With SEPA framework Europe does not need any payment card processor anymore, you can settle any payment with instant and free wire transfer through the eurozone. It's not only the bank that are coming after Visa and Mastercard, it's the eurozone.
Chargebacks for instance are a key protection which I have made use of multiple times. There’s no such option available with bank transfers. The card networks are typically the ones who handle dispute arbitration and various other issues between merchants and card issuers/cardholders.
Those kinds of features mean that people are comfortable using their bank/credit cards, safe in the knowledge that they’ll be okay if someone steals the card or a merchant makes an error or defrauds them.
There are all sorts of protections available to merchants like card holds which make buying a hotel room much more seamless.
In case someone doesn't understand why this is the case:
Banks don't really care about your money.
Banks really care about their money.
When you buy something with a debit card, you are spending your money.
When you buy something with a credit card, you are spending the bank's money.
Yes, banks tout zero fraud liability with your debit charges just like credit charges; no, their enthusiasm is /dev/null compared to credit charges.
If there is a dispute, it will typically end up in court.
But that also means that it does not support features that credit card networks support like chargebacks or 3DS. For that reason it also doesn't work online.
This is a space that a lot of bank transfer payment schemes fit into: low cost, fast settlement, high risk.
Interestingly, Erste have it off by default in the mobile app so I always have to turn it on for each transfer.
Non-free transfers between those banks can take about 1 hour but if too late in the day then 1 business day.
SEPA instant might cost extra or not be available but both of that will change soon due to new EU regulations.
For example, I'm in Sweden, and when I get my hair cut, I can Swish my payment to the barber using the Swish app. They get the money within a few seconds. It's very simple. They have a QR code on the wall that I scan with the Swish app, enter the amount I want to pay (I usually add a tip), authenticate with BankID, and that's basically it.
https://wise.com/help/articles/2956754/what-are-sepa-transfe...
> However, while banks shouldn’t charge for receiving SEPA payments, unfortunately there is a very small number that may still do so.
I can also confirm for example that (despite the UK still being in SEPA), wire transfers of Euro from Unicredit in Italy are getting extra charges when sent to a british IBAN (Unicredit is charging the sending side).
It takes around an hour or some days over border for transfer to go through.
Maybe you think of sepa instant which is supported by some banks. Very new. Mostly used for people to people transfers. Some shops are starting to support it. It is actually instantaneous anc works weekends. It seems to be mostly free.
The regulation only stipulates "equality of charges", that the bank's fees for a payment into another SEPA country/bank must be the same as into the same bank or within the same country [0]. I.e. no payment fee discrimination across SEPA: if my Czech bank X charges me Y for a local EUR payment into X, it must also charge me Y for the same EUR payment into Italy, for example.
Would any bank actually charge their customers Y>0 like that? Yes they would. For example the Bank of Cyprus (in Cyprus, which is in both EU & SEPA) will charge you 6 EUR for a SEPA payment of 1200 EUR if the sender is a physical person, and 10 EUR if legal person [1]. And 4 EUR for smaller EUR amounts. Far from "free".
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2009/924/oj
[1] https://www.bankofcyprus.com/globalassets/cyprus/org_methods... [PDF]