I feel like they are talking about the UPI (unified payment interface) that exists in India. It works way better than Zelle because you don’t need to use your bank’s app (you can if you want to, but most people use PayTM/Google Pay/PhonePe), and you can add multiple bank accounts in your preferred UPI client.

You just get a UPI ID that looks like whatever@yourapporbank. Then for online payments you can just enter that ID and approve/deny the transaction request in your UPI client. You could also just generate a QR code for that transaction and scan it with the UPI client

I see that a lot of people are unaware about UPI on HN, I might summarise my experience in a separate post and comparing it to Zelle

> I see that a lot of people are unaware about UPI on HN, I might summarise my experience in a separate post and comparing it to Zelle

Please do! I would buy you a coffee or similar for doing so. Likewise if someone wants to create and maintain a Wikipedia page listing instant payment systems and their details (because FiServ keeps taking down their marketing enumerating this information while also excluding it back from Wayback Machine[1]), I'd be willing to throw some fiat at that.

[1] https://www.fisglobal.com/en/flavors-of-fast (404s, don't bother clicking, Modern Treasury has some content marketing that refers to it)

Previous UPI discussion on HN from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24094323. It links to posts explaining UPI in detail.

WeChat and AliPay exist because China had the same problem.

In India, Singapore, Hong Kong, this is a solved problem.