The Irish banks AIB, Bank of Ireland and PTSB have announced plans for an instant-payments app set to launch in 2026. Called Zippay, on the surface it’s just another way to send money to friends, but culturally it’s pitched as an Irish Revolut. The British fintech platform is already embedded in how we split bills, fundraise and club together to buy the teacher’s Christmas present. So what might a home-grown payments app look like?
When I’m abroad, and reaching for a shorthand explanation for how Irish people are with their airgead, I usually pull out the choice phrase “he still has his Communion money”. The insult – or slander really, as it’s usually said about somebody rather than to their face – captures singularly Irish norms about money as gift, savings and obligation in one caustic burn. While 20th century thinkers tended to frame money as a cold, impersonal medium of exchange (Karl Marx claimed it reduced everything to the unit of price; the sociologist Georg Simmel wrote that it fostered a “calculating attitude”), rituals like the little white envelope on Communion day show that money is a deeply social medium, bound up in everyday beliefs and customs.
The most successful payments apps recognise that the question of how we pay is a social problem – not just a technical one.
M-PESA, the first and still the largest mobile payments network in the Global South, for instance, solved urgent issues for the unbanked when it came to the remittance and secure transfer of money. M-PESA thrived because its network of “cash in, cash out” agents built on kinship ties in Kenya. These were hierarchies of trusted shopkeepers or community figures – people who already mediated financial exchanges (and who now absorbed the risk and friction of a shift from cash to seamless digital payments).
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In China, Alipay began as a wallet for everything from taxi rides to donations to homeless people, but it was WeChat Pay that really exploded payments. Built by a gaming company already attuned to gifts and play, it rolled out features like virtual hongbao (red envelope) transfers for the Lunar New Year and beyond. Today a Chinese boss might send his employees jokey hongbao envelopes after team-building drinks with the message “hangover cure”.
In the US, meanwhile, the growth of PayPal company Venmo came from making money explicitly social. Its “public by default” interface and “what’s it for?” message turned payment into a kind of social feed – who’s on a date? Who’s in the middle of an acrimonious break-up? Who’s having brunch without you? A similar argument might be made for Revolut, whose payments system has grafted on to Irish rituals like GAA fundraising and shared nights out.
In all of these cases, the payments app works because it captures existing practices of sharing, celebrating and remunerating. Apps like Venmo and Revolut build on existing social practices. For apps like them and others like Alipay, a user’s social world is everything. It is reciprocity, data and network effects rolled into one.
But in true platform fashion, they also ride on existing technical infrastructures, acting as intermediaries between entities like the telecommunications network and the banking system.
[ Irish banks to take on Revolut with new instant mobile payments planOpens in new window ]
Their promise of frictionless payment is an illusion. They front their users the money exchanged in a peer-to-peer transaction while it clears, slowly, in the background through a still clunky network. In return, they make money from merchant fees, financial services, partnerships and data.
Apps like Revolut work well because they plug into both the existing social and technical infrastructure. The system may feel “seamless” to an end user, because the messy friction of making and maintaining these networks is offset to someone else, or hidden.
[ Will Irish banks’ Zippay see off Revolut assault?Opens in new window ]
So how will Zippay be different? As a product offered by banks directly, it will be a payments interface within your banking app. It is an interface, but unlike Revolut or PayPal, which ride the rails of other payments systems, it is also an infrastructure.
Commercial banks form a crucial part of the “last mile” of payments. In this case, Zippay hopes to provide actual settlement using SEPA Instant Credit Transfer, the new banking protocol due to come into wide effect by October 2025. If Revolut gives its users the feel of frictionless, instant money by running a private ledger on top of a slow legacy banking system, Zippay wants to give its users the real thing: cash that actually hops from one account to another in seconds. But whether this will feel seamless to an end user or not is a whole other question. (When I perform 2FA using my Bank of Ireland app, it usually freezes afterwards – just me?)
If Revolut has succeeded in Ireland, it’s not only that it builds on to the payments system but that it infiltrated our social rituals – Friday night rounds in the pub, GAA lottery tickets, holiday planning with friends, a birthday present for a godchild.
Zippay promises to take the friction out of money by fixing the infrastructure itself. But in payments, friction never disappears – it just gets shifted. Sometimes it’s shopkeepers, sometimes it’s your social circle, sometimes it’s a creaky banking app. The real test for Zippay isn’t whether it’s instant or technically frictionless, but whether it can latch on to Irish rituals of sharing, saving and slagging.
Dr Rachel O’Dwyer is a lecturer in digital cultures in the School of Visual Culture in NCAD
