3GB of Data + Unlimited SMS and Calls for free sounds very nice? Can you share the name of the provider so that we can add it to our eSIM comparison for Germany https://www.monito.com/en/esim-plans-compared
What's the reason for these lower prices? Data only 5gb/month for $5 or $6 seems to be the summary of the link, amazing! I think the answer is there is lots of competition and they've driven the price down to this point. That's an incredible price.
Of course this would be immensely useful. For example, can I put this in my vehicle with built in maps (or just have a hotspot in my vehicle to use with a tablet). As a price comparison, in the us there are some EVs that charge $100/year for basically this, most charge a lot more. That's $8.33/month, so only a bit more than $6 or 7. But in the us it's hard or impossible get anything that low for just raw service, I can't find anything like that.
Great to see more and more competition in the money transfer space, congrats on the launch.
Here's a little comparison by amount received (incl. all fees) with the cheapest provider found on Monito.com (comparison site I co-founded) vs Atlantic Money:
Sending £1000 to:
- EUR: €1,199 vs €1,196.83
- CAD: CA$1,693 vs CA$1,686
- PLN: zł5,737 vs zł5,826.58
- USD: $1,311 vs $1,310
As we can see, the competition on pricing for popular routes will be quite intense! Do you plan on mainly focusing on customers who need to send larger amounts? Or are you planning on developing other differentiators (New routes, customers service, user experience etc...))
I'm the co-founder of a international money transfer comparison engine, AMA if you have questions about international money transfers from a consumer perspective.
- The video talks about a suspense account, basically locking your money prior to it being netted out against others and sent to the central bank. How often do these take place? How does that relate to my checking account having money as "available" as opposed to deposited? In general, which step is responsible for money transfer taking so long?
- What prevents me from going to two ATMs at exactly the same time and withdrawing my entire balance? Is there a single central location for instantaneous money transfers like ATMs?
> What prevents me from going to two ATMs at exactly the same time and withdrawing my entire balance? Is there a single central location for instantaneous money transfers like ATMs?
I am a bit familiar with Interac in Canada, the EFTPOS (pin and chip retail) system here. Aside from the EFTPOS system, it also serves as a domestic interbank transfer service. When you withdraw money from an ATM, the ATM bank connects to your bank via the interbank Interac system, and submits your authorisation to transfer the funds out of your account into the ATM bank's receiving account and gives you the money. This is an atomic transaction done real time, so no double spending allowed. I believe it's conceptually quite similar for the European EFTPOS systems and Cirrus/Maestro in the US. Credit cards work a fair bit differently though.
And yes, the transfer from customer to merchant is in fact usually immediate. If someone buys something in my store, I can 10 seconds later use the debit card linked to the account to spend the funds. That's why reversing fraudulent debit card transactions can be a major pain with not much in the way of guarantee of restitution.
Does this mean there's a central server / database every ATM for a particular bank queries?
I'm thinking if there are multiple servers you could theoretically do it at the exact same time. Or if there are multiple servers but one database, is the database locked for your account when performing the request?
Yes. Each bank provides an access point to the interbank network. Which is a fairly centralised service run collectively by the participating banks. There's one database (approximately) per bank. That holds your account figures, etc. Atomic transactions are used, so yes, the account is locked on both ends until the funds go through or the transaction fails.
In the early days (1980s, 90s) this all tended to crash on Black Friday and Boxing Day, taking the whole thing down for entire banks and, a few times, nationwide. Been a good 20 years since that happened regularly though.
Two excellent questions, which I am unfortunately not able to answer with confidence, as it goes into the weeds of payment rails& infrastructure. Someone actually making the transfers (instead of a comparison site like us looking at the available services and recommending you the best one for your needs) would probably have the answers.
Love monito.com! Congratulations on your product. Do you know why so many money transfer system have restrictions on the directions to send money? For example, Wise only allows sending in the USA (USD) -> Chile (CLP) direction but not the other way around. Also Moneygram only allows USA -> Chile and it is blocked from non-US IP adresses.
This is likely a combination a question of Money Transfer/Transmitter License & compliance, but this is not my area of expertise. A provider like Wise is licensed in the countries where it accepts customers. In this case, Wise is licensed in the US but not in Chile: https://wise.com/help/articles/2932693/how-is-wise-regulated...
As it's a costly and complicated endeavour, they must prioritise the markets they operate in and must have made the business decision not to be licensed in Chile as of now.
Great post Jurn, thanks for participating in the effort against hidden exchange rate markups.
If you want to check for yourself how much you could save with TransferWise (or one of their competitors) vs banks or PayPal, we've built a comparison site for international money transfer: www.monito.com which compares live exchange rates and fees for any amount you'd like to transfer between two countries/currencies (e.g. US-Euro https://www.monito.com/send-money/united-states/netherlands/...)
Our initial goal was to help migrants save money when they support family back home, but the tool can be used by businesses/freelancers/travellers as well.
Let me know if I can be of any help in the comments, we've become payment geeks over the years!
I wanted to provide you feedback as well as alert others reading these comments. Your site doesn’t list anything other than Transferwise for transfers from India to USA, even though options like InstaRem and others exist. Based on this, I’m not sure how comprehensive your service is to compare providers for cross border transfers. I see you have InstaRem and others for some other currency combinations (including the inverse, sending money from USA to India).
Thanks for your feedback. Monito.com strives to list as many options as possible and be the most exhaustive source of information about international money transfer fees worldwide. However, we're not always able to access all data as no worldwide regulations require banks or money transfer services to be transparent about their fees and exchange rates (yet).
That being said, in the case of money transfers from India to the USA: InstaReM temporarily suspended money transfers from India last month. As soon as this is re-activated, they will once again appear in our comparison table on all supported corridors from India.
Thanks for the prompt response with details. If I may bother you one more time, do you have XE in your list of providers? It provides money transfers for many currency pairs (probably not as broad as Transferwise or InstaRem).
Have you transferred money across borders with good recommendations lately?
Sending money across borders is historically super complex and expensive, you're right. The WorldBank estimates that it costs an average of 8% in total fees (transfer fees + exchange rate mark-up) to transfer money internationally.
For international transfers with banks and cash-based money transfers, this is still true.
But, in the last 10 years, we've seen hundreds of new online money transfer operators innovating in the field (way before crypto) starting with Xoom in the first wave and then TransferWise, Remitly, WorldRemit, InstaRem, Azimo and hundreds of others...
Don't know about Monito but I've used TransferWise many times. First it's not straight forward, it takes time (several days), and it's freaking expensive. These numbers you quote are pretty far from what I spend when transferring money between France, the UK and the US.
>The Business Model Canvas, released under Creative Commons license, is open for building other approaches and variations on the concept. There have been a number of variations discussed and demonstrated here in the Hub and externally. Where variations have been made, recognition of the original source material must be included in the variation. The text and link Strategyzer.com should be clearly visible and legible under every canvas.
If you're interested in the topic, you should definitely check out https://strategyzer.com/ which is the company co-founded by the former PHD that developped the concept of the Business Model Canvas.
That does sound dubious. The specific graphics created by Strategyzer can be copyrighted with a Creative Commons license of course, but I can't see how the concept of the business model canvas can be protected.
In the current US patent climate disaster it is not really a big leap to see something that is clearly not protected by copyright and then think "maybe they got a patent for it and throw licenses around because of that."
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