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In the US, you can do an ACH transfer, bank account to bank account.

Some US banks support FedNow, which does roughly the same thing as ACH, but in seconds rather than days. It's not widely used yet. $0.045 per transaction.

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In the US, there is also a "pay a person" scheme, where you only need to know someone's phone number or email to send them money.

Are you referring to Zelle? I think the issue for users that keeps them on services like Venmo is primarily the UX. The Zelle experience varies depending on the customer’s bank. It’s a service run by and between the banks, who are generally not as user experience-focused as tech companies. One example of this is that there is no feedback when sending money to a phone number that is not on the platform. The funds just go into the void and are returned a couple days later. By contrast, Venmo lets the payer verify the payee with their profile picture, username, and phone number.

No, not zelle. Pay a Person service is popular with credit unions and some banks. Receiver gets a message and inputs his bank account information into a form. Sender never sees that information. After the link has been established, subsequent transfers are just one click.

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