In Sweden there is a single cross-platform payment app since >10 yrs called Swish which all the banks are connected to, and you transfer money by entering the recipients mobile phone number and the amount. No fees and the transfer is instant.

I guess it's luck that some countries happened to get the banks to agree to something like this at the particular time when the technology needed to support it just had matured (in Sweden a government supported e-ID had just become prevalent), and then it's kind of difficult for them to pull out and say "now everybody should pay for it".

Here you can pay with Swish in most stores as well, but the prevalent payment method there is still mastercard/visa I think.

Swish is just another proprietary solution though along with BankID. And BankID basically requires residency in Sweden (and much more), so it's not something you can install while visiting to pay at flea markets. Their only appeal is that they are ubiquitous.

I lived in Sweden as a resident for a period of time (less than the amount you are required to get a personnumber, one of the requirements for BankID) and sometimes not having Swish was a real hassle. Oftentimes it was with smaller mom-and-pop shops whose primary method of accepting payment was Swish. Carrying cash usually solved the problem, but not always. Transferring money to and from friends was also more difficult, either cash or Transferwise were used instead.

Even if I had been able to get a personnumber getting a BankID would have also been a real hassle - by law I believe Swedish banks have to grant me an account if I reside there and have a personnumber but as a US citizen they go out of their way to make it as difficult as possible due to the extremely onerous requirements that US requires foreign bank accounts comply with.

In practice signing up for a regular account w/ debit card, bankid etc as a US citizen isn't very different from signing up as a Sweden.

You'll run into issues trying to open an account for trading stocks though.

It does not require residency in Sweden. I left in 2011. I'm not in SPAR anymore, which restricts some rare things, but not BankID or Swish.

You cannot have BankID without having a personnummer, for which you need to be a resident or citizen (Swish uses BankID for identification for those who are not familiar with it).

Yeah, in Sweden you basically don't exist if you don't have a personnummer, yeah.

I'm a citizen and have a personnummer, but because I'm not a resident I'm not in SPAR. But I need to be neither in SPAR nor a resident for BankID or Swish.

I even managed to pick up a parcel my saying my personnummer, when they couldn't scan it off of my British driving license.

We have something like that in the US and it’s called Zelle.

I’ve used it to transfer money to family, but friends sometimes use Venmo, Cash App, or others. I don’t think it ever gained critical mass.

Then it’s not like that. Swish is literally the best and only option and it is better than people exchanging cash.

In Singapore there’s also PayNow/PayLah

It’s like Swish because it’s the solution backed by the banks and you can pay someone using just their phone number.

Same in Norway, but product is called Vipps. It's slower to use for payment than contactless (you have to scan a QR-code if paying in shops), but it's so much easier for everything else than bank transfer and much cheaper and easier for pop-up shops than cash and any kind of card reader.

And of course Denmark has MobilePay, which unfortunately is owned by a single bank: Danske Bank. But I guess the other banks are fine with not competing against MobilePay.

That was true but isn't anymore. MobilePay is now part of a Norwegian company, Vipps, which is owned by a consortium of Norwegian banks (65% ownership), Danske Bank (25%), and Finnish OP Financial Group (10%).

> How has this industry so royally fucked up something that should be pretty straightforward?

Because... money? Venmo built up the biggest user base and was subsequently bought out by PayPal for big bucks. Zelle was a major initiative by the banks themselves, but too late, I suppose, to sway the habits of the consumers themselves. There was also SquareCash, but they were also too late into the game, particularly because they had no institutional support behind them like Zelle. Lastly, Apple Cash, while particularly convenient, IMHO just did not advertise it well enough. Also, being limited to Apple devices only, kinda misses the point of making payments easy, since you can't be expected to always remember/check which device does your payee have.

Most other service you mentioned were just regular payment processing intermediaries, not p2p solutions like Venmo/Squarecash/Apple Cash.

It's a mess indeed, but at the end of the day, from my experience, Venmo in the US still is the go-to method, seconded only by Zelle.

Zelle and Square's Cash App were not too late. They are both very popular in the US and by all accounts Venmo is the one trending downward in usage. The near future looks like Cash App in first and seconded by Zelle. You're just in a certain segment of the US where Venmo still has first place.

Here's some data from Google: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Yes, absolutely aware of Zelle's growing popularity. I also tend to hear "Cash App" a lot more than in the past where "Venmo" was the only thing mentioned.

Still leaves Google', Apple's or Facebook's solutions in the dust.

Because this should have been part of the basic banking infrastructure (like it's done everywhere else), not something done by one company tying all the knots around

I usually pay people online with Paypal. Isn't that p2p given that you send money using only their email address? What do Venmo/Zelle give over that?

Fundamentally, nothing really. It's all the same: money moves from one person to another—quickly, instantly, and no fees (unless it's a business transaction)—as long as it doesn't leave the network. But therein lies the rub: money has to leave this network occasionally because you cannot send money peer-to-peer to from PayPal to a merchant not using PayPal (like Amazon), and that is the troublesome part where money has to be ACH'd to bank accounts.

And as such, the p2p ecosystems differentiate themselves by giving people ways to pay merchants without explicitly needing to move that money out of the network. So, Cash App issued a debit card, and then PayPal, and then Venmo (yep, even though it's a subsidiary, it's a separate card). And then some of them started using real bank accounts (with routing/account numbers) to back the stored balance. And the result today is that all these p2p apps look awfully a lot like banks, but less encumbered by regulations because they don't do everything that banks do.

Back to your question, why bother changing to Venmo (or Cash App) when PayPal is basically the same at this point? Obviously, the primary reason would be if everyone you know is using not-PayPal. A secondary reason is the same reason that people have different credit cards from different banks: different rewards schemes (yep, there are incentives for using those p2p debit cards).

Zelle is probably the odd one out here, because it's just an extra thing built on top of existing participating banks that already have all these ways of moving money out of their networks. It's effectively a wire transfer replacement without the fee (or a physical check replacement without the check-writing).

(Disclosure: am employed by a company that has a p2p product.)

> And the result today is that all these p2p apps look awfully a lot like banks, but less encumbered by regulations because they don't do everything that banks do.

They don't just look, they are banks (or has a bank they outsource the regulated activity to). This is a piece they're not too keen on disclosing, except in very tiny print, as they wouldn't like their user to realize they can go and complain to the regulator regulating their companies when they leave their customers high and dry.

> Obviously, the primary reason would be if everyone you know is using not-PayPal.

Where Venmo wins with Zelle and PayPal is the privacy: you don’t have to hand out your email address or phone number — you’re payee only knows your handle.

PayPal have an unfortunate history of seizing people's balances. So it's fine for small amounts, but you shouldn't trust it for large amounts if you can help it.

PayPal is complicated and difficult to use. There are lots of different ways to pay people and they use dark patterns to try and get you to use a method that costs you fees. And this is coming from someone who has used it for 20 years. Venmo is starting down that same road, likely due to it being purchased by PayPal.

To pay with PayPal, cash moves: Your Bank Account -> Your PayPal Account -> Their PayPal Account -> Their Bank Account.

That's how a client-server model works, definitely not p2p.

I have no clue how Venmo or Zelle work though, so I don't have an answer to your latter question.

Zelle is bank2bank in theory though the one time I used it the payment got stuck in some sort of limbo for awhile, not sure why.

Next time I’ll just use the bill pay and make the bank eat the cost of a stamp.

> How has this industry so royally fucked up something that should be pretty straightforward?

If you ever have to ask this in America, the answer is almost always corporations and lobbying.

The companies are all doing a land grab because they think if they can get the whole pie it’ll be worth quite a bit.

Which makes it all a major cluster f. Same thing happened to messaging.

Here in Canada it’s crazy to hear about all the different apps and challenges in the states given we’ve had etransfer (email money to anyone it Canada from your bank) for nearly 20? years now I think. It just works.

  > How has this industry so royally fucked up something that should be pretty straightforward?

The fungability of currency, central to its invention and adoption in various forms, provides power to those who hold it. Removing the fungability transfers power to those who middle-man transactions. This became very obvious when large financial institutions refused to deal with e.g. Wikileaks or various porno and gambling websites.

There has been a constant trend throughout history minimize plebian agency and power. For a few decades after WWII the common citizen gained agency and now corporations and governments alike are clawing it back.

Google Pay ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... ) can store my Tate and National Trust membership cards, my EU COVID passport (proof of vaccination and booster), as well as boarding passes. And it's smart enough to expire out cards from the pass as expired memberships or flights that have flown.

Anything that can be represented in a barcode or QR code can be stored in it. Which of course turns out to be a lot of things, payments are just one part of it.

Edit: added link, but it's preinstalled on most modern Android devices.

How did you get your EU Covid pass added if i may ask? On my brand new Samsung phone it only lets me add predefined cards, most of which are quite useless (ie. Various US Transit Cards)

Pkpass appears to be an Apple defined spec that isn't owned by a neutral party like a standards organisation. Yes they've published the definition ( https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Us... ) but why would other companies embrace a definition and then entrench that when Apple could change it at any time or lock them out of future revisions?

If an airliner is only making boarding passes available in pkpass, then ask your airliner to support more than just Apple devices. The one I flew with at the weekend "just worked".

I didn't know about this stuff before your comment as I've not yet encountered a pkpass formatted digital file. But I do see that there are conversion apps available if I did give across them. I'm just not surprised Google wouldn't adopt a non standard format.

> Pkpass appears to be an Apple defined spec that isn't owned by a neutral party like a standards organisation. Yes they've published the definition ( https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Us... ) but why would other companies embrace a definition and then entrench that when Apple could change it at any time or lock them out of future revisions?

That's overly paranoid, and the defensiveness leads to self-defeat.

There's no incentive for Apple to change the spec confrontationally like that, especially if more people use it. People will stop buying or using their products.

From my perspective, no-one's using this ticketing spec any more because of this fear. You have to download apps for all the services you want and view your tickets/passes/cards in those apps. Very view companies export just the card/ticket without an app (when some of them started out doing this), and increasingly they just keep the ticket in their app. The only thing that seems to consistently work for more than a couple of years are my bank cards - presumably because I can pay with contactless.

Those services which have given up using Wallet are now harder to use and less appealing. They create friction and dissatisfaction with every transaction. And now I don't trust Apple Wallet any more (in terms of being useful). I actually feel freer to leave the Apple ecosystem now than I ever have done because nothing works as well as promised. (The two things keeping me with Apple are not Apple benefits, but Google's failings: surveillance based business model and that their ecosystem looks worse still).

For me Google's main issue is security updates. My 2 1/2 year old Pixel 3 is effectively trash because they only provided 3 years of security updates.

> If an airliner is only making boarding passes available in pkpass, then ask your airliner to support more than just Apple devices. The one I flew with at the weekend "just worked".

And I'd get the same reply I get when I ask for an upgrade.

But what do you mean with "just worked"? Where did the pass show up?

The airline app offered a button to add the boarding pass to Google Wallet, I pressed the button (because airline apps are slow, and a local asset would be more reliable) and it appeared in Google Pay and everything went smoothly. The airport barcode scanner worked, the boarding gate scanner worked. More... the entry in Google Pay was updated with the gate number and notified me of the change, and the flight departure time was updated. Even the priority boarding is reflected on it which allowed me access to the first queue. Links from the boarding pass went to "Booking management" and also "Flight status detail".

It literally "just worked". It was intuitive too... I'd not seen it before and knew where to find everything.

I hadn't seen the functionality before (but haven't travelled in ages), and everything I would reasonably hope for from it was there working flawlessly. Even this morning when I looked at it I see it's moved into the "Expired passes" section as I would expect from a flight in the past.

Similar for the COVID pass in Google Pay... it was accepted at KubeCon, it was accepted at the Canadian border, it was accepted at the Spain border. Everything "just worked".

Google Wallet is likely fully implemented in the Google Pay app today, and the change is going to be a rebranding just to let people know you can do more than just pay for things. I don't work for Google or hold shares, all of this stuff is just me using the product as a user... it all works great for me, YMMV etc.

I never download Airline apps so there isn't a way to add passes to Google Pay for me.

Let's see if wallet changes this.

Coming Soon.. https://wallet.google/

I think it was announced at Google IO a week or two ago.

> On the Google side, there is (or was) Google Wallet (OG), Android Pay, Google Pay, gPay, now Google Wallet (new).

Don't forget Fitbit Pay! (As Google apparently did)

Because money.