Banks offer cash transfers via cell number, e-mail address | Hacker News Reader

Banks offer cash transfers via cell number, e-mail address

usatoday.com

23 pointsMetricMike25 comments

Email transfers have been available in Canada since 2003: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac_e-Transfer

yeah, I've been doing this for ages, and now the TD iphone app lets me do from my phone. I have no use for square or any other P2P cashless transfer feature.

As someone who has just moved to the US from Australia, all I can say is: about time. Back home I'm used to being able to transfer money to anyones bank account with no fees, and with the funds arriving the next day. Coming to the US has seen every check I cash "held" for days, and $25 fees for having the gall to transfer money out of my account without using a check. Paying rent takes at least a week, as the "online transfer" in internet banking is a check sent by the bank! I understand now why PayPal was such a big deal when it came out.

(Disclaimer: I bank with Bank of America, and am waiting with baited breath for BankSimple)

The service is a direct threat to PayPal, which dominates the market for online, electronic payments with nearly 100 million active users.

But all the money in Paypal is in facilitating C2B payments, not in C2C payments. Granted, many of their businesses are tiny compared to the typical credit card charging business, but it doesn't meaningfully compete with anything except, perhaps, the low-end of eBay sellers. (And it won't be allowed on eBay.)

I thought you could pay however you wanted on ebay (including check or cash) it was just up to you to work something out with the seller. From what I understand, Dwolla not only does C2B but also does a ton of B2B transactions per month.

Nope, eBay definitely doesn't allow you to just work something out. Sellers are not allowed to induce buyers to "Pay using online or other payment methods not specifically permitted in this policy"

http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/accepted-payments-policy...

"Months behind?" Why has it taken the US so long to catch up with Europe on transferring money via banks? Here in the UK I can pay any company and any person via my bank details. Super easy to do and makes paying my friends back painless and easy.

Very cool to see they've opened this to e-mail and txts now too.

If ClearXchange really works without a separate account, it could be compelling. Wonder about the implications of Metcalfe's law though.

There are a lot of "me too" money transfer services out there: PopMoney and ZashPay are two more that come to mind.

After a quick evaluation of ZashPay, I wasn't impressed. No T-Mobile support, US only, can't send to/from Oklahoma(!), restrictive EULA, terrible UX.

PayPal is still compelling for this type of payment, as P2P payments can be made with no fees, as long as they're sent from a bank account.

All in all it's a good move and the system to do it really is not all that complicated. It will be interesting to see the user experience side of things since this has already been available in FI's for years under different names.

Am I the only one thinking this might just be a white label of a solution they were already all using?

I was trying to find the CDixon tweet that said something to the effect: "In a year personal payments will be revolutionized."

Between BitCoin, Square, and everyone elses entry into the market its hard not to agree.

It's nice to see the banks trying to catch up with PayPal 12 years later.

I'm interested to see what their fees are going to be. PayPal is ridiculously expensive (2-3%). Dwolla is a flat 25 cents per transaction (regardless of size).

FaceCash, which I run, is free for peer-to-peer transfers. You can send up to $5,000 per day.

I'm interested to see if they will clear the funds instantly or sit on them for 2 business days like they currently do.

It competes with PayPal, but they really just borrowed the feature from ING Direct. ING has let you send money to anybody with an email address for a while.

You need an email address and the bank account information, don't you? I'd love it to be otherwise, but getting banking information from e.g. my younger brothers is a lot trickier than just emailing them.

Correct. Here is exact quote on ING's P2P payment screen "To send a P2P Payment, you'll need the recipient's email address and account information."

Huh. Thanks for pointing that out. I'd never actually used it but IIRC they always advertise that you can send money to any email address.

The crux is in transferring beyond borders.

Dwolla has been doing something similar for a year now. I wonder how all this shake out.

DOn't ask me why but I can see this going horribly wrong!

Why? All this allows you to do is to initiate a transfer to someone using their phone or email, rather than making you know their routing number & checking number.

Yeah, that's the problem.

How?

Presumably, I can't call the bank and tell them to transfer from someone's account using their phone/email address.

Do you have a problem giving your Paypal address out? I don't: I give mine out and people can use it to transfer money in. How is this any different at all?

Anything that makes it easier, faster, or more convenient to transfer money is going to increase fraud. This is not hyperbole, it's simply a matter of degree.

The credit card networks make up for this by charging a sizeable fee on every transaction and passing the cost of reported fraudulent transactions back to the merchants, who presumably feel the convenience is worth the cost.

In this scheme though it's not clear who is going to bear the cost. Paypal had Ebay to basically force people to use it for their transactions.

Who is going to pay the fraud costs in these transactions? Do federal laws that limit liability for other card network transactions apply to email payments by bank? Are personal and business accounts treated the same way?

Do you have a problem giving your Paypal address out?

Yes I don't use PayPal, although its as much because I have heard of so many people not actually getting paid the money they were sent.

But this isn't really about you and me, we know how email and phishing scams work so we are not the biggest ones at risk.

How is this any different at all?

For one thing, Paypal currently does face huge costs due to fraud, so even if it's the same, it represents more of it.

There is now (and there almost always has been) so much fraud in banking it's treated as an expected statistical loss. Something like 0.5% of transactions is one statistic I've heard. Banking has been pushed online, and currently the highest-risk website transaction of all is setting up a new biller, address, account number, etc. in the online bill-pay. There's malware that will script this process for you.

So now the transaction destination is just an email address... hmm, what could possibly go wrong? :-)

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