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> I felt like I stepped into the future.

It's more like stepping out of the past. It's not that India is particularly ahead, it's that the US is particularly behind.

The EU for example has essentially instant SEPA transfers now and has done for a while.

> The EU for example has essentially instant SEPA transfers now and has done for a while.

It seems that for me (in Germany) transfers still only arrive the next business day. Something must be going on there...

There are normal SEPA transfers (taking between a few hours and 1-2 days) and there is SEPA Instant which transfers the money within a few seconds. Those are two different systems and not all banks support SEPA Instant yet.

I've done a few SEPA Instant transfers in Germany already and they really arrived within a few seconds to a few minutes.

The instant trasfer costs money in Italy. I saw fees from 5 to 50 Euros.

Most banks in germany do it for free, my bank does 1'000 Instant Transfers for free (incoming + outgoing) after which I have to pay a fee for every additional block of 1'000 transactions. 1'000 is plenty considering the supermarket would still be fine with a next-day standard SEPA, so 3-per-day on average seems reasonable to me.

Where I live (in Estonia) all bank transfers are instant payments, and they are free. I don't have to pay a transaction fee for them.

Must be a problem with your bank, or the other banks. They must implement the instant payments in their systems.

Here in Estonia the SEPA payments were a step back, because we already had a quite fast transaction system between banks, transactions happened about every hour or so. Then came SEPA and transactions became slower, and now we have instant transactions, even better.

Australia and New Zealand have Osko, which is instant and supports Unicode

It's counter-intuitive, but if you think about it, less develop countries are in a better position to deploy fully integrated systems.

E.g.: Portugal has a great, free, cross-bank, ATM system since the beginning [1] because Portuguese banks were late to the party in regards to deploying such machines. They could learn from other countries and create a more resilient system, which has since been expanded to be able to pay various services, from utilities, fines, tolls, phones, withdrawals without cards (with phone), etc. Countries that developed earlier have to suffer with a lot of baggage and the Banking industry is not known for it's desire to innovate its tech.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multibanco

How’s MBpay? I loved using Multibanco when living in Portugal but I never got around to using MBpay, which I think is the equivalent to what’s being discussed for the US, essentially.

Getting worse by the moment due to EU requirements for EU-wide standardization

FYI, the term for this is leapfrogging -- essentially the lack of infrastructure allows developing countries to suddenly advance past established countries in terms of policy/tech integration & utilization. In other words, no tech debt to pay off first :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging

Good luck convincing the shop owner to accept payment in SEPA instead of cash the next time you get a beer.

Girocard.

Is Girocard debit/credit card? If yes I don't see how that is any better compared to USA.

> Good luck convincing the shop owner to accept payment in SEPA instead of cash the next time you get a beer.

Girocard is a debit card. But it operates over SEPA. So „ Good luck convincing the shop owner to accept payment in SEPA instead of cash the next time you get a beer.”, no problem, just pay with a Girocard :)

In some countries in the EU there is a minimum amount required to pay with Giro but generally it’s not a problem.

There is no minimum amount for UPI. And you don't need a card to use UPI. You just scan the QR code and send the money from your phone. And UPI is accepted almost all the shops.

I don't know how much you know about payments in India, but they are, from what I have heard, fairly evolved and advance.

In fact, in India there are 4 different ways in which you can do online transfers across the banks (NEFT, RTGS, IMPS, and UPI). The latest iteration, UPI, is indeed state-of-art. It lets even companies like Amazon, Google, and PhonePe, which are not traditionally banks, to offer ability for people to do transfers from their Bank account. QR Code for UPI apps are very commonplace at least in metros and it enables nano transactions without really a fee to small merchants and users. There are lot of fail safe mechanisms and safety features built into the protocol and a user is not really hostage to the bank or the payment app as you can switch both at your will.

I agree wholeheartedly. In my opinion, UPI has been an unmitigated success. Nearly everyone from a roadside street-food vendor to a 5 star hotel accepts UPI and it makes the whole flow of day-to-day payments entirely contactless which is especially useful with the COVID-19 situation.

Now if only they could introduce some way to enable subscription payments, it'd be the cherry on top.

already live. its called UPI Autopay

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/startup/exclusive...

Ohh. Thanks for linking this. I'm excited for this.

So, subscriptions are possible - just programmatically request a payment on a recurring basis.

As a consumer I actually prefer this approach because I get a payment request that I must explicitly accept for my subscription to be renewed, as opposed to forgetting about a subscription and have it show up on my bank statement.

For example: Every month Netflix sends me a payment request asking me to pay for another month's service.

Perhaps they could allow for auto-withdrawing to reduce friction for subscriptions you definitely know you want, but I strongly feel this request-before-withdrawing model should be the default for any subscription service and anything else should be explicit opt-in.

And completely trackable

US banks have something mostly like this: Zelle [1]; the company behind it, Early Warning Systems, is owned by JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Capital One, Wells Fargo, PNC, basically every bank has a stake in it, and every bank supports it. And it works better than Cash App/Venmo; enter phone number or email address, get an instant direct bank-to-bank transfer, no fees, all from the normal bank app you'd already be using.

What we're really talking about with FedNow is not user-facing: Zelle runs on Mastercard Send/Visa Direct, but traditional bank transfers run on ACH, which is very antiquated. FedNow is supposed to replace all of this (though, who's to say if Zelle would actually use it; its possible Visa/Mastercard have stakes in it as well, and they'd lobby against it; but, even in those cases, Visa/Mastercard likely make heavy use of ACH somewhere, and they'd be using FedNow. Its all ACH all the way down)

Zelle's issue is really that most people don't know they have it. For example, Chase has had, for a very long time, QuickPay, which could be used to instantly send money to other Chase customers. Naturally, no one relied on it very often, because if I'm out for drinks with my friends, I'm not going to lead with "Hey, do you have Chase?". QuickPay now uses Zelle, so the bank doesn't matter, but people have their apps.

Its actually the exact same "problem" as WhatsApp is elsewhere in the world. Upgrades to the fundamental, platform-agnostic technologies (SMS->RCS, ACH->Zelle->FedNow) lose stickiness when people have "their app" they'd rather use. In my view, Zelle is one of the greatest tragedies in the US financial system; the banks did everything right with it, its an incredible product, but even very smart people I know refuse to use it, because its not Cash App or whatever.

[1] https://www.zellepay.com/

Today was the day I discovered Zelle was same day deposits as I had just assumed like everything else before it, that there would be 2-3 day settlement. US Banks are comically bad at branding and user experience and the lack of cooperation between them all historically has left a pretty bad taste in the mouth, leading to my own ignorance displayed here.

What skeeves me out about zelle is there is no fraud protection unlike most other payment methods in the USA. So I'm going to continue to use venmo, credit cards, etc:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/16/zelle-users-are-finding-ou...

When people started trying to pressure me to use Venmo, my research at the time led me to the conclusion that it offers no guarantee of fraud protection either.

Just like PayPal before it, it's not a bank and doesn't have to follow any of the rules.

How it's legal to operate in such a fashion is beyond my ability to understand, but that's my understanding of the situation.

Venmo & paypal have a reputation of helping you if there is a fraud dispute, zelle has the opposite. The difference between guarantee and practice.

Zelle is not supported by every bank. A major exception is Charles Schwab.

God - Zelle is HORRENDOUS.

Seriously - check out your limits. I can ACH into the 100's of thousands but I can zelle basically nothing - I don't think you could run even a small payroll on zelle or make even a medium sized purchase with it.

The fraud story is horrendous.

The traceability and audit-ability of things is horrendous - seriously -> you CANNOT see where the funds are and no one will tell you / can tell you.

With a cancelled check image I get the back and I can trace down what account it went into if need be.

With a wire I get my reference number and can trace status that way.

With NACHA I can do Payment Trace Requests...

Zelle - forget it, the money is GONE and no way to trace who got it.

Zelle is horrendous and cannot die soon enough. How are people even considering this as a settlement service?

For context - Fedwire does something like trillions of dollars per day in activity. NACHA at least $100B per day+.

According to the Zelle website they have 924 partner financial institutions. If you total the number of FDIC insured institutions and the number of credit unions in the US the total is very near 10,000, so Zelle is very far from universal.

Best feature of UPI for me is you can interact with UPI via USSD code (*99#) which is terrific for someone like me who don't use any proprietary apps on his Lineageos.

They made cash almost illegal allegedly to fight corruption, but I think that has an awesome UI.

Of course the poorest were strongly hit by declaring the currency illegal. Some negligible UX experience wouldn't be my first thought on the issue

> instantaneously from any bank account to another

I am already able to do that with eTransfer. That's how I pay my rent and haven't had any problems.

The rest of the developed world can do that from their bank, no financial data-selling middleman required. Oh, and for a decade or two.

The main thing I still hate about anything that's not a wire transfer is the transfer limits, doubly true in all the fintech apps.

Hey here is this arbitrary limit for "security" purposes! Not good enough? Well now listen to this low level banker and customer support person make up a fake anti-money laundering law on the fly! We are still left wondering why the compliance team interpreted actual laws so ridiculously, or maybe this institution is just insolvent. Oh great, the entire population is also brainwashed to stigmatize ever having any actual money to transfer, can't talk to them about it either.