7 ms·

Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will

by fyfy18 8y ago

Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will arrive in few days at the very latest. Within the same country transfers mostly arrive the same day (often it's under 1 hour), and sometimes that happens internationally too. Oh and I don't need to pay anything for that. A few years ago I was working in the Middle East, and before I moved back I transferred my savings from there (~€50k) back to Europe without any questions from either bank. I just did the transfer online, and it arrived in a few days. Now I'm working for a US company, and it took them a few weeks to setup paying me with their bank. It usually takes at least a week from when they tell the bank to pay me, until I receive the money in my account - to a USD account also in the US.

short_sells_poo 8y ago
> Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. This. Whenever someone says that Cryptocurrencies solve money transfer problems, I look where they are based and 99% of the cases it is the US. In Europe, transferring money is the same internationally as it is nationally. Type in the IBAN and the name of the recipient and they get it the same day, or latest the next day. I made seven figure international payments that went through in 24 hours. This is not a technical problem that Cryptocurrencies are somehow uniquely placed to solve. Technically, a money transfer could take miliseconds - updating a couple of database rows. National payments in Europe at least are actually pretty much instant since they are now fully automated. International payments can take up to a day due to an actual human checking the correctness (and perhaps doing due diligence for money laundering).
- cal5k 8y ago
  So? There's a huge amount of currency flowing to and from North America to Europe, Asia, etc. Just because the euro zone has standardized their banking system doesn't mean a) that America will ever do the same (cough the metric system cough), or b) that all movement of money across borders should be strictly the purview of banks. In Canada alone people send $23.3B/year back to their country of origin in the form of remittances (China, India, the Philippines, etc.). Historically they've been massively overcharged for the privilege of doing so because they're held captive to our oligopolistic banking system - sometimes upwards of 20% because they regularly send smaller amounts to minimize risk.
  - short_sells_poo 8y ago
    How does your point relate to the usefulness of Bitcoin? I highlighted that the quagmire of international payments is not a problem that Bitcoin can uniquely solve. It is not a technical problem at all! Bitcoin has nothing special about it that would allow these countries to make payments between each other smoother. That is apart from sidestepping the existing regulatory framework. It might have the beneficial side effect of competition, but that's not a virtue of Bitcoin as a concept. Perhaps the space is ripe for a new fintech startup that streamlines payments between these destinations.
    - cal5k 8y ago
      It's a distributed protocol with wide adoption and enough liquidity to be easily traded anywhere in the world. That makes it great as a medium of common exchange... I can easily convert from Canadian Dollars to BTC in Canada, then convert from BTC to Pesos in the Philippines so long as there's enough liquidity on either end. Both parties still have to act within their respective legal frameworks, but it sidesteps the need to add even more parties into the mix, each of which take their own fees. International wire transfers are a great example of how opaque, slow and costly that can be. You can go customer -> Canadian Company -> Filipino company -> customer. The traditional way would be customer -> Canadian Company -> Canadian bank -> Intermediary bank(s) -> Filipino bank -> Filipino company -> Customer I'm simplifying somewhat... obviously banks are involved in any domestic fiat transfers, but they're not involved in international transmittal (which they usually charge quite a bit for).
      - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
        I understood bitcoin transfers could take days. If so, that's not really very liquid?
        CedarMadness 8y ago
        It depends really. Transactions are usually processed based on the fee associated with them. If the network is exceptionally busy and you send a transaction with a low fee, yeah it'll take a while, but when creating the transaction you can adjust the fee (and most wallets will give you a few options) to make your transaction more valuable to miners, so it will be picked up more quickly.
- gst 8y ago
  An ACH transaction between two North American banks usually arrives on the next business day (if you place it before the cut-off time). In fact, ACH supports multiple settlements per day now so if that feature is supported by your bank ACH transfers can even arrive on the same business day. There are a few banks that are slower, but that's not the fault of ACH - don't use slow banks and you're not running into that issue. That's very similar to SEPA transactions, with the exception that some European banks support real-time settlements for SEPA. For banks that don't support this yet funds usually arrive on the next business day. Transfers between the US banking system and the European system are usually slow and expensive as those two systems aren't directly linked to each other. So you your bank needs to send the funds to a correspondent bank which forwards the funds to the final destination. But if you use 3rd party services such as TransferWise those transfers are significantly faster and cheaper. My last transfer from my US bank account to my European account (via TransferWise) arrived on the next business day and cost something like 0.36% on top of the mid-market rate.
  - vsipuli 8y ago
    But you cannot deposit money into any arbitrary U.S. bank account using ACH. For every account that you want to make transfers to, you first need to sign a bunch of forms. With the European IBAN system, no permissions or forms are needed to make deposits to a new arbitrary account.
    - gst 8y ago
      Almost all of the US banks allow you to add other ACH accounts that you control. Just confirm the two trial deposits and you can push or pull money from that account. A few banks also allow to send ACH transfers to third-party accounts that you don't control - for example with USAA that's possible. This still doesn't 100% match how transfers work in Europe (you first need to add the account, then wait 1-2 days, then you can send funds to it), but it's definitely better than "signing a bunch of forms".
  - Smokinator 8y ago
    A BTC transaction arrives within minutes. For merchants, that's huge. Why wait 36-72 hours for your credit card sales to hit your bank account? Why pay 2% or more for the "privilege" of that clunky old system when you can use Bitcoin for free and offload the fees (.1 percent) to the consumer? Watching you naysayers takes me back to the days when I used to try to get business colleagues to use e-mail, and they would be like, "But I have a fax machine. It works just fine." Really they were just scared of this newfangled computer stuff, but the better tech wins out eventually every time. It's funny to see so many so-called "techies" who are so incredibly ignorant of the most important technological advancement since the Internet itself. In fact, it's probably an even bigger deal than the Internet. lol
- easymodex 8y ago
  >Technically, a money transfer could take miliseconds - updating a couple of database rows. I'm a devops engineer at a somewhat large company (4mil+ daily users) and in my years of working with servers and databases, even in this professional enviroment, I've seen some crazy things go down. That's why I find the thought of having basically the whole world's money state written in some databases which are so simple to update, insanely scary. And that's also why I really love bitcoin and the whole blockchain idea. I could go on about the reliability and transparency of it but the general opinion around here is somewhat aginst crypto currencies so to each his own. As to the people saying it's difficult to use and has an unfriendly UI. I might be just one of those nerds it's aimed at, but I feel it's the simplest way of transfering money. I mean really, you just put in an address, hit send and the other party gets it. It won't get delayed, no bank will call you about the funds, no conversion fees, etc. Yes there is a transaction fee which makes it a bit odd to buy coffee with, but for small amounts I don't need the whole world to confirm my transaction, I can use whatever other solution. But for big amounts hell yes, I want to use bitcoin. It's my hard earned money and I don't trust anyone with it.
hartator 8y ago
> I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will arrive in few days at the very latest. I can do the same in the US, except it’s instantaneous, not sure what you are talking about.
- stevekemp 8y ago
  One surprise for me, as a European, is that in America people seem to regard bank account numbers as secret - I dwell on forums for landlords, etc, and people expect to collect cash/cheques from their tenants, rather than sharing bank details. Unrelated to your alleged speed, but another odd perception of the American banking systems. (Lots of other people in this thread seem to suggest you're an outlier; I don't know enough to guess either way.)
  - hartator 8y ago
    Your account number is on every checks. Checks are usually prefered because in the US you can cash them immediately and online. Of course, YMMV. I've experienced both the US bank system and the EU (France) bank system. Even if Americans are very critical of our banks, no fee (usually) for anything, reduced red tape, and credit cards that are on your side won me over. When you take account of cash back and interests on checking, you've usually a cash positive relationship with you bank. Good luck finding that in Europe.
NicoJuicy 8y ago
It's weird that slow banking is something that makes credit cards more useful. And credit card transfers earn more money ( just putting 1 and 2 together)
justaguyhere 8y ago
* infact just issues with North American banks.* Yup, same experience here. It takes at least 10 days to send a paltry 1000 USD for me and yes, there is a fee. The bank is probably making money on the exchange rate too, not sure. At one point, I was asked all kinds of documentation - passport etc. All this to send very small amounts of money (I don't remember sending more than 3K, 50K Euros without questions is amazing to me). Edit: Many comments here mention that Europe is way ahead of the US i the money transfer space. Can someone talk about why the US is lagging behind?
- kingaillas 8y ago
  There's a pretty good Planet Money episode on this issue: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/10/576879734/episode-489-the-invisible-plumbing-of-our-economy https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/10/576879734/epis...
kmetan 8y ago
>Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. This is true only for transfers between and within Europe, north America and couple of exceptions in Asia. The world is bigger...
vbezhenar 8y ago
If I would receive $50k in Kazakhstan from foreign country, they will be put on hold for a few months for security investigations and I'll have to provide all the documents about that money before I could have them. And even then someone corrupted might invent something to steal them from me. I definitely don't trust banks for anything but pocket money.

by fyfy18 8y ago

short_sells_poo 8y ago

> Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. This. Whenever someone says that Cryptocurrencies solve money transfer problems, I look where they are based and 99% of the cases it is the US. In Europe, transferring money is the same internationally as it is nationally. Type in the IBAN and the name of the recipient and they get it the same day, or latest the next day. I made seven figure international payments that went through in 24 hours. This is not a technical problem that Cryptocurrencies are somehow uniquely placed to solve. Technically, a money transfer could take miliseconds - updating a couple of database rows. National payments in Europe at least are actually pretty much instant since they are now fully automated. International payments can take up to a day due to an actual human checking the correctness (and perhaps doing due diligence for money laundering).

cal5k 8y ago
So? There's a huge amount of currency flowing to and from North America to Europe, Asia, etc. Just because the euro zone has standardized their banking system doesn't mean a) that America will ever do the same (cough the metric system cough), or b) that all movement of money across borders should be strictly the purview of banks. In Canada alone people send $23.3B/year back to their country of origin in the form of remittances (China, India, the Philippines, etc.). Historically they've been massively overcharged for the privilege of doing so because they're held captive to our oligopolistic banking system - sometimes upwards of 20% because they regularly send smaller amounts to minimize risk.
- short_sells_poo 8y ago
  How does your point relate to the usefulness of Bitcoin? I highlighted that the quagmire of international payments is not a problem that Bitcoin can uniquely solve. It is not a technical problem at all! Bitcoin has nothing special about it that would allow these countries to make payments between each other smoother. That is apart from sidestepping the existing regulatory framework. It might have the beneficial side effect of competition, but that's not a virtue of Bitcoin as a concept. Perhaps the space is ripe for a new fintech startup that streamlines payments between these destinations.
  - cal5k 8y ago
    It's a distributed protocol with wide adoption and enough liquidity to be easily traded anywhere in the world. That makes it great as a medium of common exchange... I can easily convert from Canadian Dollars to BTC in Canada, then convert from BTC to Pesos in the Philippines so long as there's enough liquidity on either end. Both parties still have to act within their respective legal frameworks, but it sidesteps the need to add even more parties into the mix, each of which take their own fees. International wire transfers are a great example of how opaque, slow and costly that can be. You can go customer -> Canadian Company -> Filipino company -> customer. The traditional way would be customer -> Canadian Company -> Canadian bank -> Intermediary bank(s) -> Filipino bank -> Filipino company -> Customer I'm simplifying somewhat... obviously banks are involved in any domestic fiat transfers, but they're not involved in international transmittal (which they usually charge quite a bit for).
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      I understood bitcoin transfers could take days. If so, that's not really very liquid?
      - CedarMadness 8y ago
        It depends really. Transactions are usually processed based on the fee associated with them. If the network is exceptionally busy and you send a transaction with a low fee, yeah it'll take a while, but when creating the transaction you can adjust the fee (and most wallets will give you a few options) to make your transaction more valuable to miners, so it will be picked up more quickly.
gst 8y ago
An ACH transaction between two North American banks usually arrives on the next business day (if you place it before the cut-off time). In fact, ACH supports multiple settlements per day now so if that feature is supported by your bank ACH transfers can even arrive on the same business day. There are a few banks that are slower, but that's not the fault of ACH - don't use slow banks and you're not running into that issue. That's very similar to SEPA transactions, with the exception that some European banks support real-time settlements for SEPA. For banks that don't support this yet funds usually arrive on the next business day. Transfers between the US banking system and the European system are usually slow and expensive as those two systems aren't directly linked to each other. So you your bank needs to send the funds to a correspondent bank which forwards the funds to the final destination. But if you use 3rd party services such as TransferWise those transfers are significantly faster and cheaper. My last transfer from my US bank account to my European account (via TransferWise) arrived on the next business day and cost something like 0.36% on top of the mid-market rate.
- vsipuli 8y ago
  But you cannot deposit money into any arbitrary U.S. bank account using ACH. For every account that you want to make transfers to, you first need to sign a bunch of forms. With the European IBAN system, no permissions or forms are needed to make deposits to a new arbitrary account.
  - gst 8y ago
    Almost all of the US banks allow you to add other ACH accounts that you control. Just confirm the two trial deposits and you can push or pull money from that account. A few banks also allow to send ACH transfers to third-party accounts that you don't control - for example with USAA that's possible. This still doesn't 100% match how transfers work in Europe (you first need to add the account, then wait 1-2 days, then you can send funds to it), but it's definitely better than "signing a bunch of forms".
- Smokinator 8y ago
  A BTC transaction arrives within minutes. For merchants, that's huge. Why wait 36-72 hours for your credit card sales to hit your bank account? Why pay 2% or more for the "privilege" of that clunky old system when you can use Bitcoin for free and offload the fees (.1 percent) to the consumer? Watching you naysayers takes me back to the days when I used to try to get business colleagues to use e-mail, and they would be like, "But I have a fax machine. It works just fine." Really they were just scared of this newfangled computer stuff, but the better tech wins out eventually every time. It's funny to see so many so-called "techies" who are so incredibly ignorant of the most important technological advancement since the Internet itself. In fact, it's probably an even bigger deal than the Internet. lol
easymodex 8y ago
>Technically, a money transfer could take miliseconds - updating a couple of database rows. I'm a devops engineer at a somewhat large company (4mil+ daily users) and in my years of working with servers and databases, even in this professional enviroment, I've seen some crazy things go down. That's why I find the thought of having basically the whole world's money state written in some databases which are so simple to update, insanely scary. And that's also why I really love bitcoin and the whole blockchain idea. I could go on about the reliability and transparency of it but the general opinion around here is somewhat aginst crypto currencies so to each his own. As to the people saying it's difficult to use and has an unfriendly UI. I might be just one of those nerds it's aimed at, but I feel it's the simplest way of transfering money. I mean really, you just put in an address, hit send and the other party gets it. It won't get delayed, no bank will call you about the funds, no conversion fees, etc. Yes there is a transaction fee which makes it a bit odd to buy coffee with, but for small amounts I don't need the whole world to confirm my transaction, I can use whatever other solution. But for big amounts hell yes, I want to use bitcoin. It's my hard earned money and I don't trust anyone with it.

hartator 8y ago

> I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will arrive in few days at the very latest. I can do the same in the US, except it’s instantaneous, not sure what you are talking about.

stevekemp 8y ago
One surprise for me, as a European, is that in America people seem to regard bank account numbers as secret - I dwell on forums for landlords, etc, and people expect to collect cash/cheques from their tenants, rather than sharing bank details. Unrelated to your alleged speed, but another odd perception of the American banking systems. (Lots of other people in this thread seem to suggest you're an outlier; I don't know enough to guess either way.)
- hartator 8y ago
  Your account number is on every checks. Checks are usually prefered because in the US you can cash them immediately and online. Of course, YMMV. I've experienced both the US bank system and the EU (France) bank system. Even if Americans are very critical of our banks, no fee (usually) for anything, reduced red tape, and credit cards that are on your side won me over. When you take account of cash back and interests on checking, you've usually a cash positive relationship with you bank. Good luck finding that in Europe.

NicoJuicy 8y ago

It's weird that slow banking is something that makes credit cards more useful. And credit card transfers earn more money ( just putting 1 and 2 together)

justaguyhere 8y ago

* infact just issues with North American banks.* Yup, same experience here. It takes at least 10 days to send a paltry 1000 USD for me and yes, there is a fee. The bank is probably making money on the exchange rate too, not sure. At one point, I was asked all kinds of documentation - passport etc. All this to send very small amounts of money (I don't remember sending more than 3K, 50K Euros without questions is amazing to me). Edit: Many comments here mention that Europe is way ahead of the US i the money transfer space. Can someone talk about why the US is lagging behind?

kingaillas 8y ago
There's a pretty good Planet Money episode on this issue: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/10/576879734/episode-489-the-invisible-plumbing-of-our-economy https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/10/576879734/epis...

kmetan 8y ago

>Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. This is true only for transfers between and within Europe, north America and couple of exceptions in Asia. The world is bigger...

vbezhenar 8y ago

If I would receive $50k in Kazakhstan from foreign country, they will be put on hold for a few months for security investigations and I'll have to provide all the documents about that money before I could have them. And even then someone corrupted might invent something to steal them from me. I definitely don't trust banks for anything but pocket money.