No money transfers for me. My account is now considered for "business" regardless of me considering my personal account as "personal":
"Wallet can't be used: This could be because Google Wallet isn't supported in your country or because you're using a business account. To see your purchases from Google Play and other products, go to the payments center."
I've unintentionally "poisoned" my personal Gmail account by adding Android Developer capabilities to it. An unexpected negative side-effect.
Google has under-designed its Account concept asserting an account is entirely for business if it's merely associated with an Android Marketplace capability.
Google should really support multiple roles for an account. At the least, caution users when adding Android Developer Marketplace capabilities to Gmail accounts about the new limitations this choice will impose.
As anyone with experience in payments will tell you, this is the easy part (and should explain why Google hasn't expanded the coverage in the four years they have been offering this).
The reason that payments systems are all either expensive or inconvenient (usually both) is that the regulatory systems that underpin the international movement of money are very complicated, and are different in each country.
Getting payments to users in the US and UK is relatively easy; you'll need a business entity in each country and you'll also need to register with the regulators in each country (e.g. as a MSB in the USA, requiring a $1m bond in some states). Note the phrase "relative"; this is not something that a couple kids from Stanford can disrupt, you need expensive lawyers and banking contacts. You can run all of that from your office in Mountain View though.
You'll also need to comply with various "know your customer" regulations; the US government will not be happy if you wire money to O. Bin Laden, or anyone else on the OFAC watchlist. And even if you're sending money to a "gmail UK" email address, you will need some way of proving that you're not sending money to countries that have sanctions/restrictions on capital flows like Iran and North Korea.
That's the easy part. If you actually try to make a serious international play, then you'll need a sizable team in each region that you want to do business in. The Eurozone is relatively easy to cover, but your regulatory requirements in South American countries will probably require one or two people per country (that's to keep your bank relationships warm, and to keep up with all of the paperwork that's required to operate a money transmitter business).
This is why Paypal charges merchant fees of 4.4% _plus forex fee_ to receive money from an arbitrary country in the world. This system is hugely complex, and very resistant to change, due to the serious consequences of making a regulatory error.
Is the problem that the "stanford disruptors" are sticking to offering value as a payments facilitator/money transmitter and not trying to move up the value chain and get some banking licences? I assume this would be orders of magnitude more difficult but I really want to see it happen somewhere in the world!
Even the money transmitter play is harder than you'd think (all of what I wrote above is applicable to that class; being a bank is even harder). Since Paypal failed to convince the regulators that they were not an MSB, they are much less likely to let a small fry under the radar.
Cards on the table: I work for a money transmitter "app" headquartered in SF (I say "app" because we still operate in a somewhat speculative niche in the industry) as a software engineer - but I have a degree in law as well. To me the regulatory compliance seems to be an issue with the tech people not properly collaborating with the "banking proper" types (financial services/legal/banking professionals) Note: in "easy" jurisdictions we are seeing some progress[0]
Would you be able to take this offline and discuss with me further? I do not know the protocol for off site discussions from hacker news. Do I give you my public key? haha LOL
[0] www.monzo.com (with whom I haveno affiliation whatsoever)
I think you're right about there being a significant collaboration issue; having a lawyer on your founding team makes this a lot easier.
Happy to chat more offline, I've linked a public key in Keybase to my HN profile, you should be able to do the same and message me there, or just use my key to encrypt your contact details and put that on HN somewhere.
I wonder why banks in the US don't just give all of their customers an IBAN and let them transfer money for free or very cheap. They could even give companies those IBANs and let them receive bill payments that way. But I guess that would be too easy and also too European.
If you're asking about making transfers electronically inside the US, that already exists -- the system is called ACH. You use your bank's routing number and your account number. It's not as widely adopted for things like bill payments, since the US banking system is quite antiquated (they still use checks for many payments).
If you're asking about international payments between US and EU banks, currently you do that using the SWIFT network (i.e. wires). It's $25-30 a pop. And there are significant regulatory and technical barriers to getting this cost down (see the EU's SEPA program for a regional version, and that's with a bunch of countries that have already normalized their financial regulations).
As a sidenote, some financial companies named "forex" are specialized in international payments. I use currenciesdirect.com, they don't take a commission and their exchange rate is within 2% of the Google rate. Most other banks apply a 5-10% spread as a hidden fee.
The secret is, they have a bank account in every country, so it's a local payment in US with no fee, and no fee for their bank transfer between their French bank account and yours.
Unfortunately many banks seem to put up arbitrary hurdles to performing ACH transfers, or obscure the fact that they are available. Certainly I've had this issue with Wells Fargo, US Bank, and BoA.
I assume this is because a number of them use "free, easy transfers between our customers" as a selling point, which would vanish quickly if it were easy to do between anybody. Sometimes it seems like we're even sliding backwards -- for example Chase used to have a fairly nice person-to-person payment system, but they recently locked it down to people with their own Chase account.
One problem is that ACH transfers are inherently quite insecure and the banks don't want to be held liable for fraud. It's in the bank's best interest to make transfers difficult and to check the source and destination identities pretty thoroughly.
This is why I use separate accounts for different things. Bill pay is a separate account. Direct deposit is a separate account. I have an account I _only_ use for writing paper checks (rare these days).
It's a pain in the ass, but a long time ago an employer errantly clawed back a full month of payroll direct deposits from me instead of another employee. The bank couldn't/wouldn't help, and the company's payroll was handled by a third party who was not helpful at all.
How do you move money among the accounts? I like the idea of using multiple bank accounts as financial firewalls for my money, but it seems difficult or expensive to move the funds, especially if the accounts are not all at the same institution.
I wonder whether the issue is that consumer protection laws are not strong enough in the US banking system. In the UK, the Direct Debit regulations make it very easy to dispute/reverse charges, so there is little risk to giving your details to companies.
After reading a horror story of Facebook completely locking out someone's account for allegedly doing Marketplace fraud, I'm extremely dubious of services adding financial stuff into their existing offering. Imagine being accused of fraud and losing all access to your GMail information.
Google's branding, though, is confusing and may hold this back.
There's Google Wallet, Android Pay, and now this. This is probably related to one of the previously mentioned ideas, but it isn't mentioned on the page.
I love this idea, it can be even bigger than Paypal. Three suggestions:
First, make it a mobile app as a simplified gmail with just the recipient, the amount and a memo. That's it. In version two add the pic, avatar or whatever people use.
Second, open a new wave of email accounts since all gmail accounts are already taken so people can start using their names or businesses as email accounts again. Perhaps GoMail? And start from day one with two factor authentication so squatters don't start their party.
Third, create Merchant accounts and apps so business owners can track thousands of payments a day with tools for money management.
This was my dream solution for the mobile payment need but now that Google is going to do it I'll leave it to them.
I firmly believe they have a winner, specially for the small and informal businesses, all they need is to deliver simplicity and security. The pay by email is not as important as the pay by mobile but it can be used to leverage market penetration. Later on add NFC to the mobile app to have a total winner.
Now, imagine this mobile app used to pay a taxi driver, a street vendor, a handyman, any and all informal activities that are hard to pay by credit card. Trillions a year.
Make it simple, Google, simpler than the suits can ever think of, or I'll be forced to make it with my own bare hands. All this time I've been waiting for a giant to bring mobile payment to the masses just to see Apple fall short and nobody else stepping to the plate.
Already did it for the latinamerican market, but haven't launched it and probably never will. Banking is not hard, it's just too regulated for the mere mortal.
An important thing, besides mobile payment, will be web payment. So start a viral campaign to show people how to put their email account on their web page and ask buyers to pay their shopping carts using this Google Pay app. Use your phone app, enter the email plus a cart id in the memo field and send the money. The seller will use the cart id to verify the purchase and deliver the goods.
Pay with your phone all your web purchases. Killer.
Can you send and receive money for "non personal use"? E.g., I tried paying some small test consultant fees from my company using Facebook's "send/receive money", and they quickly told me I was violating their terms of usage. I can't tell either way from this Gmail page. Just curious (not that I would actually use things this way, but zero fees can be nice for small transactions).
To be honest, I think email accounts (especially the main ones) have always been a huge target to thieves, since many services still use it as the primary password reset/two-factor authentication method. In that sense, not much has changed.
So now Google will tell advertisers how much you are willing to pay for products too. Paving the way for omnipresent Amazon(tm) price adjustment based on user history.
I was almost expecting this to be a late April's Fool...
I guess it's a way to get more people to sign up for a Google account - you can "send to any email" - but that's not really accurate as you need a Google account to send/receive funds. It's not surprising of course, anyone technically inclined would realize this is a wrapper around:you can now place money in escrow with Google and let people know via email. Just like you could probably "send [money] via carrier pigeon" with PayPal...
"I was almost expecting this to be a late April's Fool..."
I did, too. The date was the first thing I checked. Well, I guess we can email money around on our insecure devices now. So, with Apple Pay and Gmail Money, we might finally develop something along the lines of WeChat in China where many people are constantly just using mobile to pay each other.
For those of you interested in Financial Technology and money transfer. Check out the UPI system in India. It's basically an API for banks. It's designed in a way that start ups can approach it. Each user can pick up an ID, say zuron7@bankname and transact with it.
What word would you use for the class of machines that are desktops and laptops? It's a real, if not very important, question that I've never found a good answer for.
Lol, I always on the lookout for an answer to this as well. I use Browsers vs Mobile Browsers vs Desktop Apps vs Mobile Apps if I want to be precise. But, yeah, it's usually confusing.
At work I ask "Are you using your phone or your computer?" It's generally non-techie people that will get confused and might consider their tablet a "computer", but that is pretty rare.
But we did just (in March) launch this for Android: https://blog.google/products/gmail/send-and-request-money-in... & https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/14/you-can-now-send-and-reque...