Your money is located somewhere and your recipient has their money located somewhere. The places where your money sits needs to interoperate with whatever "thing" you're using to send money. Presuming that your money sits in a bank/credit union, you arrive at the quoted statement. If your money is paper in a sack somewhere, you can mail it, but it might not make it all the way.
If you send it to an email address that doesn't exist, does the transfer go through? If so who ends up with the money?
It's been a while since I sent funds to a new address but I am pretty sure my bank's UI provided protection against that, and now when I send future funds to the same account, I just pick them from a drop down box instead of entering it manually.
How do you send money via ACH? I've never figured out a way to do it. Unless you're talking about the common "link an account" functionality where you do trial deposits, etc...
Does the US not have e-transfers? Up here in Canada you can easily transfer money directly between accounts. You log into your bank and provide the email address for the recipient. The bank emails them a transfer message. They log into their account and accept the transfer. Could not be easier.
In Canada we use email for person-to-person money transfers. I transfer money to my contacts by email address. They then get an email which informs them they have a pending transfer, and allows them to deposit it into their bank account.
You can optionally register your email with the central system for autodeposit.
Point is you always have the option of sending the old fashioned way if you want. You don't have to use a 3rd party unless there's a specific function they provide for certain specific cases that you want. You don't have that option with regular money. You have to use some service to transfer money for you.
>You transfer the money to them, and then they send a transfer directly from the bank of recipient
Since few years banks also provide APIs for redirecting to transfer form prefilled with payment processor details, so you don't have to enter them manually.
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