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Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

And yet I'm constantly told that European banks make it trivial to transfer money without middlemen like visa. So why not just submit payment that way?

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They do. If I have someone's bank details I can transfer for free, instantly. (OK it sometimes takes a few minutes at weekends). There's two issues with ever using that for online payment:

1. There is no mechanism to obtain a refund for a mistake - eg I mistype the account number, someone else gets the money. Banks won't reverse but ask the payee to refund. If they still exist and are willing to cooperate. This is the route used for many, many scams like Microsoft calling because they noticed a fault with your Windows.

2. There is no protection under the Consumer Credit Act to obtain refund in the event the company goes bust or the product is defective and they won't refund. Credit cards have to provide that.

I use it with friends in preference to any other method, especially Paypal though.

With SofortBanking and similar services it is becoming more common to use this to pay online. It eliminates much of the issues you mention.

Sofort are problematic because they a) access your account via credentials that it's against bank ToS to share and b) they scrape and store (and likely sell) transaction data unrelated to the current transaction because they have access to your account.

You can't "mistype the account number", as it has control digits. I mean, there's a possibility, but it's really slim.

Credit cards definitely have check digits, pretty sure bank accounts don't, though I'm not certain.

Common enough that there's been a fair bit in the media[0] regularly, ever since instant transfers took off, and warnings from the Financial Ombudsman[1].

There's also been stories of people randomly discovering a few thousand appearing in their account and stupidly going out to spend it that day.

[0] First link in results https://www.telegraph.co.uk/personal-banking/current-account... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-22815716

Credit cards definitely have check digits, pretty sure bank accounts don't…

My (US) bank issues account number serially. No check digits.

IBANs have check digits. That's been the standard way of representing bank + account number for a few years now.

Maybe internationally, but usually domestically within the country IBANs aren't used, at least in Australia, UK, and United States. Hell, my bank here in the UK doesn't even give me an IBAN.

With SEPA I've been required to use the IBAN even for transfers within Germany. Which isn't all that different, as you only need to remember the two check digits and the order in which the old numbers appear within the IBAN. The UK and other countries that continue to use their own currency are a bit special regarding domestic payments, though:

SEPA does not cover payments in other currencies than the euro. This means that domestic payments in SEPA countries not using euro will continue to use local schemes, but cross border payments will use SEPA and euro against eurozone countries.

But you wouldn't see such a distinction in countries that use the Euro.

You can use IBAN domestically in the SEPA area for EUR account numbers. The banks usually allow the use of bank account numbers too and they then translate them to IBAN, so you don't have to. What's more, account numbers in some countries themselves contain check digits.

A Norwegian bank account number has it, so I guess it depends on the country

> If I have someone's bank details I can transfer for free, instantly.

> There is no mechanism to obtain a refund for a mistake

Neither of these is true for SEPA.

I did that a few times (buying bitcoin) and got my bank account suspended. I was told the other party was suspected of perpetrating fraud, and if I wanted to complete the transaction I'd need to do it in person in a branch.

Getting your bank account suspended is much more painful than a credit card.

As a result, I'm not very interested in executing transactions with random entities out of my bank account.

Because we already do, in some places – e.g. Amazon.de takes wire transfers, so does PayPal in Germany, and so do many/most German online shops.

And even for offline payments, we have in Germany an entirely separate card system based on that.

But you know, network effects and all. Internationally, it’s incredibly hard to buy anything online without a CC. So Germans who order lots online still often have a CC.

Also, getting a hotel reservation is much more painful without CC. Some hotels outright refuse to do a reservation without CC, others will charge a higher rate.

It's only trivial within each country, not across borders.

No, it's pretty trivial for SEPA countries.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retpaym/paymint/sepa/html/ind...

Do you know of any problem?

Instant clearing/settlement is in TARGET2 which is the ECB's vision for 2020.

Stupid high fees from uk banks, for example (we're talking a flat ~15€ per transaction)

For SEPA transfers? Are you sure you're not mixing it up with SWIFT transfers?

Like with anything else, you just need to use a provider that doesn't suck.

That was true up to 1/1/2018. Now the transfers take a couple of minutes in most cases. The frustrating thing is that it is now quicker for me to move money between say ABN-Amro in NL and some Polish or Romanian bank than it is to transfer between ABN-Amro in NL and a RABO or ING account in NL.

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