I most frequently use my mobile banking apps to transfer money, but I find the process quite frustrating with a lot of necessary waiting and taps. Does anyone use anything else to transfer money to friends, or is everyone still using account number / sort code based transfer?
Hi! Welcome to the community!
If you have accounts with any of fintech banks (Monzo, Revolut, Starling), they offer peer to peer options. This makes sending payments to other people with the same bank very easy, and in far fewer taps.
All of these also offer the option to send or receive money using links, which is much slicker.
I very often use Monzoâs payment link feature. I enter an amount I want to send, share the link with them and thatâs it for my part. Itâs not necessarily faster or easier, but it shifts the burden of who has to enter and confirm all the details from you to the person receiving it.
Youâll probably find the newer app based banks will generally have a much better and faster flow for payments anyway. Who do you bank with currently?
Thereâs also an app I use quite often for this purpose too called Cash App. The recipient will need to use it as well (often the pitfall for services that make the process better). Cash app is really cool though if youâre on iOS. Itâs built into iMessage so you can send and receive directly from the app you use to talk to your family and friends on.
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Many UK banks support PAYM - where you effectively use the mobile number of the person you are paying and donât need to know their bank account details.
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I donât really use it myself for this purpose (Iâm fine with regular bank transfer), but is there any reason PayPal hasnât had a mention?
In the UK I suspect its active user pool is larger than the options already mentioned (fintech banks, cash app, paym). So after regular bank transfer might be the option with widest reach.
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I agree, itâs a good option.
Really Paym and PayPal collectively cover most things, the other options are good if you know somebody uses a particular service as many of them are actually slightly easier.
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Cash App and VibePay are both great options
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Paym isnât without its own issues.
A colleague of mine recently found a couple of hundred pounds in an old bank account of theirs. They had Paym set up on that account and people paid them back for things like lunches over the years with their mobile number and I guess they just assumed they were never being paid the money.
Iâm not sure how well itâs been advertised and therefore how many people outside of forums like this one know that it exists.
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Thatâs unfair to label that as an issue with the technology, really.
It was on them to keep track of their registration status, which they should have realised earlier.
I have seen it advertised over the years, but itâs only really registered with me because I already knew what it was, if that makes sense.
It could do with a bigger push, probably best if it was joint push, from the big banks though - I agree with that.
Part of the reason Monzo.me was such a success initially was because nobody realised Paym existed.
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If they could make the payments instant and Al did a good marketing push, force bank adoption too, Iâd be down for it.
It is instant, or near enough.
The payments are sent via normal Faster Payment on the back-end, just as if you had used the sort code and account number.
The system acts as though it gives an account a mobile number as a secondary identifier (itâs accomplished through a separate database, but the effect is the same).
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Wasnât aware, just know that they say payments can take up to a few hours.
Would be nice then if it really just is Faster Payments, if it was a system the banks coalesced around and made work. Even the smaller ones.
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As far as I know, one of the limitations with paym is that you can only have it registered to 1 account.
I have a few payments going out to friends, some with a fintech account, some without.
For those without, once I have paid them the first time, the fintech accounts keep the details and itâs just a couple of taps to transfer any money I need to 
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Well yes, thatâs obviously the case, otherwise the PAYM system wouldnât know which account to send the payment to.
But if youâre paying someone with more than one bank account youâll have to keep several sets of bank details for them and ask them which account they want the money sending to, which is just as limited as PAYM.
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It is, but you have hit the nail on the head in identifying the issue here as the smaller banks seem to have all opted to develop their own contact-based systems instead to create a network effect and lock people in with the ability to add richer transaction data, which has compromised the Paym pitch - it should obviously be just âevery bankâ (within reason). Thereâs no reason Monzo (for example) couldnât offer Monzo.me, PayM payments and âtraditionalâ sort code and account number.
All the big banks are Paym members, but many of the smaller and medium-sized ones arenât.
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Yes, you can only register your phone number to one account with Paym, but itâs easy enough to move money around your own accounts once youâve received it so I donât really see that as an issue.
In a way, thatâs by design, as clearly your phone number is an identifier that can only be used once. You can, however, change what account your number is registered with quite easily.
Every bank does this, if you are talking about saving payees!
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Itâs situations like this that make me envious of Scandinavia with solutions like MobilePay (DK), Swish (SE), and Vipps (NO) for in-store, online, and P2P payments. It would be so nice to just have one thing for everything (regardless of your bank).
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True, but most of those solutions are very clunky and based largely on QR codes (and sometimes Bluetooth).
For payments in shops, Iâm much happier with Apple Pay (which we obviously have already).
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Write a cheque - in the age of cheque imaging these are actually surprisingly convenient 
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Long live cheques!
WePay is where itâs at, QR codes everywhere
Itâs a lot friendlier for low-end devices and could feasibly connect even the (for lack of a better word popping to mind) poors to the financial system
In China every single phone will have WePay or AliPay (or theyâre trialing the digital Yuan now with certain state banks)
Every phone has a camera (that is capable of reading a QR code) but not every phone has a secure NFC chip to make mobile payments
On top of that, with a QR code itâs actually more secure (in theory) as you scan their code and can look at all the data before agreeing to exchange anything with them
Also, although I doubt it, does anyone have any ties to any of the following universities? ä¸ćľˇäş¤éăĺ大ăĺ¤ćŚăć¸ ĺ
Looking for cronyism