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by dustypotato 1115 days ago
Not the original commenter, but: In certain countries transactions take about 2 days to be reflected. In most digital payments, the payment networks (visa/mastercard/amex) take a cut of 1-2.5% of the total payment value which is a large percentage of profit for a small establishment. The bank APIs are inconsistent are a huge mess to manage so including the regulatory barriers, if a new payment solution wants to come up , it's a lot of money , time and work. On top of that , different countries have different API standards.

There's value to be had in payment solutions and banking solutions being decoupled . Banks should more deal with lending and deposits , injecting cash flows into the economy , insuring deposits, etc. Payments should be , well, payments similar to from a wallet, with less regulation overall.
2 comments
r00fus 1115 days ago
This is evolving slowly but surely - take a look at ISO20022 [1] and its adoption by SEPA network [2] in Europe (more slowly - adoption by most other banks throughout the world).

ISO isn't perfect but most things are just a minor XML adjustment, and the schema is well structured.

Europe/SEPA has free non-urgent transfers up to a certain amount. [3]

How do you increase adoption for this except to get involved politically and lobby? Unless you plan on rolling your own - in which case good luck.

[1] https://www.iso20022.org

[2] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/sepa/html/...

[3] https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...

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cube2222 1115 days ago
Oh, I'm all for innovation here, I just don't see building the financial system back from the ground up as an effective way to innovate.

All the issues you've mentioned aren't issues core to our financial system, they can all be solved through iterative innovation - many countries are solving this, like Poland (which I use as an example cause I live here), which has free instantaneous cashless transactions both for payments and p2p use that work with all banks here (blik, slowly trying to expand to more countries).

Similar systems are in place in many other countries. Open banking standardized APIs have already spread across Europe, etc.

So tldr, no need to redesign the financial system to fix these, just disrupt it a little bit.

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WeylandYutani 1115 days ago
Also cryptocurrency hasn't actually solved any of these problems. If it did people would be using it in day to day life instead of speculation.
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