It's a no-brainer. Card processing fees are just too high (2.9% + $0.3).
Account transfers bring more flexibility and convenience and costs almost nothing.
Account transfers bring more flexibility and convenience and costs almost nothing.
Of the 2.9% that Stripe (or any other processor) charges, a majority of the fee goes to the credit card issuer, i.e. bank. You probably chose to use a particular credit card because of the rewards offered by that particular bank. So, practically, a majority of the 2.9% fees goes to the issuing bank and a major portion is returned as rewards to the credit card user, i.e. the payer. Since the merchant, i.e. the seller, probably raised the prices by ~3% in order to afford the processing fees and credit card users get back most of it in rewards, people that use any other mode of payment end-up paying extra for the same product practically.
'Credit' cards are going to cost money for the foreseeable future. Issuing banks charge anywhere from 1.8% to 3% or higher for processing credit their cards. Processors add a markup on top of this fees to their merchants. 'Debit' cards issued by the major banks on the other hand, cost less than 0.5% for the processors. Stripe charges 2.9% for both debit as well as credit cards, YES but their costs to them are not the same.
The actual itemized fees inside of that Interchange fee are mind boggling.
Cryptocurrency was considered a way to simplify the problem, but probably didn’t work in this aspect
The caveat is that the money transfer cannot be undone for almost any reason. There's zero customer/purchase protection. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, however, has instructed banks that part of the Electronic Transfer Act requires banks to refund people if the transfer was a result of them being tricked into giving up their account details (it's not clear if this means the money would be yoinked from the recipient.)
I kind of would like the option to enable some sort of confirmation and/or 2FA for a Zelle payment (mainly this means disabling it via the website; my phone provides bio 2FA), and confirmations for receiving a payment. Those are my only complaints with the system.
But that means it can be trusted by people who want to know, for certain, that they've been paid "for real." It's instantly settled, unlike damn near every other form of money transfer system where even if the money seems to be in your account, there's still a days or WEEKS long delay until the transaction can't be yoinked back.
This makes it great for if you're selling a car and about to sign & hand over the title to the other person, for example.
Also the etiquette that’s emerged around using Zelle is funny too. If I’m paying someone new, they’ll normally have me send $1 as a test to make sure we all have the right contact info before sending the rest.
I do not see these options on BoA's website though, which is a dumb inconsistency.
I miss Monzo.
Very, very annoying. One of the many reasons I prefer crypto currencies. No one restricts me about what I can do with my money
Through the website, transfers with similar speed are limited to 1,000,000DKK a day ($150k).
In person (showing identification at the bank) I don't think there's a limit.
You will note the restrictions apply also to anyone who has successfully stolen your credentials, or is holding you at gunpoint, etc.
Legit crypto users[1] should let you pay with TransferWise.
[1] ie online research chemical stores
Wise is also a great solution, but its speed is going to be dependent on a lot of factors: does it have a partnership with your bank, how long is the route it'll take, and how long each node will take to process a transfer on the route. It is streamlined though so the user experience is top notch, security wise it's a centralized system so the more people use it the more it becomes a single point of failure.
It is not just much cheaper than card payments, it is also dramatically more reliable. If you lived in a parallel universe where all of these payment methods had emerged at once and you described a payment method so unreliable that people would actually give a name to the hack of retrying each failed charge automatically, they would think you were joking.
Ironically, despite in theory having a more generous reversal policy to protect consumers from fraud, these direct payment methods are also much less likely to result in inappropriate reversals that harm legitimate merchants, at least in our experience. Perhaps this is because banks will typically only reverse in cases of real fraud whereas card chargebacks are widely abused to commit fraud themselves or applied inappropriately as a blanket measure after an event like a stolen or lost card, and the incentives favour granting the refunds even if the customer just says for the flimsiest of reasons that they want their money back.
Intra-bank transfers are always free and instant because bank is just changing numbers on two accounts in the same database.
It has been so easy to move money between banks in India that we don't even think about it.
A decentralized system like crypto which uses pointless proof-of-work to remove trust providing intermediaries are just too slow, expensive and overall inefficient by design. They won't work in real world.
2. Nobody uses proof of work anymore (besides bitcoin)
And Ethereum and...