MasterCard Send Speeds Up Money Transfers With A Little P2P Magic

Sending money is hard. Sure we’ve got bitcoin for some and PayPal for some more and the horrible SWIFT and ACH systems for the rest of us schlubs but no one has quite cracked the money transfer trick. MasterCard Send is a good start.

Created as an effort to follow the Federal Reserve initiative aimed at speeding up the money transfer system, Send allows instant disbursements – imagine payments from insurance companies that land to your bank account nearly instantly – and P2P payments that let consumers “seamlessly send and receive funds from friends and family typically within seconds through providers including issuers, money transfer operators, merchants and more.” That’s finance talk for really fast remittances and money transfer. You can also send money from card to card, even to non-MasterCard cards. If you’ve ever tried to send money you’ll know that this is kind of a big deal.

MasterCard is pretty hush-hush about the technical details but they write:

MasterCard Send is the only personal payments service that can reach virtually all U.S. debit card accounts and enable funds to be sent and received typically within seconds – far superior to existing solutions that either limit transfers within a closed-loop network or involve ACH, which can take several days for funds to be received.

This Promethean fire is not for mere mortals, however. The new service is available for ecommerce players and companies and will likely requite plenty of regulatory oversight to be used by anyone, let alone big guys like Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection and FreeShipping.com, two initial customers. If you think you have the chops to use this stuff in your business, MasterCard wants you to check it out.