Person-to-Person Bank Transfers Gaining Steam
March 30, 2010
Fiserv, Inc. is one of those companies that lives by the business model of selling the picks and shovels to the gold miners. That is to say, they are not a bank, but they provide information technology services to over 3,000 banks. And Fiserv is offering a new service that could change the way you use your checking or savings account.
This new technology would essentially give any bank customer an easy, fast way to transfer money from a money market, savings, or checking account into the account of another person at another bank. Fiserv's new system would allow people to send money by email and maybe even by phone.
Customer Demand Driving Innovation
Fiserv did its homework while developing this new technology. According to a survey of 1,022 U.S. consumers, 70 percent of people saw value in a person-to-person money transfer system. Three out of four of those respondents prefer that their bank offers this service, rather than a third-party company like PayPal.
PayPal, now owned by eBay, has been a true pioneer in the e-payment field, and now the banks seem to be catching up.
Banks Can Offer Instant Access
In order to use this new service, customers would have to sign up at a Web site, which would then validate that all bank accounts involved are valid and so forth--you don't want someone emailing your money market account to another person's money market account at will. That would be a disaster.
But once banks have on record that you regularly send your brother, daughter, or father a payment, the banks can enable these payments on a pretty much instantaneous basis. The timeworn excuse "the check's in the mail" would certainly lose efficacy under this scenario.
