https://www.euronews.com/business/2023/11/08/eu-seeks-to-make-10-second-bank-payments-a-reality
A legal deal struck late Tuesday could put an end to long waits to transfer money across borders
The technical capability for instant SEPA transfers already exists (and has existed for a while), this is about making it free for everyone (some banks charge an extra fee for instant transfers).
Yeah, my last bank charged around 15ct per instant transfer. I was unpleasantly surprised when I found out that my current bank takes 2 Euros…
Maybe make the bank Apps a little more intuitive to use and make it easier to send recurring payments to your friends and the monopoly of paypal in germany could disappear
Yeah. It's really a UI issue at this point. Just a simple frontend to facilitate SEPA transactions to contacts (which could just be a simple Name -> IBAN map stored locally)
I could imagine something like an IBAN protocol - open an IBAN link as in iban://AB26374838388 directly with your banking app and auto fill the bank transfer menu. Only add the amount of money you want to transfer.
No idea what other implications that would have e.g. for security though
I thought about that, but I think it's actually more error prone, because people might just be setting ?amount=32 and leaving out currency which might lead to unexpected behaviour. Implementors tend to interpret this differently and one app might take the default currency and the other might fail to accept it, and that kind of different behaviour is a common source of security issues. Having a single unified parameter that must always contain the value and currency "solves" that issue.
Makes it a bit more annoying to parse, though I definitely see your point.
However, you're still proposing a standard: "has to include both the currency and the amount in the parameter", so why not split them up at that point?
Idont't think that's a good idea, too many peoplr quickly pressing pay and then they tealizef only afyer paying thay there's an extra 0
There's still plenty of steps that your bank app can (and will) take to verify this is as intended. Requiring the user to "parse" the URI is not scalable anyway, the app needs to present the information clearly (i.e. "Do you really want to transfer 123.45€ to IBAN abcd, you have not transferred money to this IBAN before, the IBAN indicates a bank in " where the money amount is clearly highlighted).
I agree, still having to input the money manually is the best failsafe, how many people are used to just automatically hitting whatever button to make a message go away for example (even more with the cookies), best failsafe is inputting the money manually, you'd never mistakenly/automatically do that.
True, my bank also supports this. I already saw QR-Codes on some invoices but never used it... will try it out next time.
Main problem I see is that as it stands it's insanely easy to forge a SEPA mandate. Ever had to fill one out? It's literally just a piece of paper saying "I, John Doe, allow XXX to take money for services rendered from my acount AB1234. [signature]". The wonder of legacy processes built for companies with fax-based workflows...
I believe only some "trusted" commercial customers are authorized to turn in SEPA mandates (I know my ISP went into some bankruptcy proceedings and lost their ability to use their SEPA mandates for instance), but still, that makes me somewhat wary about who I give my IBAN to. I'd certainly not put it up online for anyone to see.
Didn't know it was this simple, that's stupid.
I believe though that in today's day and and of banking apps this should be very easily solvable with inapp confirmations
Let's hope the old way dies
Alternatively, let's kill contact lists completely and do this some other way. Contact lists are already a privacy disaster, allowing users to compromise all their friends' personal information without a hint of consent.
Speak for yourself. Speaking for myself, I don't even use my contacts app for this reason. When the "current best solution" involves telling Big Tech the identity particulars of all your friends, it is not a solution to anything. If this had not been normalized by Google and Apple 15 years ago, it would surely be illegal.
Jesus Christ then don't use it if you mind, but overall, it's the best solution for keeping track of people's phone numbers.
You're saying kill it but not offering a better choice, you'll never accomplish anything like this.
Well pardon me but "Jesus Christ" perhaps some of your friends never asked you to share their names and phone numbers with Google or anyone else just because it makes life convenient for you.
You should push for something like BIZUM. Say what you will about Spain but we got that right.
I just want an easier way to give money to homeless people, without them having to depend on an electricity supply.
There are penalties for carrying cash. One is the time burden of withdrawing it, the other is that if your bank has fees for more than X withdrawals a month then you will be deincentivized.
how much money do you want to give to a homeless person for you needing to withdraw a high amount of cash each month?
I just don't want to have cash on me. My wallet is already quite a stack of cards. Two debit cards, a credit card, two vehicle registration cards, a roadside assistance membership card, a driver's license.
Brazil has PIX: 24/7 instant (inter)bank transfers without any fees, you only need the money and the other person's key (email, phone number, SSN, random key or QR code)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A legal deal struck late Tuesday (7 November) could spell an end to days-long delays in receiving cash for Europeans, who instead could soon transfer funds between bank accounts within seconds.
Instant payments, as they’re known, allow money to move in the blink of an eye — and a new EU law making them the default option across the bloc has been hailed as good news by consumer advocates.
The commission argued its move would free up billions of euros that, at any given moment, aren’t available for people or businesses to spend because they’re in transit through payment systems.
Under the new plans, banks will have to provide the service to their clients at no extra cost, under strict deadlines, said Dutch lawmaker Michiel Hoogeveen, who shepherded the proposals through the European Parliament.
According to a separate statement from the Council of the EU, there’ll be a longer transition period for countries like Sweden and Poland that aren’t in the eurozone.
“This is fantastic news for everyone who wants their payments processed in seconds, not days,” the McGuinness said in a post on social media site X, saying the new rules will make instant transfers “universal, affordable and secure.”
The original article contains 528 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
In Spain we have bizum. It is instant, well integrated with bank apps, works with a mobile number and it is free.
The Netherlands has Tikkie, same thing. And my bank has instantaneous transfers all across the EU… I’ll never change bank
Actually, the goal is to fold all of these national digital payment schemes (like iDeal, Payconic, Giropay,...) into a unified European system called WERO which is also based on SEPA Instant Transfers and will be rolled out over the next couple of years. They actually just finished the acquisition of iDeal recently.
How is Australia ahead of Europe! We have Osko which allows instant transfer(seconds) upto $10,000 per day. It's fantastic.
The whole EU already has SEPA Instant Payments which allow the transfer of up to 100.000€ per transaction in under 3 seconds. This law is just about making it Default
And free if I remember correctly. I never used it because my bank was like "Fees might apply". Trying to figure out which fees and how much was pretty much impossible.
In Greece is 4-6€ per transaction for every 100€😊 (now we have created the interbanking system called IRIS which you can send money to an IBAN linked with your phone number for free)
From the central bank at slightly above policy interest rates. Cutting out as many middlemen as possible should be imperative for our age of technology.
That is until we have gotten rid of the central banking system …
That’s rather the exception than the norm. All my banks charge 1€. All Sparkassen I researched you pay at least something:
https://www.sskm.de/de/home/service/echtzeit-ueberweisung.html
There it is 0.75€
We're talking about payments across different countries. Inside each country payments have been instant for a while
Which is a fucking insult. The moment i pay anything with a debit card the payment is already noted in my account, just the formal transfer of the money hasn't happened yet. But both banks already know the transaction and they know that they will do the transaction, everything is there already. But they just didn't do the switch.
It is like you would go to an airport, have your luggaged checked in, go through the security, board the plane and everything is ready. Also the starting lane is empty. But the flight will wait until the next day, because thats how it has been done since the days of olde.
It's also such a dumb idea to cut this feature. People will just substitute bank payments for PayPal.
I'm pretty sure this new ruling is only for bank transfers, not card payments.
Your card payment is technically instant, since you get the goods in the store at he same time as the money leaves your balance. Both parts agree that it happened. The waiting time until the store actually gets the money deposited in their bank isn't dependent on bank. First it sits in the terminal until it is reported to the card company at the end of day. Depending on the specific agreement they can then accrue several days of transactions before even starting doing the bank transfer. Some do it daily, but I don't know of anyone doing it more frequently than that. For debit cards that is. Other payment methods can be faster or slower, but it really isn't the bank to blame for this.
Bank transfers should be faster than card settlements. The current setup is that banks also acrue transactions and exchange them one or two times daily. This has one benefit for users, since at a known time, they can surely know that there won't be coming more payments that day. This information is f.i. usable for debt collectors. Doing faster payments is obviously better, but it will also mean that due times need to be specified by the hour and will probably cause some arguments about when a payment was actually done. Also even with faster payments, interest calculations are done on a daily basis, not hourly, so there'll still be a technical cut-off time that determines who actually had the money on that day even if it was moved to different accounts several times on a day. So sure, it may theoretically free up some money, but it won't make much practical difference anyway.
Then I would suggest switching. Even my Sparkasse which charges for everything through the nose doesn't charge anything for SEPA Instant Payments
That's not true for every bank. My bank supports instant payments (for free) regardless of the receiving bank.
Yeah but that's the problem, each country has their own solution, with no interoperability. Whether it's MobilePay, Swish, Vips or PayPal or whatever, they are all only ubiquitous within their own country.
Yeah that I agree with. I have to use Wise to do transfers between the US and EU and it's kinda clunky and the fees add up.
I'm pretty sure Dutch banks already have this with eachother, but it would be great to loop my German friend in too
The EU's payments company bought iDeal, that Dutch service you are mentioning. They're rolling it out EU-wide.
In Ireland, this is already a thing between two people who have an account with the same bank.
Online banks like Revolut and N26 tend to be instant between each other too.
Would be nice to have this between all banks in the EU though.
In Poland there is BLIK, it's well integrated, you can use it anywhere, you can pay, you can transfer, you can request, and it's free.
Sweden has Swish. Instant transfers, you can pay with it in some stores and you can request money from others. All you need is a phone number and a bank account.
I do not understand how I can transfere money instantly theogu an app but the bank needs a few days to do so (unless I pay a fee for instant transfere). I can't imagine it costing the more to transfere my money now than have it done during the night
It doesn't. But at the same time the app you use doesn't transfer money at all. It just shoves ious around.
10 second instant? I hope at their next restaurant outing they get meat fresh from the can.
That's the case for many counties but that's only between the banks within that country because that's all that one government can require banks to implement. The EU has to do something to get things moving between counties, otherwise nobody is going to agree on anything voluntarily.
Man these bankers can't even keep up. Bitcoin has been doing this for 15 years across all borders and the recent lightning upgrade makes it even better. It's accessible to anybody with a cell phone in every country regardless of their credit history, the stability of their banking system, or the reliability of their national currency. And no government or politician can increase the supply thereby decreasing the portion of it you own. It does this 24/7 365 with zero downtime, no bank holidays, and for .1% of global electricity usage. Less than remittance services alone like Western Union use and mostly from renewables. It is the first truly international currency.
You can send a million dollars for less than 50c in fees on the main chain or <1c in fees on lightning. Lightning transactions confirm in microseconds, main chain transactions confirm in seconds to minutes depending on block timing and how much security you want to guarantee.
Main chain transactions should, on average, take around 6 minutes to confirm.
It'll be seconds only if you're very lucky.
Don't wanna hate, crypto is hella cool, but overselling it won't help anyone.
Edit: oh yeah, and lightning won't confirm in microseconds, you've got your scales mixed up mate, it's gonna be tens to hundreds of milliseconds, simply of your wifi's latency.
For everyday spending, I would consider "The tx is valid, signed, seen by nodes, and has a fee high enough to make it into the next couple blocks" as plenty of confirmation on main chain. That part takes seconds. Like if I'm splitting a bill w a friend a merchant selling somebody a coffee a double-spend attack is really not even in my realm of considerations, I don't need it to make it into a block.
Nobody serious is ever gonna sell you anything without a block confirmation, that's just delusional.
For a settlement with a friend, sure, but don't tell me you believe you'll walk out of a store before it hits at least 1 conf
It's not a double spend if it hasn't been confirmed yet, you can always replace-by-fee before it even makes it onchain
A. Lightning solves this with their super fast confirmation times.
B. Merchants do this regularly. The equivalent to a full block confirmation (the money is yours now and the transaction can't be reversed) for credit cards is on the order of 30 days. Venmo and paypal have similar policies. Plus higher fees. Plus sometimes they charge or otherwise punish you even in the unlikely event you win the dispute.
The risk of fraud is the cost of doing business and buyer-initiated fraud is rampant on these platforms. It's why I don't sell anything > $50 USD on ebay, because the buyer can just say it "doesn't work" and get to keep the item and get their money back.
A. I'm not saying it doesn't, I'm just disputing what you said about onchain txs.
B. CCs are much less anonymous, making engaging in fraud much riskier. If you did this 10 times your bank would notice, adds up for you. If you do it with an anonymous system, you're forgotten the second you walk out of the store (barring being caught on camera but you can solve that by wearing a mask or something).
I do see your point, but I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison.
