The payment information is a bit obfuscated, being only a parenthesized sequence of letters and numbers in the OP.
IBAN: DE41 2001 0020 0599 0902 01
BIC: PBNKDEFFXXX
Purpose: Lokomotive
Payee: CCC eV
IBAN: DE41 2001 0020 0599 0902 01
BIC: PBNKDEFFXXX
Purpose: Lokomotive
Payee: CCC eV
I spent almost an hour trying to jump through the fiery, spinning hoops being dangled by my bank website only to finally at the end be given an "It looks like this part of our site isn't working. Please try again later."
Thank you, bank /s
For anyone else wanting to try their hand and weather the gauntlet, I found slightly more detail of their published bank acct info at: https://www.ccc.de/en/membership
and an official, physical address over at: https://www.ccc.de/en/imprint
If you're trying to send from America, it's still the normal way to send a payment to Europe so see how your bank sends international payments.
It should be as easy as possible to donate, imo it would be better even setting up a basic kofi or buy me a coffee account, or I see the Ukrainians using paypal all the time.
It should be a 3 click payment not a bank transfer requiring copying and pasting IBAN numbers and bank account numbers etc
To poke fun at the Germans at least they are not requesting we fax a copy of the money in :P
That... is what SEPA is, but built into the european banking system directly.
> I think he's right that if you are relying on IBAN and needing to do an individual bank transfer then it's not ideal.
It's not ideal that you can do a simple transfer by inputting the recipient's IBAN and an amount and be done with literally no third party involved? What?
> imo it would be better even setting up a basic kofi or buy me a coffee account, or I see the Ukrainians using paypal all the time.
You think it's easier to require setting up a third party account, adding your card to it, getting the card authorised, and doing the payment that way, with fees.
Than putting 20 digits in your own bank's application and pressing "send"?
> It should be a 3 click payment not a bank transfer requiring copying and pasting IBAN numbers and bank account numbers etc
It's a SEPA transfer, it's super common and nothing very complicated. There is no bank account number involved: the BIC is the bank's own identifier, and while it was commonly required 10 years ago it's been optional for a long time, my bank's application doesn't even have a field for that anymore.
There's a standard format for qrcode SEPA called EPC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code), however the amount is fixed which is not always desirable e.g.
- qrcode for a 133.70€ donation https://epc-qr.eu/?bname=CCC%20eV&iban=DE41%202001%200020%20...
- qrcode for a 13.30€ donation https://epc-qr.eu/?bname=CCC%20eV&iban=DE41%202001%200020%20...
> Than putting 20 digits in your own bank's application and pressing "send"?
Posting from U.S. (and admittedly a very U.S.-centric response), but in the case of Venmo/Paypal/buymeacoffee/Patreon/gofundme, yes.
I spent another half-hour trying to go the route of Wise suggested by a sibling comment but got stuck in the KYC hurdles. I already sent them my I.D. several times, but the selfie-verification flow won't complete for me, and I'm drawing the line at choosing not to install their app. (And well, I bit the bullet and installed app. It refuses to take a clear selfie, no matter how clear the the preview is /shrug)
Yes if you're trying to use SEPA from the US I can see that, no issue there.
But from the perspective of a very euro/german centric CCC[0], SEPA is really not complicated, and almost certainly free (I understand that a few banks still charge for those but most don't, possibly to a limit). So that's likely a blind spot of theirs: SEPA is probably the cheapest and most straightforward method for 95% of their donations or more.
Even more so as this is the central organisation, but the CCC is mostly a network of local clubs[1], so revenue to the national CCC is I assume almost entirely from the clubs shunting some of their income up
[0] if you check their front page, 1/2 to 2/3 the posts are in german, so are several of the pages
I don't see why you'd need Wise for a one-off payment. Just go to the international transfer page at your bank and enter the details? Do they not have one?
I believe this is par for the course for US banking and why so many alternate payment systems exist. And in all fairness, it does very much remind me of european banking 15-20 years ago, before the spread of smartphones and banks getting on with the program and making SEPA a (and later EPC) a baseline feature, undoubtedly prodded on by member states.
And I can understand having to translate from SEPA to SWIFT and then needing to deal with that to be less than ideal. When I had to send money to a friend outside the EU I had to go through the bank's website (not available at all from the mobile application) and to register & wait for validation of their account as beneficiary (24h delay IIRC).
At the same bank, SEPA transfers is a button on the home screen of the mobile application, and doesn't require any setup, just input the IBAN or scan the EPC and go (and god would I like more businesses to accept SEPA / use EPC instead of requiring inputting my credit card every time or going through third party payment providers)
- You don't have to setup an account
- You don't have to get the card authorised (I don't know what this means)
- Adding your card numbers in takes me 10 seconds, in the case of Paypal, it's already there so no time
- Fee's are minimal, not even worth wondering about
In terms of donation, entering in the amount to donate and clicking submit is yes, easier than going into my bank's website, bringing up the international transfer, and it's asking me for SMS confirmation that I want to do this, and I can't be bothered going further.
edit: I think maybe we are fighting the wrong battle.
You think IBAN is super easy, and maybe in Europe it is.
I'm not in Europe though and neither is the other chap, so maybe the donations are very easy in Europe but not so much out of it.
I've never done an IBAN payment in my life but I've donated thousands and thousands of dollars to loads of places all over the world without issue for years including Ukraine, this is the first time I've seen a place only accepting an IBAN donation, which feels like a friction that is not there for other places.
This feels like an "American discovering the outside world for the first time and discovering that American systems aren't very good" moment.
What I meant is that in BLIK, phone number gets resolved to a bank account number and a regular (express) transfer gets made, which can be seen in your account history.
It’s not; SWIFT is, and that requires additional information not shown there (although some of it is encoded in the IBAN if you know how to decode it).
Do you see the rest of the world complaining when no-one can send free uncomplicated transfers to fund a U.S. non-profit because the U.S.A. prefers to run a draconian consumer banking system?
The shier American arrogance in this comment thread gives me an aneurism. Fix your banking system, ours works.
i wanted to leave some breadcrumbs for anyone else in a similar situation (that is, trying to donate from U.S., not the bit about wealth) trying to figure out how to make it work, because i sure expended some effort digging it up.
this specific discussion thread is a call to donate and to write here in solidarity in having done so. i may not have successfully donated cold, hard cash, but i'll dare say my pledge of most of my afternoon trying to move mountains in order to send some scratch their way fits in here. it may have barely registered as a drop in the bucket had i been successful, but i believe this is what the thread is about.
Okay, but surely you can appreciate that making it easier for Europeans and non-Europeans to contribute to this cause would achieve the goal of the donation campaign more efficiently?
My personal opinion is that it would be very much worth it to accept payments via PayPal, Stripe, or other global electronic payment methods[^1]. And show how much money has been received to date.
I would rant about being content with “it works for us, people will donate if they really want to” but I’ve already done that too many times this year.
^1: yes there are some fees associated with this. But it’s also more convenient and probably more people would donate. But for some people the convenience argument does not compute.
As a Belgian (EU), I love how I can pay them just by sending them money, without all these weird intermediate companies stealing your personal details and sometimes even your money.
To answer some contras:
In my experience, the process takes about 10 seconds before the payment confirmation appears in the destination bank. Outside business hours and for some bank combinations, the actual money might be in a reservation/underway/unspendable state until the next business day starts. You can not cancel the transfer once it's gone, so most businesses don't care about that delay.
Typing the IBAN is a tiny bit annoying. I see QR codes appearing, containing bic+iban+amount+message to autofill. You pay by scanning the QR code and pressing OK.
AFAIK bic+iban+amount+message is all you need to pay from anywhere in the world. The BIC can be derived from the IBAN if you have the right and up to date database, but outside the EU it is smart to know it, just to be sure.
Sometimes, reading HN, I wonder if I should write a loooong blog post about how Belgium does its money transfers(iban) and buys bread (Bancontact). I suspect most of the EU will answer: duh, boring! Meanwhile, the average USAian brain goes poof.