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Comment by noxvilleza | Hacker News Reader

Part of this is just the banking here in Germany being so bad. Fast ('instant') transfers are relatively new for many banks, online banking has always been quite poor/limited, and many of the cards they used to offer were Girocard (or Maestro) and didn't work with online retailers. Paypal has always been a great buffer to those problems.

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Well, to be fair, even for many customers 'instant' transfers are new. Even if their bank offers them for months now. Some folks still consider 'online banking' a novelty.

In 2015 when I still lived in South Africa, you could do near-instant online transfers - but there is/was a cost involved (I think about $0.45 for transactions under $250). Online banking was super common then, I imagine it's become even more so in the last 10 years. I was quite shocked by how outdated the German banking system was, although it's definitely improved in many ways in the last decade.

Even in 2006, in Australia you could do interbank transfers with near instant availability (certainly within 60s), usually for free.

That’s interesting, because every time there’s something about a money transfer service, there are a ton of posts saying “Oh, the United States is so backwards, in Europe you could do this forever.” Apparently, by Europe, they mean the particular place they happen to live in.

Europe isn’t a monolith and some countries are weird about cards. Here’s two examples.

In Germany, cash is strongly preferred or was the last time I was there a few years ago.

In Norway, cash is nigh nonexistent.

Don’t mistake Germany as representative of the median European country when it comes to card transactions.

Trite comment. Debit/credit cards never took off in Germany because everyone had a Giro card that worked perfectly well for cashless payments. And for online payments, PayPal filled the gap quick enough. The average German saw no reason to request a Visa/MasterCard from their bank for a heavy fee when PayPal did the job. That's also the difference: Germany never had the "Here, have a free credit card" culture.

A Giro card is a debit card.

With a more benevolent reading of my comment you could have seen that I do consider them equivalent for cashless local payments. My first sentence was meant as "[American] debit/credit cards". This doesn't invalidate anything I said.

In 1995 I could give anyone in Germany my PostBank konto number and they could “wire” me money by calling the bank.

In 2026 I pay contractors working on my US house by logging into my bank and instructing it to mail a paper check.

The only exception is Venmo which everyone expects will be enshittified.

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