As someone who's done work on payment systems for both countries (online payments only).
In the US:
Credit cards have a bit better protections than bank accounts do. For example for bank transfers[0], if you wait a few days after finding out there is a fraudulent transaction, you are liable for $500. (if you reported it right away, it's only $50 liability). Credit cards max at $50 liability.
ACH for US banks is absolutely horrible. It's slow and just doesn't work well. FedNow that was just announced could help, but that's 5 years out (at least). TheClearingHouse has an instant payments platform out there, but only had 50% adoption right now, and costs a flat cost per transaction. Credit Cards are instant (ish), but have super high fees.
The US has thousands of banks (~5000), many of which are smaller local banks. Getting all these banks to be on a common system is hard.
In the UK:
You have BACS, which has some really nice properties (like when moving between banks, your auto-pay moves with you), but it has warts on it. Like ACH, all payments are successful after it's submitted, but you don't find out about rejects (like insufficient funds) until a day or 2 later.
UK has Faster Payments rails, but it is absurdly expensive (1-5 pounds per payment (EDIT: THIS IS WRONG)). It's same day, which is awesome, but it could be better.
UK does a lot more debit payments than the US, likely because debit in the US just has not-great consumer protections today.
The UK also has many fewer banks (~300), so getting them on common systems is a bit easier.
I don’t understand your comment about faster payments. At least for sending money between people it appears to be free and basically instant to transfer money. Maybe the bank just swallows the fee or doesn’t have to pay it for some reason.
How is Faster Payments that expensive? I can't imagine online banks like Monzo & Starling who offer free accounts, no fees whatsoever and thus very low profit margin per customer are paying that.
I had bad data apparently. It looks like some businesses (for business use cases) are charged that amount potentially, but it looks like the service ended up mainly being free. My bad.
In the US:
Credit cards have a bit better protections than bank accounts do. For example for bank transfers[0], if you wait a few days after finding out there is a fraudulent transaction, you are liable for $500. (if you reported it right away, it's only $50 liability). Credit cards max at $50 liability.
ACH for US banks is absolutely horrible. It's slow and just doesn't work well. FedNow that was just announced could help, but that's 5 years out (at least). TheClearingHouse has an instant payments platform out there, but only had 50% adoption right now, and costs a flat cost per transaction. Credit Cards are instant (ish), but have super high fees.
The US has thousands of banks (~5000), many of which are smaller local banks. Getting all these banks to be on a common system is hard.
In the UK:
You have BACS, which has some really nice properties (like when moving between banks, your auto-pay moves with you), but it has warts on it. Like ACH, all payments are successful after it's submitted, but you don't find out about rejects (like insufficient funds) until a day or 2 later.
UK has Faster Payments rails, but it is absurdly expensive (1-5 pounds per payment (EDIT: THIS IS WRONG)). It's same day, which is awesome, but it could be better.
UK does a lot more debit payments than the US, likely because debit in the US just has not-great consumer protections today.
The UK also has many fewer banks (~300), so getting them on common systems is a bit easier.
[0] https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/rules/6500-580.html