By RON LIEBER FEB. A few weeks ago, at a dinner with a dozen or so friends, the check arrived and the usual payment scrum ensued, with cash being passed back and forth across the table.

Except for one person, who whipped out the little plastic device made by Square, plugged it into her phone and offered to swipe the credit card of anyone who wanted to give her exact change for their portion of the bill. You must pay it 2. And at long last, banks have finally taken notice.

While they have given companies like PayPal a decadelong head start, nearly all of the big institutions offer some sort of person-to-person service, and three of the biggest — Bank of AmericaChase and Wells Fargo — have joined up to create their own back-end system for processing the money.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans give money both for birthday and holiday presents at least once each year, according to a study by Aite Group, a research and advisory firm.

Another quarter handed off financial support, often to a relative. You can see why banks want a piece of that action.

Why It’s So Hard to Transfer Cash to Your Friends - Your Money - The New York Times

And sure enough, an all-out war is unfolding behind the scenes to make sure you will still use your bank and not some app or other third-party service from the likes of Google or Facebook or Apple to make those payments five or 10 years from now.

The banks would also like you to pay for it, each and every time, as recipients of money now do with the Square device. But what would actually be worth paying for?

PayPal emerged in as a way for people to transfer money from one Palm Pilot to another. The PayPal person-to-person payment service, however, survived and did eventually move to the Web. Javelin Strategy and Research counted at least 15 start-ups and bank services that tried to ape it in the early years of the last decade. Most of them went out of business after finding few users or experiencing fraud.

How to transfer money into your own paypal account Canada and Europe, which have far fewer financial institutions that need to agree on standards, person-to-person payment services emerged with little 10/22 stocks nordic and have been up and running for several years.

People who move to the United States and are told to write a check are often baffled by the backward state of affairs on these shores.

United States banks eventually albeit reluctantly did make it easier for people vfx trading system move money electronically from accounts at the bank to savings or brokerage accounts with competitors.

A few years ago, two companies called Fiserv and CashEdge started offering banks the ability to help customers do that. Fiserv acquired CashEdge last year, and today they serve about 1, banks and credit unions, including Citi, BBVA Compass and Regions Bank. Then, the recipient gets a text or e-mail message prompting him or her to enter their bank account information at a Web site. The money lands in the bank account a few days later.

Even PayPal, alternately an object of scorn and fear by fx options trading jobs singapore in its early days, has gotten into the bank partnership game and is working with a couple of hundred of them, including USAA, to offer a similar omega forex toronto. With its offering, recipients end up with money in how to transfer money into your own paypal account PayPal account, and they can transfer it to their checking account if they so choose.

Given the huge numbers of younger users of those services, it is possible that one of them may try to build a platform for easy person-to-person payments. That may be the biggest reason clearXchange, the joint venture by Bank of America, Chase and Wells Zion oil stock price chart, emerged. Those three companies claim to have about half of all online and mobile banking customers, so they can certainly throw their weight around.

All of these interoperability issues aside, though, the person-to-person payment services still have ease-of-use challenges. Higdon, the former Citi banker.

5 Ways to Add Money to PayPal - wikiHow

One thing that might get consumers on board faster is if the money moved instantly from one bank account to another at a different bank. But because these payments move along the same electronic railroad tracks that checks do, it can still take a couple of days.

The big hope here is that banks will find a way to solve this, even if means effectively extending people credit and taking on risk to deliver instant money transfers between individuals. Plenty of consumers seem ready to pay at least 2 or 3 percent for the privilege, as evidenced by the scene I witnessed at the restaurant.

The question is, how many more years will it take for banks to make person-to-person, account-to-account transfers truly instantaneous? A version of this article appears in print on February 25,on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Order Reprints Today's Paper Subscribe.

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