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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

We have “faster payments” in EU/UK. You enter a bank account number and sort code, confirm it, and it transfers instantly in 99% of situations. 0 fees, it’s faster than card payments and available to anyone with a bank account. If you want to go down the clearing route you can do CHAPS which is the same as a US wire.

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Well, in Hungary had the "instant payment" for years, but last year the National Bank issued the spec. & requirement for the banks to facilitate the "qvik" payment method. Which is pretty much a QR code which you scan with your bank app and they will automatically parse & populate the fields for wire transfer. Then the payment provider will do a callback to the merchant which confirms that the payment was made [1]: https://www.cib.hu/en/Maganszemelyek/digitalis_bank/mobilalk...

There are two problems with faster payments in the UK as an alternative to cards.

1. A lack of a mechanism for using it for things like online purchases. 2. What about the 1% of the time when it is not instant?

On top of that you are not allowed, by law, to charge customers more for a card purchase so customers have no incentive to switch from cards and the existing mobile phone payment systems.

Not sure how they do it in the UK, but in the EU, for online purchases they typically give you a unique code to enter in the note field. This is picked up by an automated system and matched to your order.

It does sometimes take two business days to clear, so it's not good if your service requires fast turnaround (e.g. pizza delivery). Of course, it's always good to have another option, and perhaps even for pizza delivery you could accept it on trust with customers you have a good relationship with.

(On the software side, unlike a credit card payment, this does require that you temporally decouple ordering and billing. Besides the processing delay, a lazy user might not send the payment immediately. Two weeks seems to be a typical length of time, and of course you don't ship anything until payment is received. Treat it a bit like a cash-by-mail payment.)

It is guaranteed to take no more than two hours in the uk, but still not fast enough for some purposes. Entering a code manually is also not convenient and is more error prone. its useful and widely used but not a replacement for card payments.

In Sweden, we use Swish, you enter the phone number, not bank account. Everyone has it and connect the app to their bank account, so payments are instantly in your bank account.

Funnily enough, the company that runs UK Faster Payments (Vocalink) is a Mastercard subsidiary.

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