Personally I think a billion dollars for a nationally recognized electronic payment system is worth it. In the US the commercial solutions (venmo, paypal, etc) work fine between friends, but sometimes you get stuck having to write (paper) checks. There are several reasons this can happen:
- Some people are just old-school. I've had several landlords who barely understood the internet, good luck getting them to give their banking details to some trendy company in SF. I had one roommate who would routinely drive 30 minutes to drop off a check in my landlord's mailbox, for example. This wasn't secure, and if either my roommate or our landlord was traveling our rent payments would be late.
- Municipalities or government-supported entities are on unstable ground if they start playing favorite with private payment systems. Try getting a national lab to accept paypal, or the University of California to transfer reimbursement to an IBAN through TransferWise.
I imagine it would be even more complicated for cryptocurrencies. And in all cases, I can't say I blame people for asking for checks: it's often low-level clerks who have to do the work, why should they risk getting fired for your convenience? When the national standard is paper checks, having them stolen, arriving late, being forged, etc are all just "the price of doing business".
On the other hand, no matter how much you save your employer and increase client satisfaction by using something non-standard, you're on the chopping block if something goes wrong.
American is so far behind the rest of the world. Even before this, in Australia and New Zealand, I could pay anyone, direct bank-to-bank, with just their name and account number, within 24 hours.
Agreed. What this article doesn't mention is that the NPP is now the world's most sophisticated payment system. The things this thing can do is insane.
- Some people are just old-school. I've had several landlords who barely understood the internet, good luck getting them to give their banking details to some trendy company in SF. I had one roommate who would routinely drive 30 minutes to drop off a check in my landlord's mailbox, for example. This wasn't secure, and if either my roommate or our landlord was traveling our rent payments would be late.
- Municipalities or government-supported entities are on unstable ground if they start playing favorite with private payment systems. Try getting a national lab to accept paypal, or the University of California to transfer reimbursement to an IBAN through TransferWise.
I imagine it would be even more complicated for cryptocurrencies. And in all cases, I can't say I blame people for asking for checks: it's often low-level clerks who have to do the work, why should they risk getting fired for your convenience? When the national standard is paper checks, having them stolen, arriving late, being forged, etc are all just "the price of doing business".
On the other hand, no matter how much you save your employer and increase client satisfaction by using something non-standard, you're on the chopping block if something goes wrong.