Ask HN: Why there are no good services to send money abroad?
Why it's so hard to send money abroad? It's either takes long or costs a lot. IS it laws or is it just no one has taken this an issue? Even inner-country money transfers between two banks accounts can take 3 days for no apparent reason. My understanding is it's a mix between risk assessment and banks trying to keep the money to work with longer. I use https://transferwise.com/ for British Pound <=> Euro. First couple of times takes about 1 day, later (whatever scoring they use) it goes down to hours. I've seen within an hour once. Here in India, local interbank transfers take less than 5 seconds with zero fee. I still can't understand why the ACH system is the US takes 5 working days. NEFT/RTGS is the system in India which is equivalent of the ACH in the US and it takes maximum 1 hour to transfer funds. It's very strange. Here in Argentina you can transfer money from a bank to another in 5 minutes. (Disclaimer: Other parts of the economy may not be so smooth :). ) Within-country transfers in the UK take minutes between most banks, except for large amounts which take 3 days, probably for risk/fraud reasons as you said. Yeah, I've used a few services but so far Transferwise is the best for me as well I started working for a US-based company a couple of months ago. They pay me through a company that handles the contract. The CEO pays my invoice on Monday and it gets to the contract company on Friday, if I'm lucky. Good for me though - the intermediate has their bank account with Transferwise - so when they pay me, it's in my account in barely minutes after I get the email they've paid me. From from Transferwise USD account, it's usually seconds to get to my UK-based bank (one of the first group of 'Challenger banks'), and if I want to pay myself from there, it's also seconds to minutes at most from there, to my personal account. TLDR: It's a week to go from one US company to another, but just a couple of minutes to hop across the atlantic, and between UK banks. This was the problem that crypto was intended to solve, but is failing because the fiat ramps are under-developed. There are no good international money sending services because it’s a highly regulated industry. These regulations, such as AML laws, are important but cause transactions to be slower and more expensive. Both the costs and time are due to: - the number of intermediaries in the chain: the bank to which the money is going usually doesn't have an account with the bank that sent the money, so effectively the transfer is split up into multiple transfers between banks - foreign exchange volatility: when sending money abroad, the bank gives you a firm quote now for the rate at which they will convert one currency to another; they reduce the chance they will lose money by charging you a rate worse than the current mid-market rate. - operating costs: banks have to run processes for AML, KYC, CS etc. - risk/fraud costs: provisions for actual losses from internal/external fraud To your later questions: - many companies have tackled this issue and aim to make it cheaper and/or faster: Moneygram, Western Union, OFX, HiFX, CurrencyFair, TransferWise, ... Which is the cheapest service for the currency pair in which you're interested? How much do they charge? I use veem for my business and it's been great. I don't know how well it would work for personal use. This is from the US to Mexico, southeast Asia, and India. I've used veem for my business and it's been pretty good. I don't know if you can use it for personal use. I flagged this for being a duplicate comment from the same person. I hope that's the correct action. Elsewhere, I saw a duplicate comment being downvoted, but I'm not sure that's right either. Sorry about that on mobile and can't seem to delete it myself. Transferwise isn't good enough...? The problem with TransferWise from a business perspective is that the money appears on your bank statement to have come from a local bank account, of a party different from the party that is supposed to have paid your invoice. That's a dramatic difference for taxes & accounting from an international wire (charge VAT vs no VAT, being able to prove it). Could you expand on that? Does that make a difference if I am just transferring money from an account abroad to another in the US for private use? Eg just moving money to from European account to my US account btc? what's wrong with MoneyGram?