this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
73 points (86.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43816 readers
1265 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
SMS. Universal and ubiquitous thanks to free or nearly free inclusion in phone plans. American English has no need for expanded character sets and carriers/Apple/Google have added just enough features on top that the vast majority of people aren't left wanting for more.
Instant payment was literally impossible until this summer, and given it's so new almost no bank has support for it yet. Privacy/encryption don't enter into most people's consciousness.
They might mean instant bank transfers, like OSKO in Australia. Google tells me a service called FedNow is available through 35 banks as of July this year which supports instant bank transfers.
Bingo. It's wild to me to hear other countries doing tons of their payments via apps. US is 10 years behind the rest of the world on that.
We have things like Venmo and cashapp that approximate the same thing, but in the end it's just the same ACH transfers the banking industry has used for 30 years and takes days to process. The apps just hide that behind the scenes. FedNow actually means instant and 24/6 (still doesn't run on Sunday, if I recall correctly).
OSKO is even better than payment apps. Basically every bank offers is as a payment method option (if not the default) for any transfer, at 0 cost. They're also implementing a new system to replace direct debits, to add more consumer protection and control to the recurring billing market.
SMS was ubiquitous here in NA while data was already ubiquitous but SMS heavily metered in most of the rest of the world.