to authenticate that it comes from a legitimate sender. For added security, we send you a text confirmation each time you send Cash if you have linked your mobile phone number.
The only thing that was concerning was when I sent a spoofed email, the receiver was able to know the sender name (cash account name) – "ABC is about to send you cash". Very minor but it allows anyone to find out your name provided they know your email address.