Why Can’t I Just Send Money to Someone With My Visa Card?
Richarddjarbeng5 min read·Just now--
Banks often promote Visa and Mastercard as efficient tools for swift, seamless transactions. However, one critical feature is notably absent: the ability to transfer funds directly between cardholders.
Unlike their standard role in point-of-sale purchases or online payments, these cards don’t support direct bank account transfers without involving a bank or third-party service. This creates additional steps, and every step adds fees and complexity. Moreover, such transfers can take hours or even days to process, delaying even the simplest exchanges between users.
This post explores the limitations of Visa and Mastercard for direct peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers, looking at their ease of use in payments (such as a netflix subscription) compared with the added costs, delays, and intermediaries required for bank account transfers to friends.
The Cross-Border Wall: A Practical Example
Consider this: You’re at a conference in Nairobi and meet your favorite Belgian author 🤩. As a Singaporean fan, you’d love to send him $5 as a thank-you. Even though you both hold Visa cards you’d have to exchange bank details, log into your app, face fees starting at $15, and wait 2–3 days for that modest $5 to arrive.
It’s little wonder your author might politely decline the gesture. If only you had a $5 note to slip into his hand before he could protest.
How Banks Present Visa and Mastercard
Visa and Mastercard are widely promoted by financial institutions for their speed and ease of use. For example, Visa’s website highlights “fast, secure payments” accepted globally, while Mastercard emphasizes “convenient transactions.”
Banks echo this, advertising debit and credit cards as versatile tools for managing money. However, these claims primarily apply to payments, purchasing goods or services, not to transferring funds directly to another person’s bank account.
Note: In this post, I am focusing on money transfers across cardholders for US dollar accounts. I’ve chosen one currency as a simplifying assumption to avoid the added complexity of foreign exchange (FX) services, which deserves a post of its own.
Why Transfers Differ from Payments
Payments use a closed-loop system: cardholder to merchant, processed instantly. Transfers involve moving funds between accounts across different infrastructures.
Transfers, however, involve moving funds between accounts, often across banks or borders, requiring infrastructure like SWIFT (handling $5 trillion daily, per SWIFT’s 2024 report) or ACH (68.1 billion transactions in 2023, per Nacha) to process the details. Cards lack direct access to these systems, limiting their role to payment initiation, not fund movement. The point is that payments and transfers use different systems that were not built to work with each other even though the functionality is almost the same.
The Limitations of Direct Transfers
Now that we’ve discussed why, let’s look at the 2 major platforms. Visa and Mastercard operate as payment networks, facilitating transactions between cardholders and merchants. According to Visa’s operational guidelines, their system processes over 200 billion transactions annually — almost entirely for payments, not interbank transfers.
Direct transfers to bank accounts typically rely on systems like SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) or ACH (Automated Clearing House), which these cards are not designed to access independently. As a result, cardholders cannot initiate a transfer to another person without additional steps.
Bank Involvement in Transfers
Most banks do not allow Visa or Mastercard to fund wire transfers directly. However if you do find one and try to use your card for transfers here are the approximate fees you will find:
- Wire Fees: Domestic wire transfers average $25, while international ones range from $40 to $50 (per 2025 data).
- Cash Advance Penalties: If a card is used, banks may classify the transaction as a cash advance, incurring fees of 3%–5% and higher interest rates, often above 20% APR.
Market Gap and Emerging Solutions
The inability to easily transfer money across banks has led to innovative workarounds:
- In the US: Venmo processed over $244 billion in 2023, while Zelle handled 2.3 billion transactions worth $629 billion.
- Infrastructure: Plaid facilitates transfers by linking bank accounts to over 7,000 apps (like Revolut and Wise), though support varies by bank.
- In Africa: Mobile money platforms like MTN Mobile Money and M-Pesa have revolutionized P2P transfers. M-Pesa alone has 51 million active users in Kenya moving $315 billion annually.
Personal Note: I’ve used a mobile money wallet linked to my bank account, and it’s incredibly convenient. Sending cash just requires a phone number — far easier than juggling card details. Zelle has borrowed this concept for the US market, using a phone number or email to send money instantly.
Third-Party Services: A Bridge or a Burden?
Services like Wise, PayPal, and Remitly attempt to bridge the gap, but they come with caveats.
- Wise: Charges 0.43%–1.0% plus a fixed fee. However, when I sent money from my USD Visa card (in an African country) to a US account, the cost shot from $26 to nearly $100 once the system clocked the card’s origin.
- PayPal: Charges 2.9% plus $0.30 for domestic card-funded transfers, with higher international rates.
- The Direction Issue: Many services are one-way. Remitly can send money from the US to another African country, for example Ghana or Kenya but try reversing that, and you’re often out of luck. They only have one way transfers for now.
Unlike mobile money, these platforms still demand SWIFT codes and account numbers. You can’t just use a recipient’s card number because by design sharing it is a major security risk. Is it a little ironic that for security sake, instead of a code, you share your banking details with a potential stranger, which often includes your personal address, just so you can receive money?
Summary Comparison
Shoutout to Keith in the comment section of this post for helping format this table for medium with his free tool.
Final Warning Note: Even if the sender pays all fees, many banks charge a fixed amount for receiving funds. You might find your recipient is short by $15 or $20 upon arrival. And yes I’ve been a victim of this myself!
Images in this post were generated by Grok from X AI
Disclaimer: The information contained herein is for informational purposes only. Nothing herein shall be construed to be financial, legal or tax advice. The content of this post is solely the opinions of the writer who is not a licensed financial advisor.
