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TigPT

I think this is already a reality in Brasil.

I’m really glad to see Europe making laws that improve citizens quality and competitiveness for companies.

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However, it's not just about one country, this is (also) about 27 countries and the payment between them.

Imagine being able to pay that quickly to your economically challenged neighbor (Argentina)?

Nitpicking but this is about euro transfers so a bit less than 27 countries

That's not true. Payments in EUR have to follow these rules.

You can make EUR transfers to anyone in those 27 countries.

"Euro Transfer" as in SEPA means that the currency of the transfer is set to EUR and that currency exchange is not part of the transfer itself (it can be done at originating or retrieving bank when the account involved is not in EUR, but the transfer itself has to be denominated in EUR at entry and exit from SEPA system)

oh god, don't go there! the payment area is not the same as Eurozone. Because no two things around here uses the same list of countries.

"There are 36 countries in the SEPA area." https://www.revenue.ie/en/starting-a-business/documents/guid...

Already a thing! At least for tourists.

https://g1.globo.com/economia/noticia/2023/07/16/pix-tipo-ex...

But there have been some noises in the direction of expanding regular service through Latin America. India's UPI also seems to be internationalizing. And there's FedNow in the US that is probably going to get automatically popular just for being from the US. Wonder if we're going to end up with a bunch of incompatible systems around the world or what.

In the UK as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments)

Like this one: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:31...

How does a law like this increase competitiveness? It looks like it decreases competitiveness, since banks can no longer compete on who has the fastest transfers.

Are you serious? It sets the ceiling on transfer time so that a minimum baseline quality of service is ensured.

I'm not saying that it's not good for customers. I'm saying that it does not increase competitiveness, which was the claim.

Companies (not banks) that can now settle payments almost in real-time rather than wait a day to confirm that the payment has been received makes them more competitive global-economy wise.

How does this make banks more competitive global-economy wise when these 10-minute transfers won't work with banks outside the EU?

So they'll have to compete elsewhere?

How is this anything but a win for consumers?

The parent didn't say it's not a win for customers, just that it's not clear to them how it will enhance competition.

Do they actually compete on speed here? The law seems like a mitigation for market failure -- there is not enough competition and the banks don't compete on things like this

This increases the competitiveness among other things because large established players cannot deny instant transfers to smaller competitors.

They will simply have to compete in other areas.

We know that sub-10-second-transfers are possible, by making it the norm you are not decreasing competition, just forcing players who are not competitive in this regard to conform or exit the field.

Markets are not perfectly efficient and you can have competitors surviving due to foul play or simply customer inertia. This protects consumer interest by forcing such market players to at least get to a baseline level or die.

Better than competition on who can get away with burdening their customers with the slowest transaction.

Did banks ever compete on this?

In any case, transfers rely on both banks processing the transaction speedily, so it wouldn't seem like something one bank could do unilaterally.

Eh? No-one ever competed on that. It's not like there's much of a range; banks either do SEPA Instant (instant) or normal SEPA (same/next business day depending on cutoff timing).

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