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Comment by alibarber | Hacker News Reader

Not Germany, but one that in many other ways is very efficient and forward thinking. I think the banking issues are more historical and due to having a small population with generally conservative attitudes towards money and financial institutions. But my point is that N26's offering is just not going to cut it across the whole EU(+UK), and any risk introduced by Brexit (or anything else that might happen) probably wasn't worth it for them, but claiming that they were pushed out by it is pushing it a bit.

As a side, in sites such as this (HN), especially when comparing things to the US there is defintitely a tendancy to make sweeping statements such as 'in the EU $thing is [blah]...' but actually there are huge differences across the continent, which I think is actually the news story here.

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yeah, in the US here is no expectation of a same day free transfer between banks. Only a "maybe" in the same bank. And you can sometimes game the ACH debit system to make things occur in "technically the same 24 hour time period".

there are a couple tiers of paid wire transfers, but still no guarantees that you will have liquid settled cash in the same business day.

the mere concept of the SEPA system in the EU is pretty nice

Transferring money using Zelle [0], between participating banks, is pretty much instantly, at least in my experience. The limit is up to 20,000 monthly for me. YMMV.

(0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle_(payment_service)

Might not be people's first choice, but Facebook is instant. Like, the money is a non pending deposit seconds after the sender clicks send. Slick, and not a silly extra checking account like venmo.

Why don't you just say where you moved to? It's quite interesting in context of your earlier comment.

Finland if we believe his LinkedIn, no idea if it's up to date though

Correct. It felt a bit impolite to moan about it, as I’ve found that once you get established and figure out the system everything else here works very well. That said all the natives that I know don’t exactly love their banks - so it’s ripe for disruption but I feel the market is always gonna be quite limited, due to inertia and size.

Online banking is also _the_ identity service for logging into official and semi official systems here (unless you’re a nerd and want to hook up a smart card reader and your [optional] ID card - which I totally am) and I guess there’s a heap of compliance to deal with to enter this space, which would further limit entry to the market.

Banking being the identity verification provider for everything (including governmental services) does add hoops, mainly the requirement for in-person identity verification when opening new accounts. As far as I understand the law doesn't allow strong identification to be provided using accounts that were opened with online identity verification.

> Finland

Weird. Transfers were instant when I moved over there almost 20 years ago, and you could already do them online if you wished (there was a system of codes on a paper or a card, on top of login+password). And that was in very traditional banks like the Postal Bank (Postipankki/Leonia/Sampo: it changed name at least 3 times during my stay). I cannot imagine it can have gone worse during the last 10 years.

Opening an account was no problem and quasi-immediate. The only annoying thing is that as a foreigner I had to stay 2 years before getting a regular credit card (I didn't care about the 'credit', since in my home country we don't use credit cards but only debit cards, but for 2 years I was only allowed the Visa Electron which was not well accepted or perhaps not accepted at all abroad, so it was limited even as a debit card).

In Estonia transfers went from instant to slow after enforcing the SEPA payments. Same made transfers faster in other EU countries. Different starting points. Probably similar case in Finland.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area

Hmmm... the introduction dates would match me leaving from there, so that would be a possible explanation. On the other hand, the existing system was already using IBAN and stuff, so as an ignorant customer, SEPA looks like an acknowledgement of what was already in use, not requiring any change in the process. Dunno.

In your case, when you say slow, how slow has it become?

Bank transfers in Estonia did get slower when SEPA first arrived, but not horrendously so. I think the transfers used to be every 15 minutes and during most of the day. With SEPA it got downgraded to every hour and only during normal working hours. However nowadays we've already moved on to SEPA Instant Payments which take about 10 seconds and are EU-wide, provided the other EU bank isn't dragging its feet with implementing it.

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