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by sofixa
1239 days ago
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India's UPI allows for free instant transfers with email/phone number, regardless of amount. Business have started using it for payments, that's how good it is. In the Eurozone there's SEPA Instant which is close but requires a bank account number. In the US... checks in the mail? Or third party middlemen for the fun of it. |
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SEPA's equivalent in the US is ACH, and in recent years ACH (which is a much older system) has mostly closed the gap with SEPA. Also, SEPA Instant exists, but not all banks are guaranteed to support it - as of even just a few months ago, many popular banks don't support it, which means that using SEPA reduces to ACH (in terms of payout settlement and information flow at POS).
Europe also has additional country-specific methods, so you can lean on (e.g.) iDEAL or or BACS if you know you're primarily dealing with Dutch or British customers, but that's not going to help you if you need seamless use across Europe.
ACH just never took off culturally in the US as a popular payment scheme - in part because of the easy availability of credit cards, which are usually free to the consumer and provide additional protections (such as chargebacks) that both ACH and SEPA lack. By contrast, credit card adoption is historically much lower in Europe (especially when segmented by country), so it makes sense that SEPA, for all its drawbacks, would catch on as a more popular method.
Of course, all of these pale in comparison to India's payment schemes, which are light-years ahead.