Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

$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?

View on HN

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.

>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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com