Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but what's wrong with using a bank to send money? Not in US, so I don't even know if that's another one of those things you can't do like having to still use cheques
Yup. We can't just send money to each other via the bank, unless your bank happens to participate in the Zelle network, and you want to send less than $5,000 or so (it depends on the bank and your standing with said bank).
It's another super backwards part of US banking.
The most annoying part here in Poland is to get charged by your bank by not making enough transactions or not reaching the required specified amount of money or making ATM withdraw below the set threshold. If you managed to do so, you avoided paying monthly fees; that's the only things debit accounts owners should bother themselves about. We can send money between different banks w/o issues and operations are booked IIRC twice in a day; these are instant if it's between same bank accounts, or you can pay an extra if you want money being delivered instantly and recipient belongs to a different bank. We can also send money on registered phone number via apps and the recipient can pick it up via ATM (kind of check that is slowly being adapted around; it replaced previously shortly running system as it was prone to scams); each bank participates in local cash-less payments system called Blik. Of course Apple and Google systems works as well but Blik is more popular anyway.
Most of the time operations are being processed instantly online but there are rare situations where these are being queued offline up until terminal (speaking about stores) gets online.
Btw, are you still required to confirm operations via handwritten signature?
I work in Payments in Tumblr and WordPress.com and it blows my mind how outdated US banking is. India is outinnovating US in financial markets. World is going to be quite different in 20 years.
In the UK I've got a normal debit account with a chip and pin card + contactless, I have a few different type of savings accounts attached to it as well. I can access it online and from their app, I can setup standing orders, direct debits, change my credit card auto-payments, and use "faster transfers" to send money to any UK bank account in under an hour. None of that costs me any fees, the only fees I would pay is if I go into my overdraft or don't pay off my credit card on time. ATM withdrawls are free for the most part and there's no minimum or maximum on tranasctions.
Granted, I am 26 so I imagine a lot of this has happened while I've been growing up.
I initiated a payment on 7/25 which didn't get deposited until 7/27. I'm not sure if the recipient had access to some funds prior to the transaction clearing.
If Zelle is intended to take on Venmo, banks are going to have to do better.
Your bank’s UX should indicate if the transfer is immediate or not when you create a contact. Zelle is already doing substantially more volume than Venmo, as its a consortium of the largest banks in the US who have baked it into their user interfaces for domestic P2P money transfers.
Google Pay which is a UPI client in India is just an interface over bank-to-bank transfer which takes way the above process. You can use an id or your mobile number to transfer money from bank to bank without any intermediary. It's a revolutionary step in money transfer.
There are several clients which use this UPI or Unified Payment Interface and that is the great thing about it.
There is some merit to the idea of Fed-operated system here, but, well, let's just say that investing money into a system only to end up competing with your regulator doesn't really help banks feel like they're in a stable regulatory environment where they'll be rewarded for doing the right thing and making investments in the future.
UPI has become so easy that I see people using it over credit/debit cards all the time.
In India, Visa and MasterCard responded with no-pin-code swipes for small transactions.
So it has (probably) caused some changes.
Fads do not have to make sense.