> It turns out that penetration of credit and debit cards in Germany is significantly behind other parts of the EU.
Yep. Therefore, we also use PayPal a lot to transfer money to a friend when we're at some place that is cash only and someone doesn't have cash on them. No need to type an IBAN and wait for a day.
Also, it's a great backup solution for online purchases if I don't want to share my credit card details or things don't work. For example, many vendors borked the 3d visa verification process so PayPal often was the only realistic option.
The delay can be skipped in many cases via the IBAN instant payment option. Requires both banks to be participating in the program and trust each other (the delay will happen if additional checks are needed, for example if the transction gets flagged for manual inspection, eg if you write "funny" purpose text, etc)
Use Wise (https://wise.com). In Germany especially N26 is also popular but IMO they went downhill quite a bit as soon as they realized that being a neobank is a losing venture.
I don't know, but I checked a few of these "neobanks" (or whatever they are) available in Italy and they seem more or less to have in common 3 things:
1) they offer services for free or for a low cost (compared to "normal" banks)
2) when these services work, they do work
3) when - for whatever reasons - these services do not work their assistance/support is either not-existing or unreachable, and when (if) you manage to contact them they provide no solutions/fixes and more likely than not you end up with your account frozen or closed (with no actual idea of the reasons why it was frozen/closed)
Surely there must be something (in EU) that complicates matters (anti-money laundering Laws/limits to transfers/National and EU Authorities/whatever) but right now it seems to me like none of them is actually reliable (if it is used as secundary or tertiary card/means of payment they are fine but I wouldn't trust any of them as "primary".
BTW - just for the record - right now N26 has been ordered to suspend making new accounts in Italy by the Bank of Italy (since March 2022) assertedly due to not full compliance with anti-money laundering checks:
Yep. Therefore, we also use PayPal a lot to transfer money to a friend when we're at some place that is cash only and someone doesn't have cash on them. No need to type an IBAN and wait for a day.
Also, it's a great backup solution for online purchases if I don't want to share my credit card details or things don't work. For example, many vendors borked the 3d visa verification process so PayPal often was the only realistic option.