The Rise of Whatever

> "live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal."

I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our banking system worse so they could compete, much like Uber.

I don't get this sentence. It's pretty damn hard sending money in the EU too. We only had SWIFT and CHAPS too like in the USA. The EU isn't some banking haven with ultrafast transfers. If they are talking about the new legislation about fast transfers (SEPA), that came 1 decade after paypal.

In the EU PayPal caved and officially got a banking licence from Luxembourg.

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.

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?

> 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 (within 10 seconds) you can do it, too, by checking a checkbox for a small fee and that fee will drop to ZERO across the EU in October 2025.

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

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.

The US doesn't have SWIFT btw.

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]

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.

In the EU, the value proposition of PayPal is (1) that it it hello instantaneous instead of taking one or two days like a regular bank transfer, and (2) it doesn’t disclose your banking info to the other party. The first one is now finally being obsoleted by SEPA instant payments.

I hate that companies try this. They should pay massive fines and execs should go to prison for this.

This is not rhetorical - if you (try to) make the life of literally millions of people worse in a small way, the amount of time and money wasted by them should be calculated and used to determine the punishment.

(3) steals your money at random without warning

Banks in Australia on the NPP have 16 seconds to complete the transaction.

Unfortunately this is a by-product of capitalism and lobbying