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Comment by Nathanba | Hacker News Reader

because I don't have Venmo or Cashapp but I have twitter

Do you have a bank account? FedNow (US instant payments) just crossed the 400 financial institution mark, a little less than 5% of total US banks and credit unions (~9k), and it’s only been live for ~7 months.

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/organi...

Do you often pay people who don't have Twitter or Google Pay or Zelle or anything either but do use Twitter? I would think signing up for Venmo would be about as easy as adding a payment method to Twitter and a thousand times more useful.

I've literally never heard of anyone using google pay, zelle or venmo or cashapp. My prediction is that whatsapp will add payment functionality too if they dont already have it

I’m in the US, Venmo is almost as (if not, more) ubiquitous as cash between people in my area.

>> I've literally never heard of anyone using google pay, zelle or venmo or cashapp

But you use Twitter..? That's some crazy bubble. venmo isn't even a tech savvy thing, everyone everywhere I know that moves money between individuals or super-small business transactions (think cleaning service, girl scout cookies, club dues) uses it...

In my area (South Side Chicago) I would say a majority of payments are made through Cash App. Either you're paying someone person-to-person (e.g. drug dealer on the subway) or you're using your Cash App debit card to buy something from a store. Literally every person I know in this area uses Cash App as their primary bank.

I'm banned from Cash App so I use PayPal as my primary bank.

Whatsapp does support UPI in India. To be honest it's a no brainer here imo.

UPI makes sending and receiving money as easy and instant as sending a text, that I can not believe how the rest of world lives without it. Free account to account transfers (upto ~1200USD/day) that work from any bank to any bank, in seconds. Even accessible without internet via ussd short codes.

Venmo and other platforms like that are more popular in the US. I've got the possibility to instantly transfer money to anyone in the country from my bank. There's no reason for anyone here to use a third party app to do it. Venmo is a solution to a problem which doesn't exist in a lot of places around the world.

Zelle is supposed to be that in the US. My bank uses Zelle for free transfers. It's not marketed well or feature complete at every bank though.

I honestly think people like you are the target audience, but I don't feel like it's a huge population. And even for people like you, plugging your bank info into Twitter is only one step less than downloading Venmo and plugging your bank info into Venmo, so I don't think they're offering a whole lot of additional convenience

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