On January 9 2025, EU made it compulsory to have receipt of transfers instant and in October 2025 - sending too should be available at the same cost as the normal transfer. There's nothing stopping from implementing bot send/receive instant transfers in January 2025. Yet, some of these banks only enabled instant receipts in January and will make the sending available exactly on 8th October 2025, 1 day before the deadline. What a business mindset to have!
It's a bit complex for a comment, but the TLDR is:
* funds in transit (called "positive float") are held in the banks account, and can be used by the bank to earn interest
* liquidity management - there are a bunch of considerations here, but the longer settlement periods enable banks to do "deferred net settlements" (just paying each other the difference between all transactions in a batched way) and also helps balance sheets in other ways, making it easier to meet reserve requirements, smoothing out intra-day liquidity, etc
The delay also means systems have more time to catch fraudulent transactions, and to block them before they happen.
For example, during Covid when interest rates where negative - some major German banks like Commerzbank charged interest from customers when their balance exceeded an amount like 50000€. Now that the interest rates have gone up - they are not even close to passing on those high interest rates. The same Commerzbank now asks for 50000€ in assets otherwise they charge a 4.90€ subscription charge from their customers.
So yeah there might be technicalities but nothing stops those technicalities being addressed until the law does.
So you're only paying for your second or third account.
This has changed since May 2025. Talk about inaccuracies ;)
Btw, as much as I appreciate the “correction” it doesn’t change overall direction of the comment.
It has? I've never paid a subscription charge, and I've never been above that amount.
Which is complete nonsense as the transaction is actually forward-payed, and guaranteed by the central European bank, exactly for that reason.
So, in fact, the only reason why certain banks delay payments is so that they can keep the funds "in transit" to earn interests.
Plenty of banks don't play that game, so if your bank does, they are taking the piss and it's time to change.
(The U.S. really is an outlier among developed nations in that its giro system is not widely used, and many residents would not even know how to access it. Hence Paypal's network effect can offer value there. Europe is very different.)
Not at all, not even close! In most cases, that's wrong even today.
Want to sell something online? A book you wrote, a game you made? There's no way for people to pay you via giro and automatically receiving the good on the page where the payment process was initiated.
Giro is not instant, and almost no bank will offer an API that signals that a specific customer has transferred funds successfully. It always takes hours, and the confirmation process is almost always only semi-automatic for the seller.
Visa/MasterCard/PayPal/Twint/Tikkie/Wero have and will provide actual value. Giro was nice 15 years ago, but hasn't kept up.
And even for money transfers between two private individuals, giro is the inferior system - mainly because Euro banks fail at UX/UI. I don't know a single bank that offers an "address book" in their online banking app/website. If you want to send someone money, you better remember their IBAN yourself. And because the system comes with a degree of anonymity, you can't even send people money back! Their IBAN is not part of the metadata of an incoming transfer, the only way to send money back is to contact that person and have them send their IBAN.
SEPA transfers are (at least mine have been) max. 1h until the transfer is complete (some limit this to "banking hours"). Instantaneous transfer is common.
It seems to me like there is great variety depending on what bank you use.
API's are common, and even the same between banks now with PSD2.
Tbh, a banking barcode (or EPC QR if you prefer) displayed on the seller's webpage with unique reference + reading it with your phone and making the payment is that internet payment method via giro. The webshop uses PSD2 open banking to get notified of new transactions and knows when it is transferred.
Mastercard has started to punish banks that support Girocard by default, demanding that banks drop support.
This is not an issue with Giro or Girocard, but with the existing payment monopolies.
Yes, that's what I'm talking about. This is how services like Twint in Switzerland or PayPal in Germany have worked for the last decade+.
You're saying this is currently possible, with any arbitrary two German/European banks on either end? Your customer scans the QR code, hits a button, and the QR code is replaced by a download link, and the delay is <20 seconds?
Do you have a link for the tech stack to built this?
I don't have a complete solution but this is all public information.
Barcode to read with your bank app (guide is in Finnish) https://www.finanssiala.fi/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Pankki...
Example Bank API: https://op-developer.fi/p/psd2-info
The user will likely take ~20 seconds to get their phone out, unlock it, log in to the bank app, confirm the transaction and set their phone down. The PSD2 API shows the transaction immediately (again, instant transfer being enabled is a prerequisite) and the seller can confirm that payment is complete.
dude honestly no idea what your point is. since instant and free giro transfer with more or less 3 clicks is the death pf anything else.
why the fuck should I have an extra layer to my bank? Its insecure ;)
I would like to know are you american? This thread is about europe
The thing Twint (and Wero and PayPal) allows is really easy, fast, cheap (not PayPal) and secure (not PayPal) online stores. Scan the QR Code on screen, 1 second later your download link replaces the QR code. Done.
Now, I'd like to know how to do that with SEPA/giro. PSD2 and open banking sounds promising. You seem knowledgeable. Why doesn't anybody use that (or do you have an example for a online store using it)? How fast is it really?
And why did it take so long? Twint is 10 years old, iDeal is 20 years old, PayPal is 25 years old.
Because once you have those capabilities, you can do a small firmware update on credit card readers with a display, and you can pay by app everywhere - no credit card, NFC or Google/Apple/Samsung pay integration neccessary.
And because of that we have leeches like Sofortüberweisung. They basically proxy the web interface of your bank and you'll give them full access to your account, so they do the transaction for you by scraping your banks web interface (and your transaction history) and report success to the vendor.
A reminder that Sofort is made by Klarna, the company that mandated usage of AI and fired 700 employees because of AI.
All three of my banking apps offer adresse books.
why couldnt i sent money back? I see the sender and the IBAN
I can even in some cases cancell payments
where are you at?
me france germany italy and switzerland.
Are you from the states or canada? The parent talked about europe.
Instant transactions are a very recent development and are only starting to become common because banks are required by law to support them for free come October. Up until rather recently instant SEPA transfers were often either not supported or came with additional fees attached.
Instant transfers have been the default for quite a while, and possible (for a fee) for as long as I can remember.
Online payments with instant confirmation have been really easy for 15+ years.
What giro system are you talking about here? Do you mean the postal giro system that has existed in Europe since the 1960s and has been used for postorder shopping since before the Internet existed? That system was already obsolete in NL last century when we had the first digital invoicing systems via e-mail (and digital personal banking via dial-up), and we've had direct online payments via iDeal since 2005. Are you saying that some countries are still relying on paper-based payment instructions in 2025?
I don't know a single bank that offers an "address book" in their online banking app/website.
Conversely, I don't know a single online banking portal that does NOT offer such basic functionality. Santander, ING, and Rabobank all do.
And because the system comes with a degree of anonymity
What do you mean? Every payment in my bank's transaction history shows the account number on the other end of the transfer.
Banks have APIs you can integrate with, which e.g. KDE's money app used to support in the past.
The actual underlying transaction system is extremely well designed and reliable, it's just missing the nice APIs that other payment systems have.
There was a earlier competitor much better than PayPal, called Giro-Pay: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giropay
It had all the stuff PayPal had at launch, also some of the feature made it into the eventually-died "Paydirekt" (which also died)
The main reason could be the high fragmentatin across the EU market.
Though, WERO, now we have a new appraoch, this time with support von ECB :-D
Bank transfers were not instant though, they usually took a work day. This is changing with the introduction of instant transfers, which become mandatory to support this year, and are also not allowed to be more expensive since this year also.
I wasn't even aware such a thing existed? Or do you mean Zelle, which seems to be some sort of hybrid system... It's not quite a giro system as found in most of EU, more like "PayPal, but built by BofA and CapOne"
If I need to pay a friend, it’s Venmo or PayPal in the US. In theory Zelle too, but I don’t know anybody who uses it.
Quote: "Wero is a European mobile payment system that is intended to replace Giropay in Germany, Paylib in France,[1] Payconiq in Belgium[2] and Luxembourg, and iDEAL in the Netherlands."
I was thinking about "SEPA" (more precisely "SEPA Instant") which is the layer WERO builds on.
Portugal got mbway, Austria used to have paybox, there is iDEAL, sofort.com and generally besides the local country systems with de-facto European banks you get "SEPA Instant Credit Transfer" nowadays - however IBAN is "harder" to share than lets say the phone number your friends already got.
Here you could do "cash on delivery", credit/debit card, account transfers (yes even across banks, it not as big an issue as US banks makes it) or you could send stamps (not a popular options).
There was never a need for PayPal or PayPal style services. These days it's safe to assume that people have a debit card (or MobilePay in the case of Denmark).
But now, you can generate one-time use cards, which are safer than assigning a card on your PayPal account.
The other thing, is that you can do chargebacks more easily, when you buy on eBay, but this comes at the cost of higher fees (which is basically insurance)
Other than that, it's a platform that cannot be trusted
Charge backs was also always fairly easily done via your bank. Though you did have to call them, so yes PayPal was/is easier. I don't know, the trust in PayPal was always really really low.
Cash on delivery was a huge pain since you had to potentially large amounts of cash ready to hand over to your postman upon delivery. That's the opposite of convenient.
Alternatively you could pay by bank wire transfer, which of course led to an additional delay of a day or two until your transfer actually arrived at the sellers bank account. Nobody wants to deal with barriers like these in ecommerce. Paypal was a godsend back then. Remember, barely anyone had a credit card in those days in Germany.
Let’s say direct bank transfers are not counted. What alternatives are not based on Visa/Mastercard on global scale?
Each country had a local solution. Direct transfers, or better direct debit, was the common way in Germany. You literally just entered your bank account number and that was payment, the seller would debit it from your account. Zero authentication, and it worked - never had a fraud issue (in the background, I assume sellers checked the delivery address against some database before accepting this, as the seller would ultimately be on the hook for any fraud).
Aside from manual bank transfers (seller ships when the money arrives 1-3 business days later) there were also two systems based on direct bank transfers. One (Sofortüberweisung/Sofort) was essentially institutionalized phishing - you give a third party your banking credentials, they log into your account, snoop around a bit, wire the money to the merchant using your credentials and confirm to the merchant that your account has enough money and the wire is happening. The other was a similar service but by the banks, so you'd log in directly at your bank to authorize the transfer.
Most other European countries had other local systems that covered this need, but there was nothing global. Globally, your best bet for small amounts is unfortunately likely still PayPal unless your counterparty accepts crypto. For bigger amounts, there is Wise and similar services (note that I've had a horrible experience with Wise - KYC asking for things that didn't exist, luckily before they had my money to hold hostage). Wiring directly to accounts with Revolut also works reasonably well.
For transfers within the Euro zone, a regular SEPA bank transfer is easiest, with the only "downside" that you need to ask for the destination IBAN rather than just a phone number or similar that some of the other systems support.
EU scale there are tons of solutions: iDeal (expanding to EU from NL), Klarna, sofort..
The predecessor of Wero (iDeal) has been in use in The Netherlands for almost two decades. Nobody has credit cards here and everyone does online shopping with iDeal
I am amazed on how this practical solution can't be implemented for age verification instead of all those ID uploads etc.
What really replaces Paypal in my everyday life is Revolut.
Of course nobody's using Wero now because the whole thing isn't really online yet, just a pilot program on a few websites with a few banks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)
8 million transactions in only a few months (mostly in France), I wouldn't say "nobody's using Wero"
WERO is an application/UI layer on top of SCT INST payment scheme, which adds some additional features like "send to email" etc. as well as other pay-specific features in the future (pay-per-request, which is also a defined way in the SEPA/EURO rulebooks and processing docs)
P.S. lives in Germany 5+ years and can attest its banks and online banking are generations behind its neighboring countries. A travesty.