[lxgr]

Yes, and I find that baffling. Many countries have had push transfers for decades.

Germany and Austria, for example, had standardized slips of paper that the payer could send to/drop off at their bank to instruct them to wire money to some payee at a nominal or no fee. The big advantage over checks is that there's no possibility of overdrawing, and as a payee, once you saw the money in your account, you knew the transfer was final (unlike for deposited checks, which can bounce).

This also means that there is much less risk for banks to open "checking" accounts, as the biggest risk for depository banks, i.e. that of potentially bounced checks, just does not exist, which in turn means that "unbanking" is much less of a concern.