In Europe, and probably many other countries, national transfers are very easy, and international ones are only more difficult because they're less common.
They are the default way that most people receive their salary, pay the rent or mortgage, pay utility bills, and in many cases make one-off transactions to small businesses, friends etc.
On top of that:
- Most countries have methods for making a regular transfer. I pay rent, water, electric, phone and broadband like this; each company can choose how much to take from my account each month. The consumer protection if a business makes a mistake is very high.
- Some colleagues use the "push" type regular payments for their children's pocket money. It's common for rent, since that's usually a fixed amount.
- There is a mobile app to make it easier to pay friends and very small businesses, since you can use a phone number rather than a bank account number as the identifier.
International transfers are less common, but in the last year I've received money from a Spanish organization I worked for, a Singapore company that owed me a refund and didn't want to refund by credit card for some reason, and some German tourists in a remote area who'd lost their wallet. They transferred €200 to me, I withdrew it from an ATM in local currency and handed it over.
There was a long post-9/11 stretch during which many US banks made this somewhat annoying. Much less so now, you can do it entirely online, both domestically (although why would you) and internationally. It's just (comparatively) expensive.
