Conversely, with a debit/credit card that’s all automated. No manual labor involved.
Could we automate international bank transfers? Probably. But customers end up using a debit/credit card because it’s the only option offered.
We recently rolled out ACH bank transfer payments (US only) and offered an amazon gift card for anyone who wanted to switch. <5% of our customer base utilized this option.
You have to register for a debitor identifier and ask your customers for permission to debit their accounts first but overall it works well and can be automated. It's the standard way to do direct debits in Europe.
In my experience, it's a lot more common and accepted than credit card business payments in Europe.
You might also want to check out figo and fidor.
[1] https://gocardless.com/faq/merchants/international-payments/
[2] https://gocardless.com/faq/merchants/
edit: link #2
Opportunity, business idea seekers!
Would you share more details about this, if you can?
Generally, it's way too easy to reverse a SEPA payment for a customer (up to 8 weeks if I recall after purchase). It led to some, admittedly rare, cases where we can issue a refund to a customer and then they'll reverse the payment as well. So we ended up with negative revenue to the same amount of what we charged, which can be up to 190 EUR. So we'd actually refund 190 EUR and then lose another 190 EUR + Stripe chargeback fees on top. Ouch. There was little or nothing we could do about it apart from begging the customer to transfer the money back to us...
On top of that, there were chargeback fees even if the bank, rather than the customer, reversed the charge. This happens not too infrequently (IIRC around 5% of transactions). If this was a credit card transaction, the bank would simply decline the charge. With SEPA it's not as simple... The charge gets through, supposedly, and then bounces with a chargeback fee...
Another thing I should mention is the async nature of the whole thing. Unlike cards that get authorized/declined instantly, we're talking days or weeks with SEPA. For a monthly subscription, this eats into the first month easily.
Again, we're talking about private individuals here (B2C), typically students in our cases, and as I mentioned predominately from Germany, so YMMV a lot with other customer types or countries.
[0] https://stripe.com/docs/sources/sepa-debit#create-source
Interesting that people in Denmark use a credit card, although Wikipedia seems to imply it implies as a debit card inside Denmark? [1] I know debit is definitly more common in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.
Credit cards are much more uncommon in Europe (people use debit cards, business get invoices paid through direct debit), and using credit cards for ongoing operational expenses is unheard of. This has caused a lot of friction with the accounting department of the companies I've tried to introduce some SaaS.
Usually, the solution is that one specific member of staff gets a personal corporate credit card and has to do tedious declarations and administration.