[johnwalkr]

In Canada you’ve been able to send money to people for 15 years just by knowing their email address. You also set a security question. I also had a debit card I could use in most stores almost 30 years ago.

I was shocked as a young adult when I could travel in the US and use my debit card to get money at almost any atm, yet Americans had to sometimes seek out the correct ATM, even in their country.

I was shocked again in Japan when I moved here ten years ago when online banking was useless, transfers took up to 3 days, and most of the bank’s atms closed at 5 or 6pm. Oddly enough I could always find some atm open 24 hours that worked with my Canadian debit card, even when I could not find an atm open that worked with my Japan Post bank debit card. Those problems are all solved now, but it’s no wonder that there are now 30+ competing digital payment systems in Japan vs just a few in Canada. You also have to still really go out of your way when choosing a bank to make sure that your debit card will work overseas.

The original Canadian system is called Interac, and it’s nice that everyone has been able to use it for 30+ Years. I’ve never heard of anyone being blacklisted due to an error, like you hear about with PayPal and the other things that have come since then.

[voisin]

The flip side in Canada is our wire system for large transfers. We rolled our own technology and it is a complete failure. I do wire transfers many times per year and I would say 1/3 of them end in “lost” payments that require multiple phone calls and a number of days for the investigations group to track down. And this is through no error on the sender or recipient side (as explained by the investigations teams). There have been a number of articles over the last few years on the topic and I feel awful for those involved who actually do make a legitimate mistake (transpose numbers of a branch number for example) and never see their money again.

When it works perfectly, the transaction is still nowhere near instant (transfers “cross” only at certain times of the day, almost as if it involves actual people driving between banks - ludicrous!) and recipient banks often do not recognize receipt for a day. And the fees are relatively absurd ($80-120 to send and to the same to receive) considering Interac money transfers are free.

I’ll note that literally everyone I deal with shares the same experiences with wires.

It is bizarre that the largest, likely most important, transactions we have a system that works objectively far worse with fewer checks and balances and more opportunity for error than the system we use for meaningless small transactions.

[propter_hoc]

This is a really surprising comment to me. I also do many wire transfers and EFTs (used to run an investment company, so on the order of 200 incoming/outgoing EFTs and 4-5 wires per month) and have no idea what you are talking about. The only times I've had issues is either (1) when the banking information was entered incorrectly, either by a client or by my staff; (2) if it's a weird kind of trust account that doesn't accept direct wires and needs to go through an intermediary account, which is really rare.

I would really like to know what activity you are doing that is causing you so many payment processing issues.

Unless you are talking about LVTS which AFAIK is only used for inter-bank transfers? I have no experience with that system.

[TheNewsIsHere]

I’m not the OP, but anecdotally as an American who used to work for a Canadian company which handled cross-border payroll by wire from Canada, my experience was for the most part that our payroll person worked her ass off to get everything right each time and that it was quite a significant amount of work. The actual transfers would always settle on the date expected and as expected, but I was always missing $10. I took it as a professional expense (loss) on my taxes, and no one from my bank to TD (the firms bank) could tell me which intermediary was taking a fee. They had tried for years before I came along to get to the root cause of it. All the US based people had the same issue.

[zwass]

I moved to Canada from the US recently and was shocked at how poorly Interac e-transfers work and that there is no Venmo/Cash equivalent. The system seems to assume a 1:1 mapping from phone numbers or emails to bank accounts. Having multiple bank accounts means disabling and reconfiguring the autodeposit features constantly. I've also gotten used to friends not receiving transfers I send them, which was never a thing with Venmo/Cash -- you just check the history in the app.

ATMs are also mind-boggling after getting used to banks that will refund ATM fees in the US. In Canada it's back to the fee to use ATM + fee from the bank for using an ATM that I remember from 20 years ago in the US.