... In Europe there I? What's your point?
You open your banking app, enter their bank and account number, the amount to transfer, then somewhere between seconds and a couple minutes the money arrives.
I once accidentally ACH debited the wrong person’s account at a different bank.
There was no real way for me to stop the transfer without doing extremely bad things involving having my bank report me to law enforcement.
So, I ended up sending the money back via a second transfer. That’s problematic, since the first transfer I performed was certainly unauthorized and could have been clawed back by my accidental victim (I trusted them, and I was 100% at fault, but that’s not the point.)
The whole experience was bad all around, and I thought ACH was designed to handle exactly this class of screw up.
Most major banks are apart of the Zelle program and you can send your contacts funds easily and quickly. I get notification of family sending me funds pretty much immediate with confirmation of deposit within a few minutes even for a few thousand.
Also, Apple Pay is often immediate but has taken like 10 minutes as well so that could vary.
Now, if this was a bank to bank ACH transfer, the recipient could just refuse the credit. There's an error code for this situation: R10: “Customer Advises Originator is Not Known to Receiver and/or Originator is Not Authorized by Receiver to Debit Receiver’s Account”.[1] You can contact your bank and refuse an incoming ACH transaction, which will generate this.
This is different from sending money back. It says to the banking system that the transaction was rejected and did not complete. So you're not sending the unknown originator your money. You're refusing to take their money. This eliminates the possibility of a reversal from their end costing you money. It also marks the transaction as an error in the banks at both ends. This is useful, because many errors on an account are an alarm condition and will get the attention of some fraud department.
If you have to reverse a transaction, do it fast. There are time limits for the simple paths.
(A friend of mine runs a bank branch of a major bank. Much of her day is spent straightening out error situations like this.)
[1] "https://www.nacha.org/rules/differentiating-unauthorized-ret...