6 ms·

This is great, as someone who frequently transfers money from the US to Canada I wish I had known about this sooner. Hopefully they can actually make some mone

This is great, as someone who frequently transfers money from the US to Canada I wish I had known about this sooner. Hopefully they can actually make some money.

petra 10y ago
>> I wish I had known about this sooner. A common occurence these days, with the rapid rate of innovation. It's like we're missing some efficient product discovery tool.
- deathhand 10y ago
  If there was only a news aggregation site based upon the startup culture where these sorts of things can be promoted.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    You mean like some sort of place where you could hunt new products?
    - Jaruzel 10y ago
      I see what you did there. Types 'https://www.producthunt.com' https://www.producthunt.com' into a browser. However, you could have just answered the question. Unless there's a /s i didn't see somewhere on the parent posts...
      - true_religion 10y ago
        Also: Q Television Channel - Informercials 24/7
    - petra 10y ago
      I don't think product hunt solved this. I'm not really that impressed with their results. It's more like popularity based marketing channel(what's with all those videos ? ), because of the lack of good search and deep metadata. Heck many products don't even have a rich, textual description. It's almost like aggregating product reviews from relatively unbiased sources(unlike the cesspool that Amazon has become), and filtering by depth and building a decent search around them and a good community would work better. Than after all this, a video would be very useful. Ah, and one more thing - try to filter out the bullshit apps, the ones without much value on product hunt. "A dating app where you can only date 1 guy"? and other stuff like that. Sorry but i have much better ways of wasting time. But let's think about an ideal service. Such a service would have 2 forms: 1. It gathers in some form, all the "jobs" i need to do, and how well they are done today, and how much i pay for them - and than from time to time offers me concrete recommendations how to improve my life: "you could save $X each month , if you'll use this new money transfer startup". Or "you could use this recipe book, to save a lot of time and get similar level of food you're making now". etc. Amazon does that to some extent, but it has still has some ways to go. 2. Another successful mechanism is create a RICH and DEEP tagging system for each product and search/browse through those tags - jinni.com once did it for movies - and it was a phenomenal movie discovery tool. Far better than anything we have today. Of course, ideally such tool should also include a price comparison mechanism, and maybe "performance levels" per each relevant performance dimension, kinda like the one you get in digikey, the electronic component store, where you can select chips by speed, power,etc. The question is, how to get there, and how close it's possible to get?
      - fictioncircle 10y ago
        The main impediment to your goal, tbh, seems the quality of the data. For #1, this pretty much requires human curation/submission to accurately gather the vendors for each process you might outsource. For #2, Rich, quality tags that provide a near complete representation of feature sets requires human intervention or a substantial crawl with NLP+ranking algos on par with Google. The closest that really exists is: http://alternativeto.net/software/server-density/ http://alternativeto.net/software/server-density/ http://alternativeto.net/software/sentry/ http://alternativeto.net/software/sentry/ > Of course, ideally such tool should also include a price comparison mechanism, and maybe "performance levels" per each relevant performance dimension, kinda like the one you get in digikey, the electronic component store, where you can select chips by speed, power,etc. > The question is, how to get there, and how close it's possible to get? An AlternativeTo clone with a focus on tagging features/performance dimensions, having people rate those individual dimensions, and submit prices would likely work. The only problem is the incentive for people to: A) Switch B) Be that detailed. C) Avoid it becoming a popularity contest like ProductHunt & AlternativeTo are at present.
  - FanaHOVA 10y ago
    Hacker News 3-4 years ago you mean?
    - dageshi 10y ago
      Shhh we have important articles on basic income and SF House Prices to argue about for the 400th time.
      - pdimitar 10y ago
        off-topic I remember a post made not long ago by the HN admins themselves where they said they'll try to reduce the political posts. So far, it's not working out.
        dageshi 10y ago
        They gave up when it was concluded that everything is in some way political.
        grzm 10y ago
        I don't think that's a fair representation of what the mods concluded. 'dang summarized the results of the detox week and has made some recent comments on it as well. Here are some, with some identifiable snippets only so it's not a list of links. I encourage you to read the comments themselves. They don't all directly address this, but I think they all shed some light on the topic. --- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969 There's no satisfying anybody about this: not the readers who want more politics, not the readers who want less, and certainly not the partisans on an issue. --- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433 There's a lot more politics on HN right now than there usually is, which is appropriate since it reflects what's going on right now. --- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969 When there's a deluge of political stories, as in the last couple days, users heavily flag most of them. But there have still been plenty of major threads spending plenty of time on the front page. That's the status quo for HN: most politics are off topic, but not all. It's a delicate balance and an important one. Letting politics overrun this site would kill it. --- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463480 On downsides of the Political Detox Week experiment: there are two comments in the thread.
hackerboos 10y ago
I use them every two weeks to move Canadian dollars to British pounds. Nobody else comes close in terms of exchange rates and level of service.
- briandear 10y ago
  WorldFirst does. There are plenty of competitors in the space that do a great job at this.
  - hackerboos 10y ago
    Only for large amounts of money. I'm sending roughly $2000 in each transaction.
    - gjdickens 10y ago
      This is an important point - there is a point where TransferWise becomes more expensive than WorldFirst or a bank, but it is for much higher volumes than most people will be sending on a regular basis. On average I send between 500-1000 GBP to USD per month on Transferwise and pay 2.50 - 5 GBP in fees. Compared to a wire at a bank that charges 30 GBP fixed + a % on a sliding scale depending on the amount, it's not really competitive until you get over 10k per transaction. But then at that point you can contact TransferWise customer service to negotiate a better rate.
  - no1youknowz 10y ago
    Can you elaborate on the other competitors? Thanks
    - IshKebab 10y ago
      Just google it. There are several of them (I guess it's not a really high barrier to entry). Hifx, currenciesdirect, torfx... I've not tried any of them.
    - stevanl 10y ago
      Direct competitors would be the likes of Azimo and WorldRemit. For larger transfers (ie above £5k/$6k) you have a slew of them; Global Reach Partners, Moneycorp, World First, and Rational FX to name a few. Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of CurrencyTransfer.com, an aggregator of some of the above larger transfer companies.
Bombthecat 10y ago
They are bleeding a ton of money. For there idea to work they need to get money transferred into all directions... They had Nigeria as a supported country. But they removed it (sadly) But money was probably transferred only one direction. So they lost money.
- Lordarminius 10y ago
  > They had Nigeria as a supported country. But they removed it ... I am a Nigerian and I consider this an unpardonable failure of basic market research. If they had spent a quality hour of their time investigating the Nigerian market, they would have found out that inflow overwhelmingly dwarfs outflow. Makes you wonder what their decision making methodology is
  - averagewall 10y ago
    When there's a consistent imbalance, I wonder if instead of trading it themselves, they could queue up requests. People who really wanted the cheap rate would wait days or weeks or whatever it took to reach the head of the queue, while others would drop out so it keeps moving.
    - Lordarminius 10y ago
      > I wonder if instead of trading it themselves, they could queue up requests.... That's a very good idea.
    - nothrabannosir 10y ago
      Great idea. Maybe they could go one step further, and automatically lower prices until someone does buy them out. They could call it something cool... something that reminds you of places where you can buy and sell things... :p
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
    I guess I won't be able to send large amounts of cash to a Nigerian prince who promised me a share of his inheritance anymore. I'm not even sure if he's a prince.
kore 10y ago
If you have a need to transfer large amounts of USD-to-CAD or vice versa, have a look into Norbert's Gambit. It'll effectively let you perform the transfer for 0.2%. Probably not worthwhile for small amounts, but if you're converting ~$10k, might be worth the effort. This site seems to break it down: https://norbertsgambit.com/ https://norbertsgambit.com/
- Someone1234 10y ago
  That's all kinds of sketchy, least of all because of the taxes, but also because you're playings games with public stock that they or anyone else could manipulate. I've used TransferWise for over $8K and think the service is fantastic. I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole and my git is screaming "scam!"
  - kore 10y ago
    Not sure why there was such a knee-jerk reaction, but it's actually fairly straight forward and not scammy at all. You're performing two trades, using a money market ETF that trades at the currency exchange rate, and paying standard brokerage fees + spread instead of currency conversion fees. If you pay $20 in fees + spread for 2 trades, that'll be the cost of the conversion. For a $10k conversion, that's 0.2%. Unless you're suggesting that a money market ETF is prone to manipulation, your brokerage is going to scam you, or you don't like to deal with taxes on your stock purchases/sales, there isn't much drawback other than time. The larger the amount though, the more it'll potentially be worthwhile. More info about this: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/norberts-smart-way-to-convert-dollars-across-the-border/article20279926/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/norberts-smart... http://canadiancouchpotato.com/2013/12/03/norberts-gambit-the-complete-guide/ http://canadiancouchpotato.com/2013/12/03/norberts-gambit-th... http://www.finiki.org/wiki/Norbert's_gambit http://www.finiki.org/wiki/Norbert's_gambit
  - geoka9 10y ago
    The only downside I can see is that it takes a fair amount of time (about 7-14 days) from the moment you move money in to the moment you get your exchanged money out. It'll take your brokerage several working days to "journal" your shares over to the other denomination, and the shares can go up/down in the mean time, generating capital gains/losses. Otherwise there's no catch.

This is great, as someone who frequently transfers money from the US to Canada I wish I had known about this sooner. Hopefully they can actually make some money.

petra 10y ago

>> I wish I had known about this sooner. A common occurence these days, with the rapid rate of innovation. It's like we're missing some efficient product discovery tool.

deathhand 10y ago
If there was only a news aggregation site based upon the startup culture where these sorts of things can be promoted.
- ethbro 10y ago
  You mean like some sort of place where you could hunt new products?
  - Jaruzel 10y ago
    I see what you did there. Types 'https://www.producthunt.com' https://www.producthunt.com' into a browser. However, you could have just answered the question. Unless there's a /s i didn't see somewhere on the parent posts...
    - true_religion 10y ago
      Also: Q Television Channel - Informercials 24/7
  - petra 10y ago
    I don't think product hunt solved this. I'm not really that impressed with their results. It's more like popularity based marketing channel(what's with all those videos ? ), because of the lack of good search and deep metadata. Heck many products don't even have a rich, textual description. It's almost like aggregating product reviews from relatively unbiased sources(unlike the cesspool that Amazon has become), and filtering by depth and building a decent search around them and a good community would work better. Than after all this, a video would be very useful. Ah, and one more thing - try to filter out the bullshit apps, the ones without much value on product hunt. "A dating app where you can only date 1 guy"? and other stuff like that. Sorry but i have much better ways of wasting time. But let's think about an ideal service. Such a service would have 2 forms: 1. It gathers in some form, all the "jobs" i need to do, and how well they are done today, and how much i pay for them - and than from time to time offers me concrete recommendations how to improve my life: "you could save $X each month , if you'll use this new money transfer startup". Or "you could use this recipe book, to save a lot of time and get similar level of food you're making now". etc. Amazon does that to some extent, but it has still has some ways to go. 2. Another successful mechanism is create a RICH and DEEP tagging system for each product and search/browse through those tags - jinni.com once did it for movies - and it was a phenomenal movie discovery tool. Far better than anything we have today. Of course, ideally such tool should also include a price comparison mechanism, and maybe "performance levels" per each relevant performance dimension, kinda like the one you get in digikey, the electronic component store, where you can select chips by speed, power,etc. The question is, how to get there, and how close it's possible to get?
    - fictioncircle 10y ago
      The main impediment to your goal, tbh, seems the quality of the data. For #1, this pretty much requires human curation/submission to accurately gather the vendors for each process you might outsource. For #2, Rich, quality tags that provide a near complete representation of feature sets requires human intervention or a substantial crawl with NLP+ranking algos on par with Google. The closest that really exists is: http://alternativeto.net/software/server-density/ http://alternativeto.net/software/server-density/ http://alternativeto.net/software/sentry/ http://alternativeto.net/software/sentry/ > Of course, ideally such tool should also include a price comparison mechanism, and maybe "performance levels" per each relevant performance dimension, kinda like the one you get in digikey, the electronic component store, where you can select chips by speed, power,etc. > The question is, how to get there, and how close it's possible to get? An AlternativeTo clone with a focus on tagging features/performance dimensions, having people rate those individual dimensions, and submit prices would likely work. The only problem is the incentive for people to: A) Switch B) Be that detailed. C) Avoid it becoming a popularity contest like ProductHunt & AlternativeTo are at present.
- FanaHOVA 10y ago
  Hacker News 3-4 years ago you mean?
  - dageshi 10y ago
    Shhh we have important articles on basic income and SF House Prices to argue about for the 400th time.
    - pdimitar 10y ago
      off-topic I remember a post made not long ago by the HN admins themselves where they said they'll try to reduce the political posts. So far, it's not working out.
      - dageshi 10y ago
        They gave up when it was concluded that everything is in some way political.
        grzm 10y ago
        I don't think that's a fair representation of what the mods concluded. 'dang summarized the results of the detox week and has made some recent comments on it as well. Here are some, with some identifiable snippets only so it's not a list of links. I encourage you to read the comments themselves. They don't all directly address this, but I think they all shed some light on the topic. --- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969 There's no satisfying anybody about this: not the readers who want more politics, not the readers who want less, and certainly not the partisans on an issue. --- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433 There's a lot more politics on HN right now than there usually is, which is appropriate since it reflects what's going on right now. --- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969 When there's a deluge of political stories, as in the last couple days, users heavily flag most of them. But there have still been plenty of major threads spending plenty of time on the front page. That's the status quo for HN: most politics are off topic, but not all. It's a delicate balance and an important one. Letting politics overrun this site would kill it. --- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463480 On downsides of the Political Detox Week experiment: there are two comments in the thread.

hackerboos 10y ago

I use them every two weeks to move Canadian dollars to British pounds. Nobody else comes close in terms of exchange rates and level of service.

briandear 10y ago
WorldFirst does. There are plenty of competitors in the space that do a great job at this.
- hackerboos 10y ago
  Only for large amounts of money. I'm sending roughly $2000 in each transaction.
  - gjdickens 10y ago
    This is an important point - there is a point where TransferWise becomes more expensive than WorldFirst or a bank, but it is for much higher volumes than most people will be sending on a regular basis. On average I send between 500-1000 GBP to USD per month on Transferwise and pay 2.50 - 5 GBP in fees. Compared to a wire at a bank that charges 30 GBP fixed + a % on a sliding scale depending on the amount, it's not really competitive until you get over 10k per transaction. But then at that point you can contact TransferWise customer service to negotiate a better rate.
- no1youknowz 10y ago
  Can you elaborate on the other competitors? Thanks
  - IshKebab 10y ago
    Just google it. There are several of them (I guess it's not a really high barrier to entry). Hifx, currenciesdirect, torfx... I've not tried any of them.
  - stevanl 10y ago
    Direct competitors would be the likes of Azimo and WorldRemit. For larger transfers (ie above £5k/$6k) you have a slew of them; Global Reach Partners, Moneycorp, World First, and Rational FX to name a few. Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of CurrencyTransfer.com, an aggregator of some of the above larger transfer companies.

Bombthecat 10y ago

They are bleeding a ton of money. For there idea to work they need to get money transferred into all directions... They had Nigeria as a supported country. But they removed it (sadly) But money was probably transferred only one direction. So they lost money.

Lordarminius 10y ago
> They had Nigeria as a supported country. But they removed it ... I am a Nigerian and I consider this an unpardonable failure of basic market research. If they had spent a quality hour of their time investigating the Nigerian market, they would have found out that inflow overwhelmingly dwarfs outflow. Makes you wonder what their decision making methodology is
- averagewall 10y ago
  When there's a consistent imbalance, I wonder if instead of trading it themselves, they could queue up requests. People who really wanted the cheap rate would wait days or weeks or whatever it took to reach the head of the queue, while others would drop out so it keeps moving.
  - Lordarminius 10y ago
    > I wonder if instead of trading it themselves, they could queue up requests.... That's a very good idea.
  - nothrabannosir 10y ago
    Great idea. Maybe they could go one step further, and automatically lower prices until someone does buy them out. They could call it something cool... something that reminds you of places where you can buy and sell things... :p
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  I guess I won't be able to send large amounts of cash to a Nigerian prince who promised me a share of his inheritance anymore. I'm not even sure if he's a prince.

kore 10y ago

If you have a need to transfer large amounts of USD-to-CAD or vice versa, have a look into Norbert's Gambit. It'll effectively let you perform the transfer for 0.2%. Probably not worthwhile for small amounts, but if you're converting ~$10k, might be worth the effort. This site seems to break it down: https://norbertsgambit.com/ https://norbertsgambit.com/

Someone1234 10y ago
That's all kinds of sketchy, least of all because of the taxes, but also because you're playings games with public stock that they or anyone else could manipulate. I've used TransferWise for over $8K and think the service is fantastic. I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole and my git is screaming "scam!"
- kore 10y ago
  Not sure why there was such a knee-jerk reaction, but it's actually fairly straight forward and not scammy at all. You're performing two trades, using a money market ETF that trades at the currency exchange rate, and paying standard brokerage fees + spread instead of currency conversion fees. If you pay $20 in fees + spread for 2 trades, that'll be the cost of the conversion. For a $10k conversion, that's 0.2%. Unless you're suggesting that a money market ETF is prone to manipulation, your brokerage is going to scam you, or you don't like to deal with taxes on your stock purchases/sales, there isn't much drawback other than time. The larger the amount though, the more it'll potentially be worthwhile. More info about this: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/norberts-smart-way-to-convert-dollars-across-the-border/article20279926/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/norberts-smart... http://canadiancouchpotato.com/2013/12/03/norberts-gambit-the-complete-guide/ http://canadiancouchpotato.com/2013/12/03/norberts-gambit-th... http://www.finiki.org/wiki/Norbert's_gambit http://www.finiki.org/wiki/Norbert's_gambit
- geoka9 10y ago
  The only downside I can see is that it takes a fair amount of time (about 7-14 days) from the moment you move money in to the moment you get your exchanged money out. It'll take your brokerage several working days to "journal" your shares over to the other denomination, and the shares can go up/down in the mean time, generating capital gains/losses. Otherwise there's no catch.