Are you sure? You're certainly correct that many popular payment methods are well overdue for being discontinued, but many methods of transferring money that you might think are permanent or even immediate can, under some circumstances, subsequently be reversed.
Unless you've been the victim who sent money to a scammer, of course, in which case all too often it mysteriously turns out that the method you used doesn't suffer from such a limitation. It's almost as if there's a whole dark industry of people who know which methods can be exploited like this and use it to abuse innocent people who made reasonable but incorrect assumptions about the competence and security of the financial services industry.
SEPA is certainly one of the best options for a payer-originated transfer. We have something similar here in the UK as well, the Faster Payment system.
On the other hand, SEPA Direct Debits can be involuntarily refunded up to 13 months after the payment goes through if the payer claims the charge was unauthorised. From bitter experience, some customers are quite willing to lie about a legitimate charge being unauthorised in order to take their money back retrospectively.
In the spirit of the original article here, I wonder how many people appreciate the profound difference between those two methods of transferring money, both commonly known as SEPA.
No, I haven't. On the other hand, I don't think I've ever made a payment either way, and I'm not even sure that my bank account has the facility to do so. They're certainly no use for things like purchases in a typical online store.
We don't have such a system in the US as far as I know. Wire transfers would be the closest fit but 1) they are artificially made expensive and 2) they are not instant.
Are you sure? You're certainly correct that many popular payment methods are well overdue for being discontinued, but many methods of transferring money that you might think are permanent or even immediate can, under some circumstances, subsequently be reversed.
Unless you've been the victim who sent money to a scammer, of course, in which case all too often it mysteriously turns out that the method you used doesn't suffer from such a limitation. It's almost as if there's a whole dark industry of people who know which methods can be exploited like this and use it to abuse innocent people who made reasonable but incorrect assumptions about the competence and security of the financial services industry.