About 3 or 4 years ago PayPal added the option to buy cryptocurrency, which I thought I’d try. (Dumb idea 🙄)
Part of the sign up process was glitched. I retried and clicked submit one too many times, I guess. Now I’ve been unable to use PayPal for years. They blocked me because THEIR SITE was broken, but the web page essentially accuses me of being a criminal and asks for my bank records. No way in hell.
This was just for me to pay others. I can only imagine how awful PayPal is if you are a vendor.
Fuck PayPal.
The banking system in the US is a legacy mess. Transfers still take business days to go through and making your bank account # and routing information available is actually a security concern, honestly I don’t even know why that’s still a thing.
Products like PayPal and Plaid try to provide something that is slightly more usable, but with this underlying obsolescence their functionality is very limited.
When paying for services, credit cards are still the way to do it. For P2P payments, people use PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, and others. Nothing even close to a unified system like Pix in Brazil.
There is Zelle, which is instant bank to bank. It’s fairly widely available from one’s financial institution, and it doesn’t cost anything, but it’s not terribly well known yet for some reason
Zelle works pretty good, the main problem is the security limits.
Let’s say you hire somebody to build a shed for $5,000.
You can’t just pay him $5,000. The first day maybe you can pay him $1,000, then the next day you can pay him another $1,500, then you’ve reached the 30-day maximum for a new contact so you have to wait till day 31 to pay him the other $2,500.
After that if you want another shed you can pay the $5,000 instantly.
They named it after gazelle, which is a herd prey animal. That causes it to slip away from attention when it’s mentioned.
If they’d called in Bonko or something it would stand out in people’s memories more. Bonko, bright orange icon, it would spread by wildfire. Nobody would forget that name.
There are no hard consonants in the word. Synaesthetically, it’s a blue-purple word. Cool, muted. It’s a word that, even before the “gazelle” reference, is hiding there. Your mind slips over it without friction. It enters and leaves your mouth and your mind like a fish passing under the sparkling water, nearly unnoticed.
Terrible brand name. I mean, it does convey a little more safety than “Bonko” but the whole point with the unsafe sounding name is it causes the person to consciously ask “How safe is it?” and if you can answer that immediately with “Safer than Ft Knox” then it becomes part of the brand consciously.
Zelle is non-threatening, but that’s not the same thing as safe when it comes to business or finances.
What’s a good safe, energetic, competent, orange word for this service? Hmm. Bonus points if it’s intuitively self-descriptive.
How about “Paytag”. It’s yellow but whatever. Still might not be better than Bonko.
It is until you end up having to blacklist zelle because your banking information was used to defraud someone. I actually had my account broken into, funds deposited from zelle and then all available funds removed from my account in the space of about an hour. Went to pay for something the day after and had to call my bank’s fraud department. They tried the same thing with a second account of mine but it was flagged immediately when they tried to use the same login credentials (they weren’t remotely the same). So no zelle for me. It’s permanently disabled by both my banks for security reasons.
