It costs you guys money to make bank transfers? Wow. For the record, I can send and receive money (for free) from my phone only needing the other person's phone number at this point. (Australian. Also, I've never used the pay-to-phone stuff because I just prefer to use their account number. I can do that for free from my phone too.)

It strikes me that our NFC infrastructure is way better than yours too. Somewhat a reverse of most patterns in tech-infrastructure. It's just a pity Google won't support the Nexus' NFC capabilities in Australia - I bet Apple will.

The banking system in the US is terrible and stuck in the stone age.

Venmo.

In fact, in young circles (in the US), this seems to have become the defacto way of transferring money socially between individuals. I don't think I have paid someone I know with physical cash in years.

Any number of services support ths - I believe Wallet, Venmo, Paypal and Square all offer some form of fee-less peer-to-peer transfer, because it has such a high value for organic growth as people send money to friends.

And/or because it's a nice chunk of data to add to the social graph.

Squarecash, free and works over email so anything that can do email can do it.