In the list of payment methods, I see “national banks” but when I search the wiki that phrase comes up with this page:
Is this the same thing, just poorly documented?
Nope, NEFT is something different. “National banks” is “National Bank Transfer” listed here Payment Methods and here Payment methods - Bisq Wiki . There is no specific documentation for that type of payment method. The names “National banks” and “National Bank Transfer” are used to describe the same thing. It is basically a bank transfer within one country, the same you would use to pay for an electricity bill, phone or taxes. For EUR countries it would basically be the same as SEPA (but limited to a situation where taker and maker are in the same country).
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I’ve never heard of paying an electricity bill, phone, or tazes from a bank. Can you be specific? What method does this use and what would a person need to arrange with their bank to make this work?
The page you linked me to, under “Region” says “N/A”. Does that mean the region information isn’t available, or this method is not available in any region?
Then it possibly depends on where you live and what is the common practice there. In here I can pay for 100% of utility bills and taxes using a bank transfer. I’m not talking about paying that FROM a bank (like physically being in the bank to do that, even though that is possible), you can access your bank account from internet and request a transfer to be made to whatever account you specify.
Your questions are very strange, really (; “National bank transfer” is exactly what the name says - it is a bank transfer (a basic function of any bank account) within one country. You need to have a bank account, most likely an account with on-line user interface for convenience.
This means that it is not possible to specify the region in a way that is similar to other entries. This method is available “globally” (I don’t think there is any country in the world where you cannot have a bank account) but the payments are not “global” - they are limited to single country, although the method is not limited to one country. This method is available in France to pay to a person in France, in Chile to pay to a person in Chile, in India to pay to a person in India and so on, however using this payment method a person from France can NOT pay a person in India, as this would most likely use some international banking system like SWIFT.
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This is not a strange question. The methods are all specific, except for this one, which just says “National Bank Transfer.” Which nation? What transfer technology? It is not at all clear what you are initiating if you choose this.
It is even more strange because there are already specific methods for national bank transfers listed, which imples that the “National Bank Transfer” is something completely different from any of them.
Any, as long as both seller and buyer are from the same country.
It doesn’t matter within one country, as long as agreed amount reaches the bank account of the recipient, with proper currency, clearly originating from the sender and within 4 days. How you do it doesn’t really matter that much. For example in my country we technically do have two separate systems for bank transfers (one “normal” and the other being “almost instant” and mainly targeted for high value transfers), but the end effect of using both is exactly the same, so from Bisq’s point of view it doesn’t matter which one I would use (ignoring the fact that Bisq transactions are probably too small to be eligible for the “high value” system).
This is just a generic payment method applicable to any country and with no extra restrictions. It’s just better to have this non-specific “National Bank Transfer” instead of listing 200+ payment methods, each applicable to just one specific country.
Probably for some countries this is too generic and not usable (and maybe you are from such country, hence your confusion) - for example in “EURO zone” you would just select SEPA and if you want sellers just from your country then you would restrict the list of accepted countries, for USA they obviously have to have their own system for anything (I guess this is “ACH Transfer”), most likely for a few other countries there is a specific system available in Bisq as well. But for the remaining countries where you can transfer national currency from one bank account to the other using just the account number (or account identifier, I guess you can also use letters) and just the first+last name of the recipient, then “National Bank Transfer” is an option.
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Surely, you understand that anyone who reads this knows why this is not a satisfactory answer, or at least not a satisfactory label.
Now you’re getting it. And if it is not usable for even one country that Bisq can be run in, then this is not an adequate label, is it? I knew this was so simple you would come around eventually.
Okay so you’re still not getting it completely. SEPA and ACH are each also listed as options on the same level as “National banks,” which implies that these are each completely different entities.
Then basic UI guidelines imply that this should be labeled better.
Also notice that it would not be impossible for “National Banks” to be the actual title of a specific transfer method in some specific country, and the way it’s labeled in Bisq makes this seem more likely, since it is on par with other specifics like SEPA and ACH. This is not a security issue, but a UI problem and I hope that we have brought it to necessary attention.
The situation is not perfect, but I believe the solution you expect is both very hard to implement and very inconvenient for users. First of all, it is important to keep in mind that most of Bisq volume is done via just a few major payment methods (Monero, SEPA, Revolut, Zelle, Strike and so on), some of which (fintechs as Revolut, SEPA transfers) are accessible and cheap for majority of world population anyway. With these two in mind, adding specific payment methods for each of ~200 countries would require enormous effort (to learn + code all the details), as well as enormous amount of space on the drop-down list in the application, just to hold what - 10 trades per year for a few of these methods and 0 for most of them? The presence of SEPA and ACH is not an indication of a huge problem in my opinion - SEPA is not a national system (however it is also used as one), while ACH is probably as specific that it would not fit the generic fields of “National Bank Transfer” (which are modeled after SWIFT anyway). These are there just for convenience of majority of users… After all you could argue that SEPA is not needed at all, as we already have SWIFT which does mostly the same thing (and also others), even uses exactly the same data fields, yet it is there for all financial businesses which want to be meaningful in Europe.
I did not suggest anything at all like this. How could you possibly go from what I said to this option?
Maybe? But that would be a very different thing from what I am saying.
I have read this post but unsure as to what your suggestion to improve the UI is. Please can you explain how you think it would be best handled from a UI perspective?
The person to propose a UI improvement for NEFT has to be someone who knows what NEFT means, and that is the question that I asked here.
Once someone can educate me what NEFT means - specifically, and differentiated from other things like ACH or SEPA, I will be happy to try to surmise that answer and craft it into a UI improvement.
@FreddieChopin did make the attempt, but all he was repeat vagaries and confuse it more. For example, is NEFT the same as SEPA? He seems to say that maybe, but then why list NEFT and SEPA? Is NEFT generic for whatever is used in each country? Then why duplicate it, maybe it’s best to use the local labels. Is NEFT different? If so, what - specifically - is it?
After we have that answer, we can propose a UI improvement.