The big kicker for me is Interac e-Transfers, where you simply log into your banking and can email (or text) money to anyone in the country - they click the link in the email/SMS they receive, log into their bank account, and choose where the money is deposited. We've had this system in place since at least 2014? Hell I pay my rent and buy weed just by sending e-transfers, they're treated the same as cash and happen instantly. I reminds me of something that happened recently, I stumbled into a conversation with some of my American friends trying to figure out how the one person was going to pay the other >1000 miles apart; it was absolute lunacy listening to them decide between PayPal, Cash App, Venmo, etc., trying to figure out who had the lowest fees for both parties, factoring in the time it takes for the transaction to happen and transferring to/from their bank account if necessary. It's insane to me how the banking system underlying the world's largest economy is so far behind the times.
It's not instant. Transfers can be delayed for hours in some cases.
It has ridiculously low limits that cannot be raised.
Until recently it had a cumbersome question and answer system with strange character limits for each.
Virtually no businesses use it. You can buy weed (illegally) using it because they can't use credit card processing.
A revamp to the Interac system is in the works which looks similar to the UK faster payments. A frankly much better system.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-interac-cho...
Really, the existing autodeposit feature would be perfect if it let you log in to your online banking and confirm pending transactions before autodepositing them. For that matter it would be nice if the email gave me a string I could paste into my online banking to get to the existing confirmation page.
It's all much better than having to link your bank account to some third party or give away your credentials though.
Similarly, we won't be able to get rid of email but if clicking a link in an email opened an app instead of a webpage, it would be a lot harder for phishing websites to pretend to be my bank. (Assuming I'm expecting a mobile app, of course. A second line of defense is that my password manager might not prompt me to fill in the password because the URL doesn't match. But even that's not foolproof.) Even better would be if Interac E-Transfer itself was an app I could sign up for, then it could send me a push notification and I could skip my inbox entirely for these sort of transactions.
Of course, the only reason I trust apps more than websites is that I went to download them previously, rather than clicking a link that just showed up in my inbox. To that end, Gmail and other email providers have immense power if they created a design which could highlight emails from senders I've seen before as "trusted" and those from unknown senders as unknown.
Things get more gray-area though when the system itself fails: You can request money from anyone using Interac E-Transfers, and that means spammers could hijack a bank account and request money from friends and relatives you've recently sent e-transfers to, for example. Those emails would then appear as "trusted" and there's not much you can do to stop that, it's the cost of making money transfer "easy".
The problem comes when banks are able to argue that their half-hearted security means they aren't liable to pay for the consequences. Consumers need protecting against that.
† In the UK we have a lot of 3-D Secure, developed by Arcot. But of course the average consumer has no idea who "Arcot" are, and so no reason why they should distinguish an arcot.com site (legitimate, you're supposed to give them credentials if necessary to authenticate you) versus say badguy.example (a hypothetical phishing fraud). Both of them can show you branded imagery from your bank, both have a padlock, both claim they're keeping you safe. How should an ordinary person know?
Even now you never have to pin in the US.
CB dealt with Gemplus to add chip to all new cards emitted since 1992 so we had them for a long time. I don't know how it spread over europe, but as we had the industrial capacity to provide chip cards to everyone and a free market, I think it was easy to sell that to lots of european banks. CHIP+PIN is a really great deal for banks : it's cheap and the responsibility of all payments made with the PIN is on the card owner and are really hard (or impossible) to dispute.
I've been to stores in the US where they just swipe your magstrip and hand you back the card. No signature, no pin, they don't even look at it, so you can basically clone cards like it's still 1985.
This is consistent with how my UK bank treats any transaction occurring in the US: usually it's an instant card block and a polite phone call from them to check that it was actually me.
Sounds like the other response about transaction fees is on the right track.
And almost nobody would ever use one at a retail store or restaurant or food truck, if anything they’re only used for sending large sums of money to small businesses who want to avoid the 3% card processing fee. It’s still bad that this fee is so high on our primary payment rails, but it’s not as ridiculous as people in this thread are making it sound.
When I opened my US bank account they asked me how many cheques I wanted "to get started". I said none. Like why would I ever use one for anything? I don't use a quill pen either.
I still have a UK checkbook, but haven't written a cheque in a decade.
By the way I blame patents for this. Patents are a legal blockade on third party innovation. But that's how progress is made! Everyone copies everyone. You see something and you make a better version. Patents gum up the works and drive things to a standstill. They don't have this problem in China. Some people think investment won't happen without IP restrictions, but I think it will, just differently. There's no more unicorns and whales, but there's a lot more fish.
I'm hopeful we'll see all countries converge onto a similar pace of innovation and progress. Large countries/regions (as a simple proxy for population and access to raw resources) will hopefully reach this parity sooner than later. At that point, I also hope that 1 country/ideology will never be able to pull far ahead of another - short of some fluke breakthrough that can be kept secret.
Imagine two nations. A wealthy nation that used to innovate but has completely stopped innovation. It could continue to make advanced things using existing infrastructure and people, but could not improve beyond its current state. (This is the extreme, for illustration).
Then imagine a larger poorer nation that is rapidly advancing. Even before the poorer nation has surpassed the other in technological capabilities, it would be producing more total innovation per year. Growing requires lots of innovation. Stagnating... not so much.
So I am suggesting that the rate of innovation could be slowing in the US, and the rate of innovation could be higher in China. Even if absolute output is more advanced in the US, which would be a different metric. But the rate of innovation is important for projecting where each nation will be in the future, and I do believe intellectual property restrictions slow the rate of innovation.
If you take UPI, for instance, it's a fairly robust standard that has been developed by a non-governmental body that has been ruined by the regulator insisting that banks charge 0 transaction fees even for individuals that do a large number of transactions. This is because the regulator believes even a small fee will hamper adoption. This results in a relatively high failure rate because banks refuse to invest in servers and technologies that can handle the huge volume of transactions.
I am happy that technological standards are largely untouched by the government.
If anything is going to kill the US it will be something like the collapse of fair elections or the huge ballooning healthcare and education costs, not the payment rails.
If you think about it, the payments system is a 2+% sales tax! Levied by private corporations! I don't even have an alternative since by contract with Visa/MC stores can't provide a lower price for paying cash.
This hasnt been true for over a decade. Cash discounts are allowed by the Durbin amendment.
See: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1693o-2 (b)(2)(A)
There are a lot of small businesses around me that are cash only under $10/15 dollars. Given human psychology around advertised prices (i.e. most people don't think about opportunity cost), I'm not surprised cash discounts aren't common.
There's lots of good examples of regulated open banking. Europe has PDS2. Australia has Consumer Data Right Act. Several other countries that are now implementing open banking legislation: Brazil, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Singapore, Hong Kong, India.
It would be great to see US on that list some day.
Having an act, and being able to use it any useful manner are two very different things.
From my understanding, banks are required to provide an API. Not a specific one - any API. Which means each bank has a different one and you need yet another rent seeker that aggregates those APIs.
That's on top of requiring specific, often outdated security mechanisms, so now every time I want to pay something with a credit card I have to do extra authentication, >1 GB of my phone's memory is filled just with bank auth apps (again, each bank has their own).
If anyone can implement such an aggregator, market competition should drive the cost of that close to zero soon enough.
If you'd like to use the API to access your own account using open source software, good luck (unless you find an aggregator that is certified and allows you to access your own account through them).
Defining this is a job for industry bodies and suchlike, as is keeping it current. Lest we forget jokes like the 2020 Brexit agreement containing references to Netscape Navigator 4.0
what exactly does this mean? Other countries did not have a corona virus wave?
> what exactly does this mean?
That our response to the current wave has been tragic.
> Other countries did not have a corona virus wave?
Yes they did. However, we had the opportunity to learn from the tragic things that happened elsewhere and could have done stuff to prevent it/soften the blow but we didn't. The problem is not that we "allowed" another wave to happen, but that we allowed people to die due to a lack of oxygen and ICU beds.
In the US, I have to pass through so many rent seekers to move some digits over (Plaid, Stripe, and Visa/MasterCard). Meanwhile Europe has PSD2 now and China AliPay/WeChat Pay. Even India, which in the past 3 months has unfortunately proven dysfunctional has UPI, which is orders of magnitude better than what we have.
When has the US recently passed legislation or standards that fosters innovation? (this is a serious good faith question - there seems to be a lot of govt grants for stuff like basic research, but a whiff of money churns out stuff like repealing net neutrality).