> pretty damn hard sending money in the EU too

You literally enter an IBAN and the transfer will appear in the other account the next day. And if you need the money in the target account immediately you can do it, too, within 10 seconds, by checking a checkbox for a small fee and that fee will drop to ZERO across the EU in October 2025.

What do you mean? Europe has had SEPA payments pretty much since the Euro came out. And most of Europe had functional bank transfers using online banking (including international ones) long before the Euro was a thing.

Edit: Do you mean that the speed of the transfers was the problem?

SPC Inst transfers up to 15,000EUR take 10 seconds, literally.

I'm aware, but I think zpeti was saying that this is a recent thing, whereas fast PP payments were already a thing ages ago.

SEPA came 10 years after paypal.

We currently (as in the for the last months) have instant transfers but for the longest time we didn’t and had to use PayPal as well if we wanted to send somebody money instantly without paying the bank an extra for it. I’m confused as to what the article means. It’s possible the author is misinformed.

Instant transfers have been available for many years. they were not free, but most banks supported doing them.

In the US, I have been sending money electronically for free, and instantly, to my friends and family for almost 15 years.

Zelle, previously known as clearXchange, and whatever else, but if you had an account at one of the bigger bank, it has long been trivial to send money to each other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle

> In April 2011, the clearXchange service was launched. It was originally owned and operated by Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo.[6][7] The service offered person-to-person (P2P), business-to-consumer (B2C), and government-to-consumer (G2C) payments.[8]

The US doesn't have SWIFT btw.

Even before SEPA, we didn't use checks in the EU -- or at least in Germany -- because bank transfers were a thing and just worked.