Here in South Europe people mostly use Viber. Edit: I was very unaware about situation in Southern Europe as I’ve learned from this post… Most people in Croatia use Viber!
Here in South Europe people mostly use Viber. Edit: I was very unaware about situation in Southern Europe as I’ve learned from this post… Most people in Croatia use Viber!
SMS. Universal and ubiquitous thanks to free or nearly free inclusion in phone plans. American English has no need for expanded character sets and carriers/Apple/Google have added just enough features on top that the vast majority of people aren’t left wanting for more.
Instant payment was literally impossible until this summer, and given it’s so new almost no bank has support for it yet. Privacy/encryption don’t enter into most people’s consciousness.
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They might mean instant bank transfers, like OSKO in Australia. Google tells me a service called FedNow is available through 35 banks as of July this year which supports instant bank transfers.
Bingo. It’s wild to me to hear other countries doing tons of their payments via apps. US is 10 years behind the rest of the world on that.
We have things like Venmo and cashapp that approximate the same thing, but in the end it’s just the same ACH transfers the banking industry has used for 30 years and takes days to process. The apps just hide that behind the scenes. FedNow actually means instant and 24/6 (still doesn’t run on Sunday, if I recall correctly).
OSKO is even better than payment apps. Basically every bank offers is as a payment method option (if not the default) for any transfer, at 0 cost. They’re also implementing a new system to replace direct debits, to add more consumer protection and control to the recurring billing market.
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SMS was ubiquitous here in NA while data was already ubiquitous but SMS heavily metered in most of the rest of the world.