ok now try sending money from the Netherlands to the UK.

or heck, even to Germany, Poland, or Portugal

SEPA Instant is brand new, and in the meantime each country in the EU has developed its own solution to this problem which usually works within that own country and maybe a neighbor or two, but not across the entire EU or EEA

so while two people from within the Netherlands (a country the size of New York) can send money to each other easily, the story is a little complex when one of them is located in, say, Portugal (a country the size of New Jersey)

until just a few years ago, SEPA was not actually that different from ACH from a user perspective!

SEPA had broader penetration than ACH does for consumer sales, but that's more a result of low credit card penetration in Europe, not a fundamental difference in the systems.

Same-day ACH has been available since 2018, and as of March 2021, there are now three settlement windows each day.

As of March 2021, the per-transaction cap was also raised to a whopping $100,000.

Zelle isn't a "third-party app" in that it's owned by a consortium of banks, which is a common structure for these things both in the US *and* in Europe.

If you're going to call Zelle "third-party", you'd have to say the same about many money transfer protocols in Europe too.

I won't say that ACH in 2021 has 100% feature parity with SEPA, but I will say that most people making statements like OP's either:

1) underestimate what ACH can do

2) overestimate what SEPA does

3) conflate country-specific methods with ones that work across the whole EU

money transfers are a really weird thing for Europeans to pick to feel superior about, because tbqh, SEPA payments are a legitimately *worse* user experience than what most people in the US actually do

You need to send money to your friend Joe Smith. Would you rather send money to:

1) BG18RZBB91550123456789

or

2) [email protected]

?

That IBAN is for Bulgaria, but French ones can be even longer!

Also, many countries' IBANs have no checksum feature, so if you typo one digit, your money goes to a stranger.

Better not confuse

BG18RZBB91550123456789

for

BG18RZBB81550123456789

if you want to talk about user experience, the options available in India blow Europe and the US out of the water, and work for far more people than those countries combined.

but weirdly, people never seem to talk about those....

narrator: they do, in fact, think Zelle is a separate app you have to download. https://twitter.com/ManishEarth/status/1390414844302544897

I've had this conversation with multiple Dutch people who complain that the US has nothing like iDEAL, which is so great because it lets you send money to anyone in Europe

and I've had to break the news to them that iDEAL does not, in fact, work outside the Netherlands

inb4 "non-Dutch banks can integrate with iDEAL"

yes but I guarantee you the bank your random friend in Berlin or Paris or Łódź uses does not, which is the point.

this is a broader pattern beyond just banking: I often find Europeans are very confident that systems work the way they think they should (even if they don't!), whereas people elsewhere are distrustful and assume systems don't work they way they'd like (even if they do!)

you can see that play out in the replies to this thread (and elsewhere in the trending topic): people in the US are surprised to learn that Zelle is free, easy, and already in their bank app, whereas Europeans are surprised that theirs isn't as free/universal/easy as they thought

in a similar vein, we've seen this pattern play out with COVID-19 as well. New York is a particularly extreme example: in New York, people are used to assuming the worst of our government and empirically distrusted even the things that the government claimed was safe