To be fair, moving money between countries was not trivial before PayPal.
To use Europe as an example, SEPA became operative in 2008, about six years after PayPal first became available in Europe. Before that, all international money transfers had to go through SWIFT and the easiest way was probably to use a credit card (and good luck trying to send money to a someone who isn’t a company with that).
Even with SEPA (or for domestic transfers), PayPal offered superior comfort over entering the recipient’s IBAN into a homebanking software. Processing was faster, too.
Of course these days banks in Europe have to offer instant transfers, there’s a QR code standard to read invoice data into banking apps, and they’re working on a full-blown PayPal replacement to get the last comfort bits down as well. It’ll be interesting to see how that works out.
I mean, revolut is still a thing despite instant transfers, because being able to just send money to a phone number from your contact list is still hella more convenient than sharing QR codes or IBANs.
To be fair, moving money between countries was not trivial before PayPal.
To use Europe as an example, SEPA became operative in 2008, about six years after PayPal first became available in Europe. Before that, all international money transfers had to go through SWIFT and the easiest way was probably to use a credit card (and good luck trying to send money to a someone who isn’t a company with that).
Even with SEPA (or for domestic transfers), PayPal offered superior comfort over entering the recipient’s IBAN into a homebanking software. Processing was faster, too.
Of course these days banks in Europe have to offer instant transfers, there’s a QR code standard to read invoice data into banking apps, and they’re working on a full-blown PayPal replacement to get the last comfort bits down as well. It’ll be interesting to see how that works out.
I mean, revolut is still a thing despite instant transfers, because being able to just send money to a phone number from your contact list is still hella more convenient than sharing QR codes or IBANs.