Across a lot of Europe there are systems/companies which already fill this role. I'm familiar with Blik in Poland which in addition to letting you buy stuff online and in person pretty also lets you send money to an average person using only their mobile phone number.

In Scandinavia we do exactly that via the Vipps platform and mobile app.

In the UK I can use my bank's app/website to send money to another person's bank account.

What do these 'sending money to people' systems do more than that?

To send a normal person money using blik you just need their phone number, this is usually more streamlined to obtain/deal with than the traditional identifying numbers for bank accounts.

To buy something online using blik your bank's app generates a 6 digit one time code which is valid for something like 2 minutes. You enter that on the website of whoever you're trying to pay rather than give them your card number and cvv. This is nice because in addition to being a lot shorter to enter than a card number a nefarious person can't reuse the code to perform more transactions at a later date (since they don't have your card number).

So in this case the two parties both need to be registered with the app and then can exchange money that they easily know e.g. the phone number.

The phone number is an id into the bilk system.

With bank transfers both parties do not need to be register with an app they just use the id that they have already for other reasons the bank sort code and id. So needs less extra infrastructure but the user interface is more unfriendly (people don't remember their bank account number).

Now if banks linked your phone number to the account number and sort code.....

The way it works in Poland is that the banks which participate in the blik system (which I think is all or most of the banks with large usership) take care of the link between phone number and account for you. You don't need to register for anything special just provide your number when you open your bank account.

There is no separate app for blik (at least as far as I'm aware) the functionality is integrated into my bank's app.

Ah thanks - so why is this not more common in other countries.

I do know why it is not in US as giving bank account details to others allows other to withdraw from your account.

This is not true in the UK so why no similar system here?

I don't think the lack of such a system in the US is for the reason you think - all you do is tell your bank to send money to the account attached to whatever phone number you enter so it should be technically possible.

As a former resident of the UK my feeling is that the lack of such system there is because most bank apps have traditionally been shit. Its probably better today but back in 2015 (when Blik launched) I would not have expected to do anything useful with my bank's app.

For something like blik to work well you need every participating bank to already have a decent mobile banking app and for them to be willing to put in some time/money into integrating the new functionality with that app. Blik started because a bunch of the biggest Polish banks got together and between them founded a company to launch the service. Its really hard for me to imagine the 6 biggest banks in the UK getting together and doing that.

Poland's banking industry also skipped a bunch of "cruft" that we have in the UK because it started after we'd already progressed past those things being relevant. My Polish bank card doesn't have a "sort code" to identify my home branch (because who the hell cares about that in 2024), Poland briefly had cheques but stopped having them in 2006 because everyone was already using cards. In tech-industry terms the UK banking system has a bunch of "technical debt" it has to work around.

My Bank's app has been useful and easy to send money since it come out pre 2015.

But the bank never had any branches and was phone only from the mid 1980s and then had a web front end I think in the 90s.

Thus they knew what people needed before they wrote the app.

I would guess that your bank wasn't one of the 6 biggest banks in the UK in 2015.

Well part of one.

My bank is First Direct - which is owned by HSBC.

However the website functionality was always better than HSBCs 9I do have an HSBC account as well)