I can compare it to Brazilian Pix. I use both extensively.
INTERAC is like the beta version of Pix (which is basically the same as the Indian system in the article).
Pix works via email, CPF (a person's "SIN" number, which isn't secret in Brazil), randomly generated key, telephone number, QR codes. INTERAC is mostly email.
Pix works immediately. Some transactions take 1 second or less to credit on the other bank (you can see that when you are trying to send money to yourself, when the destination bank gives you a notification that it received the money before the UI of the sending bank has even acknowledged that the operation is completed). INTERAC sometime takes several minutes, up to 30 minutes sometimes in my experience.
Personally I think INTERAC is about 70% of the way there, but I would chose PIX every time simply because it seems like a much better iteration.
With Pix, you get credited and debited immediately. With INTERAC, I've noticed that sometimes you can be debited immediately and the credit takes longer, and vice versa. Sometimes for several minutes, your money can "double" (appear in second account without disappearing from the first one) or "disappear" (leave the first account but not get credited on the second one).
This last point might not seem like much, but it gets in the way of using for a lot of things that would need to be immediate (paying for a Taxi, or a supermarket purchase). Since Pix is instantaneous, it is used heavily for those kind of payments where you don't want to wait.
INTERAC is like the beta version of Pix (which is basically the same as the Indian system in the article).
Pix works via email, CPF (a person's "SIN" number, which isn't secret in Brazil), randomly generated key, telephone number, QR codes. INTERAC is mostly email.
Pix works immediately. Some transactions take 1 second or less to credit on the other bank (you can see that when you are trying to send money to yourself, when the destination bank gives you a notification that it received the money before the UI of the sending bank has even acknowledged that the operation is completed). INTERAC sometime takes several minutes, up to 30 minutes sometimes in my experience.
Personally I think INTERAC is about 70% of the way there, but I would chose PIX every time simply because it seems like a much better iteration.
With Pix, you get credited and debited immediately. With INTERAC, I've noticed that sometimes you can be debited immediately and the credit takes longer, and vice versa. Sometimes for several minutes, your money can "double" (appear in second account without disappearing from the first one) or "disappear" (leave the first account but not get credited on the second one).
This last point might not seem like much, but it gets in the way of using for a lot of things that would need to be immediate (paying for a Taxi, or a supermarket purchase). Since Pix is instantaneous, it is used heavily for those kind of payments where you don't want to wait.