[jedberg]

The short answer is "because they can". The longer answer is because banking in the US is not as sophisticated as Europe since we have many fewer banks. The few banks we have have decided it isn't worth trying to compete on convince, so they haven't bothered to update the technology to be synchronous instead of asynchronous. In Europe, there are many banks in many countries, so they had to standardize quicker.

FWIW in the US the banks are starting to play nice. They came up with Zelle, which is basically a federated payment processing system amongst the biggest banks to compete with PayPal/Venmo. You can instantly (almost, five minutes delay usually) send money to someone at another bank. The downside is that it is limited. Each bank has different rules, but it's usually just a few thousand a week. For example Bay Area rent can't be paid with Zelle.

[crispinb]

> since we have many fewer banks

Australia has fewer still, with the big 5 almost entirely dominant, yet we have instant bank transfers through Osko, have had almost universal contactless in store payments for years, etc. I suspect it's more about government corruption. Governments are captured, each for its own historical reasons, by different industries. Australia by mining industries, the US by medical & finance, local governments almost everywhere by property development.

[mynameisvlad]

Adding onto this, Canada has pretty much the same amount of banks (about 5 big ones that completely dominate the industry) but unlike the US, have worked together for decades to create their own interbank network, Interac (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac). The network handles most ATMs, direct debits, e-transfers and online transactions, and the last two I think have been available for over 10 years now. Every single debit card in Canada is Interac-branded and the network is pretty much ubiquitous for transferring money.

It blew my mind going from that to what the US has.

[crispinb]

I haven't been to the US since 2010, but at least at that point it felt like going backwards in time with respect to banking, mobile networks & any dealings I had with government agencies.

[wahern]

It's the complete opposite of what you said, at least in terms of numbers.

The U.S. historically had many more banks than in Europe as the banking industry in Europe has historically been more centralized at the national level. Whereas in the U.S. not only did we have 50 states each regulating their own banking system (similar to Europe), but you had many more smaller banks rather than a few larger ones in each state.

It appears the U.S. now has fewer banks, but that's only because of a precipitous decline over the past few decades, and it's only been in the paste several years that the number of E.U. banks surpassed those in the U.S., long after the E.U. saw better payment systems.

So the reason the E.U. banking industry has more convenient payment systems, especially retail payment systems, is because they were historically both more centralized and less in number, which made consistent adoption of newer payment systems easier. Whereas the banking system in the U.S. was more fractured and far more diverse, and even with the dramatic drop in number and increase in centralization, we still see the repercussions.

[saarons]

"because they can" is probably the best answer. Before RTP, which is still rolling out, wire tranfers were the only way to do same-day, non-reversible, high-value payments. On occasion we also see that wire transfers being sent manually need what's called "repair", as in the sending party didn't put enough information in the wire so the sending bank or receiving bank have to go get a human being to figure out what went wrong. Repairs and rejects add to the operational complexity of wire transfers and probably contribute to the higher end-user cost of sending one.