Here in South Europe people mostly use Viber. Edit: I was very unaware about situation in Southern Europe as I’ve learned from this post… Most people in Croatia use Viber!
Here in South Europe people mostly use Viber. Edit: I was very unaware about situation in Southern Europe as I’ve learned from this post… Most people in Croatia use Viber!
Instant payment? I hope you’re not talking about NFC because that’s been around for a long time now.
They might mean instant bank transfers, like OSKO in Australia. Google tells me a service called FedNow is available through 35 banks as of July this year which supports instant bank transfers.
Bingo. It’s wild to me to hear other countries doing tons of their payments via apps. US is 10 years behind the rest of the world on that.
We have things like Venmo and cashapp that approximate the same thing, but in the end it’s just the same ACH transfers the banking industry has used for 30 years and takes days to process. The apps just hide that behind the scenes. FedNow actually means instant and 24/6 (still doesn’t run on Sunday, if I recall correctly).
OSKO is even better than payment apps. Basically every bank offers is as a payment method option (if not the default) for any transfer, at 0 cost. They’re also implementing a new system to replace direct debits, to add more consumer protection and control to the recurring billing market.
Oh man I could really go on about how terrible US banking is. It’s a shitshow.
It takes me a week to pull funds via ACH from a personal checking account to a business checking account; all because I can’t “push” the funds because there’s an HTTP 500 from their REST API when I try to switch my “funding” account from the personal checking account.
So much of my life revolves around ACH and I don’t even want to know how much of my life I’ve wasted on it. Half the time I use Cash App and the credit network to move funds instantly because these idiots at NACHA can’t figure out what anything beyond COBOL is.