what on earth is banking doing over there in the US? I wouldn't know how to write a cheque these days if I wanted to, and the only cheque I've seen in the last 10 years or so is from my (now deceased) grandmother in-law sending birthday money to my wife.

I'm guessing this is why several US payment companys and start-ups just don't make any sense to me: "make payments easier!"

but it's hard for me to understand how to make it easier than just typing in someone's phone number or email and sending them money, or purchasing via tap and go with your card/ phone. Don't you at least have electronic transfers if not those other newfangled technologies? are you (seriously) suggesting you can't transfer money between your accounts?

Banking in the US has first mover disadvantage.

Because of how and when it got computerized, it's hard to move it forward again. There's no desire for sweeping changes, everything has to move slowly now.

There are several personal transfer services (PayPal is ancient and fits the mold), but none have a lot of penetration. I think Zelle? is deployed through bank integration, and may end up with a lot of users as a result; possibly critical mass.

There was a lot of backlash on rf payments the first go round, a few issuers gave me cards with it, but then they removed it. Then they started issuing cards with chips, and now most of them are putting rf payments back in. A lot of payment terminals have the hardware for it, but a lot of them also have signs that say don't tap to pay.

I can easily do electronic (ACH) between my accounts, as long as I've gone through setup, which takes days for test deposits to show up. But to transfer to a friend or a relative is tricky.

The first digital computers were used by banks within years of each other - 1955 for BoA in the USA, 1958 for BNP in France and 1959 for Barclays in the UK. And those machines merely took over from existing calculating systems that had been in place for a good couple of decades.

US banks suck for a lot of reasons but part of it is that culturally and regulatorily the entire financial/banking/commercial environment in the US is very conservative. And there's not much in the way of pressure to make changes either - whether internally from competition and regulation or externally from the need to interact with other countries. Like broadband, consumer banking is basically an oligopoly that will quite happily plod along providing the same service as long as it can.

Can't you use a wire-transfer or an ACH transfer? All those use cases are easily solved with electronic transactions in most of Europe, Asia and even in Latin American countries like brazil. They are usually inexpensive or free and instantaneous.

ACH in the US is not simple to use. Companies that accept ACH payments are using a payment processor that comes with a fee (usually less than credit card fees); contractors aren't going to set that up. Consumer to consumer transfers built on ACH have increased in the last couple of years, but with low limits, inappropriate for contractors, and generally with terms of service prohibitting business use. It's easy to move money between my accounts with tools based on ACH, though. There's nowhere at my bank where I can say send $x to a routing number and account number, it takes a bunch of setup work.

Wire transfers are expensive here; my credit union which doesn't generally have high fees, charges $29 to send a wire (they don't charge for incomming wires, but some banks do). I've had some brokerages with free wires, but usually that's tied to a balance requirement or in connection with a company sponsored account (for stock based compensation or retirement accounts).

In the US, wire transfers can incur fees for both sender and recipient. ACH is more often used by medium to large businesses transferring money from or to consumers, but the ergonomics are pretty bad for one-off person to person transfers, to the point that if you hire a plumber who owns their own business, they'll probably accept check, and sometimes accept credit cards.

The US does have some electronic networks for instant, no-cost p2p payments. https://www.zellepay.com/ has a large number of participating major banks with some major exceptions. A lot of people use https://venmo.com/ or https://cash.app/ which are not directly integrated with banks but then offer electronic transfer of funds to bank accounts.

Australia too. Electronic transfers here are free and instant. When I used to rent I just set up a recurring payment through my bank’s website (free and easy, with any bank to any bank). Now my mortgage gets taken out each month automatically via a direct deposit authorisation. (ACH equivalent).

Wire transfers from my bank in the US require me to call up and make a request.

Writing a check is the fastest way for me to transfer between two accounts. :(

New Zealand is phasing out cheques.

Many shops don’t accept them, some banks have already stopped using them altogether, and the rest of the major banks are phasing them out this year.

A cheque is a rare thing to see (I haven’t handled one for a decade or so?)