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Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

It wont be a popular answer here but Facebook Pay now Meta Pay is a great product. It is instant, as in, you can send someone standing in front of an ATM money, and they can pull the money out seconds later. Not pending, but completed deposits. For free.

It is the "it just works" way to move money between peoples debit cards in the US. It is rock solid, a large network of us use it all the time, and it is significantly more frictionless than Paypal/Venmo/Cashapp/Zelle when you already talk on Messenger. 4 clicks and the money appears.

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Oh that's pretty cool. It looks like there are no fees for the service (at least for now), where Venmo has a 1.75% fee ($0.25 min $25 max) and Cash App has a 0.5%-1.75% fee ($0.25 min) for the same instant withdrawal service.

It also doesn't require the banks cooperation, and has pretty high limits at 10k per transaction, and per month. Basically facebook fronting money because it believes it can trust the profile.

I suspect the personal side of it will remain free. It's a gateway drug to having your card on file. Then there is less friction when you see something on marketplace you want. They can recover money on the marketplace side of things.

The bank does need to cooperate to accept the transaction "instantly", but mostly they do since it's good for them.

Does Meta Pay have a checking account as part of each account that you can withdraw from directly via an ATM? Or does Meta Pay need to transfer the money into a 3rd party checking account that you can then withdraw from? That second step may not be instantaneous, depending on which bank the account is at.

there's no account. its just your checking account. and their checking account.

facebook fronts the money, deposits it as a non pending transaction. then it takes your money.

ive done it with multiple people at multiple banks. its never been more than minutes.

Good to know, that is pretty useful for immediate transfers. I've done transfers between accounts at the same bank before, using their own website, and it still takes like 24 hours to leave 'pending' state.

PayPal/Venmo/Apple Cash also support instant transfers through this method - basically it just charges a negative amount to your debit card. It's not always free though, and most people don't actually need "instant" unless they're standing in front of an ATM.

is it free anywhere else?

Most other countries, sure. I don't know how their other fraudoffs like fraud protection work.

same minute banking transactions between checking accounts are free in most countries?

Meant to say first world countries…

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