It’s not considered a secret, it’s just something people don’t feel comfortable entering in forms online. That feels a bit too personal, and is simple to enter wrong. A middleman makes that process a non issue. It’s also nice to be able to change banks or have multiple accounts without having to care about online payments details, you just pick in the middleman setting the one you want to use. For example I had an account frozen for an incorrect inkasso (that was eventually retracted), I was glad I could just ask a friend to send me something to PayPal as a way to do online payments.
The abstraction of the middleman makes sense to me for some types of payments, I find bank accounts a bit too low level sometimes.
> It’s not considered a secret, it’s just something people don’t feel comfortable entering in forms online.
If you have someone's US bank routing information then you can forge checks against their account. This is an unforced error downstream of still using a system devised in the early years of the 20th century.
> That feels a bit too personal, and is simple to enter wrong.
It feels personal because they're trying to pretend it isn't a secret even though it structurally is one.
Entering it wrong seems like a fake problem. You copy and paste it from your bank's website.
> It’s also nice to be able to change banks or have multiple accounts without having to care about online payments details
A reasonable payments system does the same thing without a middle man taking a vig. For example, Zelle uses email addresses or phone numbers. If you change banks then you register your email address or phone number with the new bank and from then the money goes there instead. There is no reason a system couldn't work the same way for recurring payments.
> For example I had an account frozen for an incorrect inkasso (that was eventually retracted), I was glad I could just ask a friend to send me something to PayPal as a way to do online payments.
This is just a desire for it to be easy to open a new account at a different bank and start using that.
Nobody needs these middle men and the only reason they exist is that the incumbents and regulatory apparatus make the default system unnecessarily difficult.
The abstraction of the middleman makes sense to me for some types of payments, I find bank accounts a bit too low level sometimes.