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Comment by jasonsync | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean Stripe will phase out the ability for Canadians to accept USD and deposit funds directly to Canadian banks offering "US fund" accounts (that are not technically US bank accounts)?

Currently, a Canadian business can accept $USD with Stripe and have it deposited directly into a Canadian US fund account without conversion to CAD.

Stripes competitors can't do this - and have traditionally told Canadian businesses that they would have to incorporate in the US, setup a USD bank account at a US institution, in order to accept USD without conversion back to CAD.

That process is what Stripe Atlas simplifies.

PayPal allows Canadians to accept USD by holding the funds in a USD PayPal account. However, getting the funds to a Canadian bank account always involves converting to CAD.

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This is complementary functionality: you can choose whether you want to incorporate locally or using Atlas. We'll stay supporting CA-USD and will be expanding local-country support. We recently launched private beta support for businesses in new countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Singapore, in fact: https://stripe.com/global

And that conversion is expensive. If I could have back the currency conversion margins PayPal has charged my businesses throughout my life, I'd easily be able to live for a year on that money.

Well, 50 weeks, if it were sent to my PayPal account in US dollars :)

You can open a US bank account (I use Harris Bank, since they're owned by BMO) and withdraw USD from paypal to there. I then write a cheque to move USD across the border, and use VBCE to convert USD to CAD at market - 35 basis points (aka. about 2% better than what Paypal offers).

> I then write a cheque to move USD across the border, and use VBCE to convert USD to CAD at market - 35 basis points (aka. about 2% better than what Paypal offers).

Transferwise might be cheaper/easier

Not even close. Transferwise charges a fee of 0.7%. VBCE is half of that.

I would think using Norbert's gambit with a discount broker would be the cheapest way to convert large amounts of currency (e.g. buy DLR-U.TO, sell DLR.TO.)

Norbert's gambit is good, but not free - you still lose about 20 bp to market spreads using DLR.TO. If I was moving more money I would use that (possibly with a more heavily traded stock) but the marginal advantage wouldn't be worthwhile for my volume.

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