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Comment by pkavanagh | Hacker News Reader

Hi - other founder Patrick here, thank you for your interest and analysis.

It's worth noting that the rates you see on the pages often have a bit of delay - I believe both Wise and Atlantic would end up having very similar underlying FX rates, since there's no markup on either.

However, with Wise, the more you send, the more you pay in fees - so there's a break-even where it starts to become more economical to use Atlantic.

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Thank you for explaining this. It’s rare to see someone acknowledge the quality of a direct competitor.

Seems to me that the biggest risk to Wise and Atlantic is growing so large that the incumbents will change their pricing.

This was a lesson I learned the hard way with my first startup: Be cautious about how much you undercut your largest competitors unless/until you have deep pockets and/or unless you're very sure that their economics makes it impossible for them to undercut you on price, because the more you undercut them the more you're inviting a price war you can't win without deep pockets the moment they perceive you as a threat.

When trying to enter an established market to compete on price as your primary differentiator it's often better to keep your margins higher to start with than offer the steepest cut you think you can afford, and then drop your prices slowly as you build up volume and a war chest.

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