If you need to pay someone in the US, it’s interesting that you can walk into the bank used by the recipient and make a deposit into their account. You just need to know their account number and IIRC that even works with cash. There is generally no fee. Sometimes tenants and landlords have that arrangement.
Anyone know if that’s possible in Europe? Does it depend on the bank? I know the conventional way in Europe is to bring cash into the post office, and the post office will take the cash and transfer the money to the recipient. But there is a transaction fee and I think a restriction as well that the payer must be a resident. Can a payer go direct to the recipient’s bank and get service, ideally without a fee?
It’s not always possible in the US. I have a friend whose bank didn’t let him deposit money into his mom’s account for an emergency, despite them both having accounts there. They’ve both since changed banks because of this.
About 10 years ago I would visit my credit union to make payments on my car loan and they wouldn’t take payments without ID. I told him I authorized anyone who wants to make a payment on my account to be able to do so without any ID but they said it was their policy and the teller surmised that it was because whoever made the payment got a receipt with details about the account.
I assume you’re talking about the US, right? Guessing on the basis that Europe does not seem to have credit unions AFAICT.
The ID requirement may be fair enough… something we have to live with if it’s a legal obligation. But in Europe it’s a bit of a disaster because the post office doesn’t just accept any ID. It must be from the EU and must have a chip that their system can read, so they can collect your residential address and track payers digitally. Of course that all breaks down if the ID doesn’t have a chip, or the chip does not have the info the system is trying to extract. Then the post office just refuses the money. Staff are becoming more and more helpless when digital systems cannot handle various scenarios.