
Ask HN: Why there are no good services to send money abroad? - topisan
Why it&#x27;s so hard to send money abroad? It&#x27;s either takes long or costs a lot. IS it laws or is it just no one has taken this an issue?
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mtmail
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/](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.

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mkbkn
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.

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Jaxkr
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.

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rahimnathwani
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?

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FlopV
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.

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FlopV
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.

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jolmg
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.

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FlopV
Sorry about that on mobile and can't seem to delete it myself.

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Klonoar
Transferwise isn't good enough...?

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alt_f4
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).

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highhedgehog
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

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probinso
btc?

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bubba1236
what's wrong with MoneyGram?

