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Comment by Scarblac | Hacker News Reader

In the Netherlands, for at least the last 35 years, transaction forms have a field "Description" where you can enter arbitrary text. Originally on paper, now electronically.

Is that in any way remarkable?!

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American banking infrastructure is weirdly antiquated.

For a long time I was confused by Americans raving about things like venmo or bitcoin talking about it making it cheap and easy to transfer money. Then I learnt more about the US banking system and it all made a lot more sense.

Planet Money did an episode all about it, featuring someone from the UK talking about our Faster Payments system, who is basically instant.

In the US, you pay $16 to send a wire and $16 to receive a wire. So, wires are not as common as in Europe.

On the other hand, ordering your bank to print a paper check, and send it through postal mail is free of charge.

>In the US, you pay $16 to send a wire and $16 to receive a wire. So, wires are not as common as in Europe.

If we're talking about SWIFT transfers, it's probably the same in Europe. The only difference is that in Europe there's SEPA, which is readily accessible by consumers, fast and cheap.

In the Eurozone, banks are prohibited to ask money for Euro-denominated transactions. They're also mostly instantaneous.

I don't do many though, other payment options are easier (e.g. authorize companies to just take recurring payments from my account).

They are not prohibited (I pay for them on my business account). They just need to price domestic transactions the same as EU-internal ones – which often results in free transfers.

$16 to pay someone? How do you do something like transfer your friend some money? Or pay someone who did some work for you?

Here in New Zealand you'd tend to get their bank account number and send them a (free) direct deposit through your bank's Internet banking service. Until very recently that was also the main payment method for our eBay auction site equivalent TradeMe (they've now started a sort of PayPal clone called Ping so that they can skim a little extra from each auction).

But I've heard people can potentially withdraw money from your account if they have your account number in the US?

>How do you do something like transfer your friend some money? Or pay someone who did some work for you?

Venmo mostly.

Interesting. But the service provider takes a cut that way, right?

NZ expat here :) Venmo doesn't charge for sending or receiving money like this to or from people. They make money through other means; from the top of my head one is paying by credit card - they take 3% if you use credit card. Another way they make money (1% per transfer) is by doing an "instant transfer" directly from your Venmo account to your bank (the other option is ACH transfer which is usually next-day delivery.) I tried this on a Sunday night which was also part of a long weekend and the money instantly appeared in my US bank account and I got a push notification from my bank that a deposit was just made. It was awesome and makes NZ look out of date.

Venmo is amazing. It's so fast and practically everyone has it. It's the Google of payments. I wish New Zealand had something like that. Sending money to friends in NZ is slow and painful - not terribly so, but compared to Venmo they really are.

in practice, no one uses the banks directly to send money like that: we use apps like Venmo / CashApp that take your debit card/bank info and act as an intermediary for sending/receiving money.

A lot of US based startups make a lot more sense to us Europeans in case we move to the US and notice how broken all infrastructure is.

Banking still uses cheques, so you have Paypal, Venmo, CashApp and so on.

Public transport is bad or even non existent which is why Uber and Lift exist.

The programm of over-the-air TV sucks and you get Netflix, HBO, Hulu and so on.

Over the air has the newest stuff. Streaming is for yesterday's hit.

Uber exists because taxis suck.

Cheques are safer and more portable than give me your bank account because you choose where to deposit.

Paypal is for websites no stores accept it and doesn't replace a cheque

> Cheques are safer and more portable than give me your bank account because you choose where to deposit.

Maybe it's different in the US, but I have a different account number for each of my bank accounts. So I can still choose where I want to deposit someone's money when I give them my account number, by choosing which account number I give to them. And no-one has to go to a bank.

That's true you can give out different account numbers. You can't change that once you give it out though a cheque allows you to decide at the very last moment.

Is it really that hard to receive the money then transfer it to the right account?

Yes, it's an extra step, but you're already doing way more steps to cash a cheque than use a transfer service where you only give an account number and suddenly the money is there.

IMO, this sounds like a solution looking for a problem to me.

For my housekeeper, service people, etc. usually write a physical check. For friends and so forth mostly the same but sometimes Apple Pay, PayPal...

Wire transfers also take 2-3 days to clear because the Fed likes to sit on the float. They totally suck in the US.

This is one of the reasons Paypay got so big so fast. There was a huge pent up demand for a wire transfer service that didn't suck. But then Paypal started to suck and people had to find something new.

>In the US, you pay $16 to send a wire and $16 to receive a wire.

This isn't true, each bank sets their own fees. It's true it's usually stupid expensive to send one, but none of my main banks charge to receive a wire.

I don't think any (major, credible) bank charges to receive a wire because like text messages, you have no control on getting wire transfers, and it would likely cost more to set up such a system than to just accept wires from anyone to any account.

With SEPA, they now have both the free-style "description" box, as well as a (shorter) "Reference" field that has a standardised format including parity bits to prevent typos and the trouble they can cause.

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