There's a few big problems, at least on the "friend-to-friend" transfer.
1) You kinda need everybody on board. The biggest banks in the US have something like 5% market share, so it's not just 3 companies you need to get on the same page. This probably means it needs to be mandated from above. Any 1 bank could probably throw together an easy account-to-account transfer for other customers at the same bank without too much trouble, but inter-bank? Yikes.
2) 90% of the institutions are slow and conservative. Even if they agree this is a good idea, it's a couple years of meetings and gathering requirements, then a couple more to implement.
3) You can either have instant transfers or you can have reversibility, you can't really have both. People want the first...until they (desperately) want the second. This becomes a support nightmare for banks. Now, you limit this if you have really good security (password requirements, 2FA, transaction limits, recipient verification, risk analysis)...but all that needs to be in place first, so we're back at point 2.
The big US banks have implemented a friend to friend transfer system. It started between BoA/Chase/Wells Fargo as ClearXChange in 2011, now known as Zelle, and has covered more and more banks ever year since. At this point, the banks of 80% of US population are participants.
1) You kinda need everybody on board. The biggest banks in the US have something like 5% market share, so it's not just 3 companies you need to get on the same page. This probably means it needs to be mandated from above. Any 1 bank could probably throw together an easy account-to-account transfer for other customers at the same bank without too much trouble, but inter-bank? Yikes.
2) 90% of the institutions are slow and conservative. Even if they agree this is a good idea, it's a couple years of meetings and gathering requirements, then a couple more to implement.
3) You can either have instant transfers or you can have reversibility, you can't really have both. People want the first...until they (desperately) want the second. This becomes a support nightmare for banks. Now, you limit this if you have really good security (password requirements, 2FA, transaction limits, recipient verification, risk analysis)...but all that needs to be in place first, so we're back at point 2.