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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

The reason Swish is successful is because it is owned and maintained by 6 Swedish banks [1]. So the payments network - the hard part - was already in place. The banks just had to brand the app in an attractive way, offer discounts/promotions to get user adoption, and provide good UX/UI.

I doubt we'll see a new Paypal until there is a new marketplace (Ebay) on a new communications medium (internet) that attracts enough users that a new solution needs to be created to deal with it.

[1] http://ecommercenews.eu/swedish-banks-want-use-swish-ecommer...

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I don't see how that makes a difference at all, considering Paym is owned by Vocalink - which is 18 banks according to the article.

"Paym is a new service launched by VocaLink in 2014"

"This money goes to Vocalink, a company owned by a consortium of 18 banks, which operates FPS, along with Bacs (for Direct Debit), and the LINK network (ATMs)."

I would say it's likelier that the fact that Swish transactions are instant from the customers perspective have played a large part in why the uptake for Swish has been so good in Sweden. As regular bank transfers still take hours to days to settle.

> So the payments network - the hard part - was already in place.

Similar example: Polish mobile payments company (Blue Media) wanted to speed up most commonly used service - charging prepaid GSM accounts so they created account in pretty much every existing bank as internal transfers are pretty much instant. This also required to integrate with many APIs to fill out/automate transfer details. Thanks to that it was easy for them to offered express transfers (5-15 minutes instead of standard 2-4 hours)

That's not the only reason. After all, the British system is owned by the 15 banks.

Yet the British banks have done very little marketing. I wonder if they prefer the current situation, where they perhaps earn more money from debit card fees.

In the market of payments, all banks compete with rather similar products. They make money of it in (a combination of) three ways - 1) direct fees; 2) "float" (interest earned on money 'in transit', low currently because of low rates, but huge money in other decades); 3) selling other products (credit, etc) to people who also need your payment services.

If you offer a faster and cheaper way to settle payments than your competitors, you'll be able to gain a lot of lucrative corporate customers.

However, if all of the major banks offer a faster and cheaper way to settle payments, then they all simply earn less in fees and also have to pay for developing a new system. This is a loss-loss situation, so it's going to happen only in face of strong competition by other payment systems (in which case they can near-immediately lower prices and increase speed to undercut them, while still making profit) or by regulatory means - e.g. the SEPA-payment legislation in EU forced many inter-EU payments to become much faster and cheaper than before.

Ok, all you need is a good platform, a good brand, good marketing and a nice app? So you're basically saying that the reason Swish is successful is that they are doing a good job and deliver a good product?

I'm saying that they did not have to build a payments network from scratch, or convince the largest banks in the country to provide APIs for their platform, which would have been the hardest part of launching a similar product as a private company or individual.

In the United Kingdom, sending bank to bank or Paym is all the same if I'm not mistaken. The only difference is that on Paym you'll use a phone number instead of an account number.

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