<story><title>Australia’s new real-time banking payments platform</title><url>https://www.itnews.com.au/news/australias-new-payments-platform-goes-live-485045</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>djsumdog</author><text>Even before this, Australia still had direct person-to-person transfers. They&amp;#x27;d just take a day, and required an account number and name.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve written about this before, but American is terribly far behind on this:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;penguindreams.org&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;the-american-banking-system-is-still-in-the-1990s&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;penguindreams.org&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;the-american-banking-system-i...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The closest thing we have in the US is Zelle, which is not a government mandated standard (like ACH) but a private standard created by banks and which only a fraction of banks in the US currently support.&lt;p&gt;And of course there are services like Venmo&amp;#x2F;Paypal, but these are private opt-in services, where as most other countries have this system mandated and fee-free between banks via their government reserve banks.</text></comment>
<story><title>Australia’s new real-time banking payments platform</title><url>https://www.itnews.com.au/news/australias-new-payments-platform-goes-live-485045</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sandos</author><text>This sounds like the swedish product &amp;quot;swish&amp;quot; which is immensely popular. Nobody does bank transfers between people, everybody transfers to your mobile number. So far I think there are no fees for personal use, either, although they said it would come later a few years ago. Transfers are of course instant and you can see the recipients name before you send the money, which is a great pro compared to a bank transfer to an opaque number.</text></comment>