Banking in ANZ is light years ahead of the US. Why on Earth would you want to use a potentially malicious rent-seeking third-party when you could send it directly bank to bank account for free?

Looks like this is adding a convenience numbers/mapping to addresses and speeding the transfer time, which is welcome. Though I appreciated the nightly clearance because on a few occasions it gave me a chance to change the amount.

> Banking in ANZ is light years ahead of the US.

And light years behind some other countries.

Out of curiosity, who is the world leader in banking?

Going from Australia to the UK felt like going back in time 20 odd years.

When was that? I'm in the UK and I'm curious what I'm missing out on.

I have mobile banking for everything, I can do almost instant (sub 30s) transfers between banks, we have contactless payment cards and Apple/Android pay support is ubiquitous, and we can do person to person transfers using a phone number (the horribly named "PayM").

What are we missing out on here that we should be pushing our banks for? I do see that there are a number of things that people just don't seem to use very much here, but that's less about the tech, and more that there just doesn't seem to be the demand, PayM being the big missed opportunity.

This is not exhaustive but it is what comes to mind.

* Paper still required for most proof of identity/address etc. Particularly annoying almost all providers are pushing customers to move to online statements but then opening any new accounts still require paper

* Wet signatures still considered king/stronger than other forms of identification. This has caused me issues as I barely ever need to sign and hence my signature is never consistent!

* Took 5 weeks to open an everyday account upon arrival. Seems pretty standard for all ex pats I've talked to. If you are a UK local maybe you've never experienced this?

* Slow to list pending transactions although based on other posts here I may be an outlier in this experience. I assume the new digital banks (Monzo etc) have improved this significantly

* Having to specify that you want a contactless debit/credit card - do people really not want contactless cards? You can always just not use that function...

* All the banking apps I've seen over here are terrible, unfortunately didn't get to try out any of the new digital banks. I assume CBA is probably still the king for mobile banking capabilities

* When I first arrived there was no Android Pay or Apple Pay, but thankfully that did come in around mid to late 2016

EDIT: I also signed up to use PayM but never came across a single person that I needed to transfer money to/receive from that actually had PayM

Setting up accounts for the first time is a pain here, but most natives do that when they're a child. Once you already have one account, setting up subsequent accounts with other banks is much easier. Personally it has never been a problem, but I know several non-natives who had extreme difficulty.

My understanding is this is largely due to very tight regulations that have been placed on the banks to verify identity and stop money laundering. They also now rely on the banks to collect taxes and close accounts of illegal immigrants.

Lots of places ask for signatures, but I've never had anyone actually check my signature. Which is good, because like you, my signature is completely inconsistent.

Pending transactions I've never had an issue with - they usually appear on my phone within a few seconds of me tapping my card. And my banks automatically issued me contactless cards without me having to specify - but they did have an opt-out.

Android Pay was late, but is now accepted virtually everywhere across the country.

Banking apps are terrible. No argument there. Hopefully the new open digital banking legislation will fix that.

For sending money I've still always just used plain old FPS (instant) bank transfers or PayPal. PayM hasn't really been pushed enough yet...

>Banking apps are terrible. No argument there. Hopefully the new open digital banking legislation will fix that.

Honestly the Nationwide app is pretty good imho

Some particular notes:

> Paper still required for most proof of identity/address etc.

Government requirement, the "100 point test". Introduced to cut down on money laundering. It also cuts down on a lot of other crimes. In Australia I used my credit cards for any old thing. In the US if I sneeze too loudly the bank freezes it and asks me to confirm the last dozen transactions.

> Wet signatures still considered king/stronger than other forms of identification. This has caused me issues as I barely ever need to sign and hence my signature is never consistent!

I never had this experience. PIN or ID for identity, signature for legal effect. Meanwhile in the US I sign for everything.

> Having to specify that you want a contactless debit/credit card - do people really not want contactless cards?

This might be specific to your bank. They marketed contactless heavily when it came, right after heavily marketing chip-and-PIN. Might have been an own-goal.

I'm told, anecdotally, that a lot of the UK's banking modernisation in the 90s was done by Australians who participated in Australia's banking modernisation in the 80s. Might not be true, but it sounds cool, so I'm going with it.

>Paper still required for most proof of identity/address etc. Particularly annoying almost all providers are pushing customers to move to online statements but then opening any new accounts still require paper

Wouldn't they just send a courier with the papers to your place to sign it? I don't have any UK accounts so just wondering, because that's what my experience signing physical documents has been in Czech. On the other hand, N26 in Germany just needs a video call.

I've been with monzo for close to a year now, and have been with their current account for the last couple of months, and in my opinion it solves pretty much every issue you have listed above. I couldn't go back.

How quickly do credit card transactions appear in your account?

In Australia (CBA at least) it is instantaneous, in Hong Kong, it is at least 3 days.

CBA has also automated most of the account management through its netbanking - whereas in Hong Kong I need to visit a branch to create or delete an account.

I'm curious about the "20 year" difference between the UK and Australia too. My brother moved down under in 1999 (so, y'know, almost 20 years ago) and I've visited for 1-4 weeks every year since 2006. Never in that whole time have I noticed any radical difference in the personal finance experience, nor had any "ah man, you lot back home are so backward!" anecdata from him.

> How quickly do credit card transactions appear in your account?

On this note, I just checked, and the £9.75 I spent on breakfast 90 minutes ago is on my account right now. I don't know exactly when it appeared but I expect it was near enough instantaneous. Is there a reason it wouldn't be?

Frictionless and cheap international transfers would be nice.

I know Barclays have an app but I would prefer it to be a standard feature.

Check out Revolut. It's pretty awesome (no affiliation, just a happy user).

I'm not sure about world leader, but in Norway/Sweden, they've had things like PayID (Vipps and Swish), MFA, etc. for a bit.

Wikipedia mentions credit card linking and mobile apps, are those required? If so, would be negatives in my book.

Yeah, the basic idea of it is faster payments + the ability to transfer to an email address/phone number/ABN. The value is in it being supported by all the various banks and being instant, so you can just log into your banking app and instantly transfer to someone's account using only their email address, for example.

Source: I work on the account resolution service that is part of this.

Interesting. I am one of (what I assume to be) a very small subset of people that manged to enter their email address before there was any input validation. (my account is with one of the big four). Despite using internet banking my registered email address ends with @127.0.0.1

Would this prevent me receiving payments?

Ha, that's interesting - validation and normalisation is the responsibility of the banks so would depend on whether the bank of the person doing the lookup accepts it as a valid email address

AND, my understanding, is richer data to go along with transactions. A shop could, theoretically, attach a receipt to payments so you can view that in your internet banking.

Yes, this is also true :)

I presume the identifier is only usable to receive payments not to pull payments? Why does it need to be a phone number or email. Doesn’t it just need to be a unique string?

Yeah, only for receiving for now as far as I'm aware. As far as the reason it's restricted to certain types, I'm not sure - I'm contracting at a subcontractor of SWIFT so we're down the pipeline at the implementation end of things, not much visibility of business decisions.

I think I know one of the QA people who work in your company. You’ve done a pretty amazing job from the little snippets I’ve heard of this project!

Thanks, unfortunately I can't take too much of the credit personally as I've only been involved in the last few months of a multi-year project. Might be Brett that you know?

Here in Australia, bank transfers are free between banks, but can take a couple of days to clear sometimes (same bank is instant). Heard horror stories elsewhere, but pretty good customer experience here in AU IMHO.

Yeah bank transfers have always been reliable for me in sunny Australia but the issue pre-the NPP is the time it takes to transfer inter-bank and/or inter-credit union.

It’s particularly a ‘problem’ when your payments are delayed by public/bank holidays (especially those that only occur in a bank’s home state!) and feels particularly anachronistic compared to modern payment gateways.

Out of that $1bn AUD, probably half is on banker’s wages :P

No it's more like PayPal in that your PayID can be email/mobile.

But that said I would rather trust my bank than PayPal and to be fair I run into people all the time without an account.