Is this functionally equivalent to what banks in Europe already do for transfers?
https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...
https://payhawk.com/blog/what-is-instant-sepa-a-look-behind-...
A good payments system has protection for fraud. Unlike zelle.
How do you reverse that charge in case of accident or fraud?
ACH isn't great and RTP/FedNow are significant improvements, but there are reasons why reconciliation exists.
Hard fork :-D
Which is what happens when someone in charge loses money big time. Etherium Classic -> Etherium, LUNA->LUNC, etc.
For quite a lot of transactions, you can pay extra to make them near-instant. The capability is and has been there for a long time, it’s just moated by a profit model that penalizes the people with the greatest need for quick access to use resources which rightly belong to them.
Cryptocurrency technologies such as Ripple, Stellar and Algorand are already faster, available worldwide and are significantly cheaper in fees per transaction and are aiming for ISO 20020 compliance, meaning that they will be compatible with the same financial payments messaging standard used by the current system.
It doesn't mean it those three will 'take over the current system' like what many crypto maximalists keep screaming about, but those three technologies have the highest likelihood to work with the current system when crypto becomes more regulated in the future.
Roughly equal to common overdraft fees, which similarly burden those most in need of fast transactions. And often these burdens compound not just on themselves but on top of each other too, eg if I help a family member cover an expense plus overdraft we have to pay double the overdraft to pay the overdraft; when I was tight on money between jobs but had available credit I’d have to pay another increment of the same, plus interest. All told, it could cost around 150USD pay a 5USD bill. Which only affects people who are unable to pay such a small bill. Now that I’m not between jobs and the burden of fees is less of a concern, but I don’t have to worry about the fees at all because they’re processed out of my bank account. But the transfer still has a fee for the recipient if they need it sooner than “in 3 business days” which can often be effectively a week. That’s long enough to incur much greater costs, ranging from further monetary penalties to eviction depending on what payment is due.
We’d all be better off, as a family, opening a joint bank account but I’d be surprised if that wouldn’t flag a fraud alert if not actually violating some law I’m unaware of.
The US has been historically so flush with capital and regionally isolated that there was no burning need nor desire for much centralized governance let alone bank coordination so it still hasn’t developed the muscles to do much of that. Historically, other countries have needed to tightly control and coordinate capital in order to survive against geopolitical challenges and so have everything in place in order to, for instance, make the end user banking experience efficient between banks. Understand this and suddenly America makes a whole lot more sense.
Until fairly recently in large parts of the US, it used to be illegal for banks to have more than one branch. (The last restrictions on branch banking in the US only came down at the end of the 20th century or so. It was a long and slow process.)
For comparison, Canada is just as wide-spread, but they had national banking chains since forever (because they were legal), and with that came national coordination.
If your bank is locking up the funds for 3-5 days, that's their decision and has nothing to do with the US banking infrastructure.
My bank processes all transfers same day.
You should take advantage of the many alternatives and switch.