And free if I remember correctly. I never used it because my bank was like "Fees might apply". Trying to figure out which fees and how much was pretty much impossible.
In Greece is 4-6€ per transaction for every 100€😊 (now we have created the interbanking system called IRIS which you can send money to an IBAN linked with your phone number for free)
From the central bank at slightly above policy interest rates. Cutting out as many middlemen as possible should be imperative for our age of technology.
That is until we have gotten rid of the central banking system …
Which is a fucking insult. The moment i pay anything with a debit card the payment is already noted in my account, just the formal transfer of the money hasn't happened yet. But both banks already know the transaction and they know that they will do the transaction, everything is there already. But they just didn't do the switch.
It is like you would go to an airport, have your luggaged checked in, go through the security, board the plane and everything is ready. Also the starting lane is empty. But the flight will wait until the next day, because thats how it has been done since the days of olde.
I'm pretty sure this new ruling is only for bank transfers, not card payments.
Your card payment is technically instant, since you get the goods in the store at he same time as the money leaves your balance. Both parts agree that it happened. The waiting time until the store actually gets the money deposited in their bank isn't dependent on bank. First it sits in the terminal until it is reported to the card company at the end of day. Depending on the specific agreement they can then accrue several days of transactions before even starting doing the bank transfer. Some do it daily, but I don't know of anyone doing it more frequently than that. For debit cards that is. Other payment methods can be faster or slower, but it really isn't the bank to blame for this.
Bank transfers should be faster than card settlements. The current setup is that banks also acrue transactions and exchange them one or two times daily. This has one benefit for users, since at a known time, they can surely know that there won't be coming more payments that day. This information is f.i. usable for debt collectors.
Doing faster payments is obviously better, but it will also mean that due times need to be specified by the hour and will probably cause some arguments about when a payment was actually done.
Also even with faster payments, interest calculations are done on a daily basis, not hourly, so there'll still be a technical cut-off time that determines who actually had the money on that day even if it was moved to different accounts several times on a day.
So sure, it may theoretically free up some money, but it won't make much practical difference anyway.
Yeah but that's the problem, each country has their own solution, with no interoperability. Whether it's MobilePay, Swish, Vips or PayPal or whatever, they are all only ubiquitous within their own country.