Part of it is "the curse of good enough": the US has had good credit-card style infrastructure for over a century and digital infrastructure since the POTS days. Part of it is that we lost our appetite for anti-trust in the 80s. Part of it is that the price structure of this infrastructure has wormed its way into everything in a way that is difficult to undo without causing high-visibility inconvenience for low-visibility benefit. The good-enough is the enemy of the good.
Germany is another first mover with decades old banking systems and standards. German banks also dragged their feet supporting SEPA Instant or they added additional fees so that barely anybody wanted to use it.
Then the EU stepped in with regulation: If you support classic SEPA transactions, you also have to support SEPA Instant for the same price (which is almost always free for retail banking accounts). And suddenly banks did.
I think the “recent” change allowing merchants to pass along the credit card fees is a step in the right direction.
I think a lot of people would still choose fraud protection for the extra costs, though.
Not to take away from your example, but I was under the impression that transaction fees charged when using a credit card in the US were significantly more than in say, the EU?
Of course the business passes its costs right back to the consumer, but it's not visible to them, while the benefits are.
The government is the only one capable of changing the rules to be included in the list of allowed parties to make it better.
> All U.S. financial institutions (Receiving Depository Financial Institutions or RDFIs) must participate and accept Same Day ACH credit transactions.
> However, sending (originating) Same Day ACH payments is optional for banks and credit unions.
I've signed up for or seen the contracts for several payment processors across several companies. Rack rate for ACH debit starts at $0.25/trx and goes down to sub-penny at scale. Returns can be high though ($2 per, going down as well).
Edited to add: that's not a defense, I *loathe* ACH. It's a negative-reporting system which is such a pain to deal with.
What I can say is the Fed has draconian rules for pricing its services. The services cannot be subsidized but must be priced to recover costs, including a return on capital similar to what a private payment system (ie from the Clearinghouse) would expect.
I read it as the sending institution pays 5.2 cents to the receiving institution per item, on top of the 0.35c/item + 0.1c/item same-day surcharge for a maximum of 5.65 cents/item before volume discounts.
For other examples, look at adoption of login.gov vs id.me, and tax filing software solutions.
Because why would Musk possibly be interested in saving money and making the government run more efficiently?
What an egotistical ass hat.
In the USA, no single regulator have that power. Basically only congress can do something like this. The us Congress ain't famous for being fast, you know.
The countries that have innovated the most in regards to automated payments are the ones trying to escape US influence: look at PIX in Brazil, BRICS pay, etc...
In America, the payment system is an oligarchy, they protect their own (the bankers), what need is there for innovation when they are making a killing out of the current inefficiency?
The one place where the US haven't been slow is in stablecoins, making them dollar donominated, to ensure the monopoly the US dollar has on international trade stays strong. That way, when the US has a crisis, they take down the rest of the world too, to the joy of non-US countries.
I’ve never been in a position where I needed a cash transfer to an account the very same day, I have tens of thousands of dollars of credit available so there’s very little need for immediate transfers, at least for me personally. I do virtually all of my spending on credit cards so I have up to 60 days to pay the loan back without interest.
We've had a billion discussions on Hacker News about payment rails and it's invariably always a European incredulous that Americans can't/won't do a digital payment instantly and for pennies. These Europeans are typically operating with a mental model where they have cash in a bank account and every transaction gets funded from cash on hand.
Americans - for better or for worse - want longer cycles to pay for their charges and many want rewards for their spend. I don't think it's uncharitable to describe those who pull out debit over credit during a transaction as lower income and higher credit risk than those who prefer credit. (Europeans will decry that this is Americans living beyond their means. Maybe! Maybe.)
But when it comes to business, I've never understood this argument from Europeans. Invoicing works on net-30/60/90 terms. In B2B payments you could reduce payment cost by doing invoicing with instant low-cost payment in 30 days, but incur a different "cost" in cash flow management. Credit card payments are a risk-based financial product that does a magic trick of arbitrage for merchants between a service/good sold and payment received as a net-30 invoice to the cardholder, and you should expect to pay a fee for that. An economy where businesses need to pay each other immediately out of cash-on-hand is less dynamic and less efficient than one where all that cash flow can get smoothed out via payment intermediaries. (Money you have to keep on hand for bills is not being deployed doing other things in the economy - this is inefficient!)
For C2B payments, this is probably a helpful and lower-cost innovation over debit rails. But credit is a different product, financially and culturally, in the United States.