Speaking on The Pat Kenny Show, Lagarde underscored Europe’s dependence on foreign digital payment infrastructure. “Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Alipay are all controlled by American or Chinese companies,” she noted, arguing, “We should make sure there is a European offer.”
Is it? Now I’m curious. Care to elaborate?
Except for apps like PayPal, Venmo, Zelle and Google Wallet, all of which allow you to transfer money to an email address or phone number, there is no convenient electronic way to transfer money from individual to individual in the US. The only other real alternative is handing over cash or writing a check. You can technically do a wire transfer, but those are really designed for stuff like buying a house or something, and usually either cost money, take days to settle, or usually both.
I can’t speak for every other country, but in Norway we’ve at least for a couple of decades taken for granted the ability to just initiate a transfer of money to someone else’s bank account. You just enter the number and amount in your Internet Bank, and it gets transferred free of charge either overnight or instantly. It’s how we’ve done everything my whole adult life.
In the US, the prevalent way to pay rent is still to either write out a physical check or enter the numbers from a check into some web interface which is then somehow able to suck money out of your account. Sometimes a bank will offer to mail the check on your behalf, but it’s still very much a check.
I did not know that and I think it’s wild that the largest economy in the world still operates on such prehistoric methods.
It’s not in the incumbent oligopoly’s interest to innovate.
I think this is more that American exceptionalism makes them incapable of getting inspiration from other countries, so they end up doing something entirely different. If it’s better, the rest of the world adopts it as well, and if it’s inferior, the rest of the world points and laughs.
E-check is definitely in the point and laugh category, while payment apps based on phone number or email like Venmo are getting copied by various other countries. Granted, I don’t think the US was first with phone-based payments, various developing countries in Africa have had it for ages. But I do think they came up with it independently, because they habitually ignore innovation done anywhere else.