In Europe “everyone” uses bank account numbers to move money.
* Friend owes you $20? Here’s my account number, send me the money.
* Ecommerce vendor charges extra for card payment? Send money to their account number.
* Pay rent? Here’s the bank number.
However, in the US people treat their bank account numbers like social security, they will violently oppose sharing them. In internet banking the account number is starred out and only the last two/four digits are shown. Instead there are these weird “pay bills”, “move money”, “zelle”, tabs, that usually require a phone number of the recipient, or an email. But that is still one additional layer of complexity deeper than necessary.
Why is revealing your account number considered a security risk in the US?
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It is mostly because the US payments infrastructure was not set up to facilitate person to person payments, so all these third party apps formed to fill that need. The US is currently rolling out payments infrastructure that is better suited to the use cases you mentioned above, but it still isn’t fully adopted. That, plus the general monopoly credit cards have on commerce payments and frictionless experience they provide, lead to them being the method du jour for commerce.
All that being said, commodity services and large recurring transfers can be set up using ACH payments (the current standard money movement tool between banks). For example, a lot of people will authorize rent to be taken out of their accounts via ACH. Or they will set up bill pay (which is just money movement over ACH on some frequency) to pay their cell phone bill.
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