> You can just quickly and instantly send money by entering somebodies phone number. And it’s built into all the banking apps

That's how zelle works as well, with the exception that it's probably not built into every banking app, considering the number of US banks.

No, it's not. Not even close.

US is way behind.

Like over a decade behind.

Could you elaborate? I've used Zelle in the exact way you've mentioned previously (entered a phone number and an amount to send straight from my bank app) with no issues.

Zelle was a consortium of the biggest US banks. It works fine if you have a deposit account at one of those institutions, or if you have created a Zelle account that lets them get you funds through a shim if your bank isn't a member participant of Zelle. If you're at a brokerage that doesn't support it, a credit union, or a community bank, your experience is meh or non existent.

FedNow is native real time messaging plumbing, so all deposit accounts can support it once you plug into FedNow (which is run at cost by the Fed). We should theoretically arrive at an experience similar to UPI, PIX, and other instant payment systems where you can use phone numbers, email, or QR codes to facilitate payments over the next 1-3 years.

Plenty of credit unions like BECU and First Tech fully support Zelle for sending and receiving payments, some credit unions even have higher daily and weekly Zelle limits than the traditional banks.

There are some for sure, but the vast majority of credit unions do not plug into Zelle or RTP.

In the US I just iMessage money to people. Doesn’t work for Android, sure, but I know very few people still using Android and for them we just use Venmo.

Not the same.

Payments in Asia and other developed countries are instant - bank to bank. No crappy 3rd party app.

So how do I text someone money bank-to-bank? How do I give someone money who doesn't have a bank account? I do this today with iMessage. And it's not a 3rd party app.

Someone without a bank account but an iPhone? Sure.