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Comment by user-the-name | Hacker News Reader

> low-cost, fast, reliable, accessible money transfers - clearly something missing right now in this world

Missing in the US.

At least Europe has had those for a long time already, using normal banks.

I'm not sure I agree. First of all, it's not "Europe" but rather "Euro-accounts" (so no cross-currency transfers). Also not that fast - don't work overnight, on the weekends, payments might take a day to arrive.

I just checked - paying 10EUR from my UK account to the EUR area takes 2-4 days (I'd need to pay 15GBP for an "urgent" next-business-day transfer) (same rate as TransferWise) whereas if I want to send 10kEUR I'd pay 250 GBP (!) for a "no-fee" (!!) transfer than with TransferWise (a.k.a. scam). Paying from EUR to EUR account (cross-border) costs about 0.1% (0.38 EUR fee to send 350EUR) which isn't too bad.

Suffice to say, room for improvement.

That's from UK to SEPA, which has a delay. SEPA transfers themselves are mostly instant since about 2018.

There's sometimes a nominal fee across countries (mandated to be "no more than a local transfer"), but in many cases they are free.

I’m hearing about mostly instant SEPA payments but I’ve never seen them personally. DBank to DKB takes a few days, DKB to ING, the same, to bunq or N26... First direct in the UK to a EUR account. My limited anecdotal experience is “mostly delayed by at least a day.” am I really an outlier?

I've used them a few times for personal transfers. Each took less than 30 seconds until the money was booked out of my account and booked into the receivers account.

SEPA in my experience has never taken longer than 1 day unless it's SOFORT-related, which in my experience takes a bit to confirm (but the merchant knows you issued a transfer so they can rely on that).

The 250 GBP must be the exchange fee? If your account is in GBP and the destination is in EUR, the bank gets to charge you for the exchange. 2.5% is a typical rate. That's unfortunate, but is unrelated to the cost of transfer.

Euro transfers have become instant and 24/7 thanks to the SEPA Instant Credit architecture:

https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...

You can transfer up to 100k EUR in less than ten seconds; works overnight and during weekends and holidays.

In the UK, at least Revolut supports this already:

https://blog.revolut.com/sepa-instant-euro-transfers-now-ava...

Maybe it is typical with 2.5% in the UK but here in Sweden the typical is 0.5% so I feel like you are being robbed.

I don't mind the fee per se I just object to obfuscating it (which I term "fraud" thought that might not be the legal definition).

NatWest app says £0.00 fee and some FX rate but when I compare with TransferWise, the difference is £250, which means that the "FX rate" implicitly contains the fee.

Maybe not "fraud" legally but I don't want to support such non-transparent business practices.

If it's a fixed cost, it's a fee

Yes banks charge commission (where TW usualy has a cost advantage but anyway, it's a money maker for banks and calculation of the fx rate to be used at a given moment is not something simple)

TransferWise also supports instant SEPA payments. The first time I transferred money to my bank in a different country and I received immediate confirmation I was mindblown.

My Revolut account is moving to Lithuania though. Are UK customers keeping their UK ones?

From experience with bank accounts from 4 different European countries those instant transfers definitely don't work everywhere and are often accompanied by an extra fee.

Edit: And this is 2020. I highly welcome some innovation in this field - five years ago..

> "If your account is in GBP and the destination is in EUR, the bank gets to charge you for the exchange. 2.5% is a typical rate."

2.5% is a rather expensive fee for a GBP-EUR transfer, especially on £10,000! Some banks offer as low as 0.4% (on top of the real mid-market rate), probably even less on large transfers.

I think that is mainly UK banks bring bad. Here in Sweden which is also not a euro country the exchange fee is roughly 0.5% at my bank and they charge 3 euro for non-SEPA transactions and 0.15 EUR for SEPA transactions. So I would need to pay 50 EUR to transfer 10k EUR from my SEK account and just 0.15 EUR to transfer from my EUR account.

Here in Canada we have e-transfers securely from bank account to bank account, in minutes/hours.

and they are a LOT more expensive than their crypto counterparts

No, they are cheaper, by quite a bit.

Unless you count cryptocurrencies nobody actually uses.

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