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Comment by hrrsn | Hacker News Reader

>I have had to send cash to my sister a handful of times recently. Because her bank (Bank of America) stopped allowing cash deposits to any account other than your own, the most convenient and inexpensive way to do this was through Walmart, which has its own money transfer service. You can arrange the transfer through an app, then you go to an express line at a Walmart store and complete the whole transaction in under a minute.

The fact that you can't just send money from your online banking to another person absolutely baffles me.

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Aye coming from India 9 years ago it felt like the American banking system was stuck in some sort of dark age where progress had ground to a halt. It's been 9 years (!) since then and they still don't have a reliable bank-to-bank money transmission standard or service.

But if you cannot just transfer money to a different account, how do you pay for anything? How do you pay your rent, or utilities, or insurance? Do you have to use credit cards for everything or what?

“cash” deposits...i assume once it’s in your account you can send it wherever

There are ways of transferring money to different accounts, but they aren't available to normal individuals. Businesses can arrange to be able to make deposits and withdrawals. So to pay a company, you would give them your account information and ask them to pull the appropriate amount from your account. This is typically only used for large or frequently recurring payments. Most other payments would be done with a credit or debit card.

With smaller landlords I used checks, larger ones have recurring transfer systems like the other reply mentioned. Insurance and utilities accept credit and debit cards for payments online.

Wells Fargo also had (maybe still does) an online banking "Money Send" feature where you type in the person's name and address and they physically mail them a paper check :-)

Zelle is supposed to be the magic bullet for this, but it isn’t supported by all banks (including mine). I could technically send her a wire online, but I think my bank would charge me $30 to send it and then her bank would deduct $25 or so to receive it. Compare that $55 to the $8 that Walmart charges.

I could get myself a bank account at BofA for the specific purpose of sending her money, but I just refuse to give them a dime of my money because they suck.

I've never heard of Zelle. What about Venmo? Stripe Cash?

I haven’t heard of Stripe Cash - I’ll take a look. But Venmo doesn’t put cash in the person’s hand/bank account that same day.

> Compare that $55 to the $8 that Walmart charges.

Compare that to €5 to SEPA transfers in the EU between banks in two countries, or to €0 between banks in the same country.

The whole point of SEPA is that they aren't allowed to charge more for a SEPA payment out of the country.

I always wondered why ability to transfer money to your friends etc is such a big deal with US tech companies. Now I think I understand a bit in Singapore I use online transfer to pay rent, pay my part time maid or my friends so easily with the mobile app. And I am not even charged anything.

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