I'd much rather get online with my Visa Card (which is hooked up directly to my bank account, as it is for many other PNC customers and, I'm guessing, customers of other banks) to transfer money to my friend than I would write him a check. On the other hand, I don't have a Paypal account, and would be unlikely to want to screw with it.

I think there will be a lot of people who see this like I do.

Person-to-person payments still suck. I don't want to use paypal thanks in part to the stories about them freezing funds with no recourse but also because it's yet another account to manage.

Visa on the other hand has a huge established base and if they can make it easy (send x$ to CC No XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX? and that's it) I would definitely use it.

And since Visa is huge and has partnerships everywhere if this takes off in the slightest Mastercard will jump on board and suddenly nearly everyone with a credit card can accept payments from each other. Paypal's revenue will take a good hit for sure.

Big companies, especially in the financial sector, don't hop into a new market until it's both stable and large enough to make it worth their while. Person-to-person has now been proven to be big and viable by Paypal so the CC companies are right on schedule to try to muscle their way in and eat Paypal's lunch.

Why can't the US do this? Too much money in it for the banks?