I forgot, I use PayPal once in awhile. I think just for GoFundMe’s. For some reason, it recognizes my cell phone and processes my transaction without me having to remember my login, so it’s the simplest option.
The easiest way among my friends and family is PayID. You set it up on one of your accounts and then anyone can send you money instantly using their online banking without knowing your account details. They just send it your mobile number or email address and PayID links it to your account. Last week I paid my share to my friend who was picking up the bill at a restaurant while we were waiting at the cash register.
I accept gold.
Mobile-to-mobile transactions. Either QR-code based or contactless NFC stuff. Here the dominant QR apps are SnapScan and Zapper but there are others, and all the banks and Mastercard and Visa have contactless payment available.
Or a transfer in their bank’s desktop app if they’re Luddites.
Cheques are some kind of Dark Ages throwback, and even cash seems quaintly Dickensian nowadays.
I’m confused. If you cannot pay stuff from your bank account, what is the bank good for?
From my banking app I can send money to any IBAN/BIC.
Is banking in the US so different?
Like other Brits, bank transfer through their phone app. Many of these apps also support payment by mobile which only requires them to know my phone number, but these haven’t AFAICT massively caught on. (Or I’m old and out of touch.)
Speaking as an American who transitioned to Europe several years ago, the answer is yes. Banking infrastructure and services in the US are downright primitive compared to what I’ve gotten used to here. I was shocked the first time I saw people and organizations freely disclosing their bank account routing numbers, because systems in the US are so porous and vulnerable and every scrap of information is guarded like a state secret. But here, that’s just how you get paid, easy peasy.
Huh? Bank routing numbers are public info. They’re also printed on your checks, along with your account number.
Oh, I know. It’s purely a perception thing.
Like, here, you’ll get a charity solicitation stuffed into your mailbox. There’s a heart-rending description of suffering and a promise of goods and services to be delivered to the needy. And then, at the bottom, you find something like LU28 1234 9876 2323 4321 and an entreaty to contribute.
There’s nothing wrong with it, per se, in terms of confidentiality. But in the US, this just isn’t done.
I’m missing what the new aspect is - wasn’t the whole purpose of Zelle/Venmo , etc , to allow transfers between individuals?
Got my haircut the other week by a barber that operates on a cash-only basis. I discovered afterwards that my wife had swiped the cash out of my wallet without telling me, and I don’t have Venmo. So I used my banking app to transfer the money to his personal credit card.
Whatever tax evasion issues he may be up to are all on him.
When my wife and I first started going to Japan about 14 years ago, we paid cash for pretty much everything while we were there, requiring frequent withdrawals from our US-based bank account via an ATM. These days, you can pay with a credit card for just about everything, although the process is often a bit slower than credit card transactions in the US. I do see people making a lot of contactless payments using their phones; this is especially popular for paying bus/train fares.
Here in the US, individuals can pay me with cash, check, money order or PayPal. There are a number of stories of PayPal taking arbitrary actions that screw over its users, so I don’t fully trust them. My PayPal account is attached to a savings account with a low balance (instead of our main checking account which has a much higher balance), so if something does go haywire, I don’t have a lot of money being held in contention.
I’m just going by the adverts, but I gather it’s not transfers amongst the people at the table, with one person then paying the restaurant bill, but that they all get the bill electronically, and then split it so it shows up on each of their bank statements as a payment to the restaurant.
I’m not sure I see what’s so earth-shattering about it, but it’s been getting hyped in the Christmas season and into January. Maybe it’s to make sure that no-one makes a math mistake and leaves one person paying more than they should?
I’ll ask one of my techie-bright-young-things at work about it, to see if I can get a better explanation.
Email money transfers aren’t always free for the sender, though. I remember having an account where you could get two free transfers per month and each additional one had a fee.
They’re free for certain types of accounts, otherwise there’s a fee of between $0.50 and $1.50 for the sender, none for the recipient. Happily, even if a fee applies, it’s waived for Old Farts. 
Even if there was a fee, though, the convenience makes it very much worthwhile. The existence of the fee pisses me off in principle, though, even if I don’t have to pay it, because the bank could charge 5 cents per transaction and still rake in profits on the deal!
In related news, Venmo and other payment app theft is ‘skyrocketing’.
I’ve sold a few things including pontoon boats online. I accept cash only. During the recession my business had too many bad checks, so I stopped accepting them there.
My gf paid me some $$ she had borrowed by sending it through a cash app. I tried downloading the app (Zell maybe?) but it didn’t work with my small local bank. Cash is King.
Cash is obsolete, but so, apparently, is the US banking system. So I guess cash is the next best thing, but it’s far from ideal.
I’m not sure either, not unless there’s some kind of magic that allows me to pay my share directly to the restaurant even when the restaurant won’t provide separate checks or allow $22.50 to be charged to this card and $31.75 on another and the remaining $53.41 to be paid in cash.
These days I use mostly Zelle, Venmo, or Cash App, depending on the desires of the recipient.
Zelle is integrated into most of the big banks, but many credit unions don’t seem to support it. Beyond that, the recipient actually has to have a bank to use Zelle. Some people don’t. My brother, for example, basically uses Cash App as his “bank.” When I sent him a check for his birthday once, he called me and said, “Can you send this to me by Cash App instead? I have no way to cash a check.”
Cash App does actually have a “savings account” feature, although I don’t think they pay any interest.