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Show HN: World’s first £3 flat fee (0% FX markup) money transfer service

atlantic.money

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Re: Show HN: World’s first £3 flat fee (0% FX markup) money transfer service

#191

Post by renewiltord »

londons_explore wrote: post #17
wdaareg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question! We hold rates for customers for up to an hour and customers can only hold one rate at a time, so the risk is minimal - but we do price that risk into our business model.

So I can shuffle $1M between £ and $, costing £6/hour, and earning guaranteed money whenever the rate moves by more than 0.00003 in a half hour period? Sounds open to abuse!

Save yourself the trouble. I’ll write you the contract myself. Just give me the million quid and I’ll pay you the £12 a day.

No need to actually move anything.

Re: Show HN: World’s first £3 flat fee (0% FX markup) money transfer service

#193

Post by panarky »

Youden wrote: post #156
pkavanagh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi and thanks for your interest! We use the interbank rate from global exchanges. Both being from fintech, we are aware that it is easy to mislead (and to be misled) in money transfer and its a reason why we built this product in the first place. We have worked hard not to have any middle-men that mark up rates in our liquidity provision, and are quite certain that our rates are fair and extremely competitive. I do t…

Overall your product looks good but aside from a more detailed page, I really think the wording here needs to be changed. It's verifiably false that you use the same rate shown on Google so you should remove that entirely. If I can't trust you to honestly describe your service, how can I trust you with large sums of money? I wouldn't be surprised if that caused you legal issues too. As for "the live rate", I think it…

Fees for international money transfer across currencies are always opaque and borderline deceptive.

If this is truly fixed cost, it would definitely be the first, but it's right to be skeptical.

The only reliable way to discover the actual cost is to do a round trip.

Convert a million X to Y, then convert whatever Y you get back to X, and the difference between that and the original million, divided by two, is the real cost.

Naturally this website won't show you that, because you can only convert from pounds but not back to pounds.

Re: Show HN: World’s first £3 flat fee (0% FX markup) money transfer service

#194

Post by vidarh »

randogeuebdb wrote: post #136
pkavanagh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi - other founder Patrick here, thank you for your interest and analysis. It's worth noting that the rates you see on the pages often have a bit of delay - I believe both Wise and Atlantic would end up having very similar underlying FX rates, since there's no markup on either. However, with Wise, the more you send, the more you pay in fees - so there's a break-even where it starts to become more economical to use At…

Thank you for explaining this. It’s rare to see someone acknowledge the quality of a direct competitor. Seems to me that the biggest risk to Wise and Atlantic is growing so large that the incumbents will change their pricing.

This was a lesson I learned the hard way with my first startup: Be cautious about how much you undercut your largest competitors unless/until you have deep pockets and/or unless you're very sure that their economics makes it impossible for them to undercut you on price, because the more you undercut them the more you're inviting a price war you can't win without deep pockets the moment they perceive you as a threat.

When trying to enter an established market to compete on price as your primary differentiator it's often better to keep your margins higher to start with than offer the steepest cut you think you can afford, and then drop your prices slowly as you build up volume and a war chest.

Re: Show HN: World’s first £3 flat fee (0% FX markup) money transfer service

#195

Post by blunte »

YYYdoIdoit wrote: post #189
blunte wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A financial company playing fast and loose with the law That escalated quickly.

> That escalated quickly Pfft The company clearly had poor legal advice and/or didn't think things through, yet they want my money and personal data? At the very least, you should consider this error analogous to the Van Halen 'no Brown M&Ms rider', in that it flags sloppy practice elsewhere [1]. [1] https://www.insider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9

They were approved by the UK Financial Conduct Authority. That surely takes some serious legal effort and attention to detail.

Also, their About Us page suggests that they are staffed by people from relevant financial services companies. Plus they are backed by some VCs who would not take risks by handing money to a company if they thought the legal side wasn't up to par.

We don't know why there wasn't an annoying cookie popup. So assuming that the company in general plays "fast and loose" doesn't seem warranted.

Re: Show HN: World’s first £3 flat fee (0% FX markup) money transfer service

#196

Post by YYYdoIdoit »

blunte wrote: post #195
YYYdoIdoit wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That escalated quickly Pfft The company clearly had poor legal advice and/or didn't think things through, yet they want my money and personal data? At the very least, you should consider this error analogous to the Van Halen 'no Brown M&Ms rider', in that it flags sloppy practice elsewhere [1]. [1] https://www.insider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9

They were approved by the UK Financial Conduct Authority. That surely takes some serious legal effort and attention to detail. Also, their About Us page suggests that they are staffed by people from relevant financial services companies. Plus they are backed by some VCs who would not take risks by handing money to a company if they thought the legal side wasn't up to par. We don't know why there wasn't an annoying co…

> UK Financial Conduct Authority

Frequently satirised in Private Eye [1] as the 'Fundamentally Complicit Authority' :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye

Re: Show HN: World’s first £3 flat fee (0% FX markup) money transfer service

#197

Post by cr15 »

wdaareg wrote: post #137
BukhariH wrote: post #110

Since, Wise & Revolut have been mentioned quite a bit and I'm an ex-Revolut & ex-Wise engineer where I built a lot of the FX infrastructure so I'll throw in my 2c. My assumption of what you & Neeraj are doing based on your backgrounds: You've decided to build a smart order router for retail FX hence the slow transfers because you need to wait for the spot order to settle T+2. Story at Wise Funnily enough Wise started…

Thanks for sharing your story and for the thoughtful feedback BukhariH! We thought a lot about the current players and offerings in the space, and came to similar conclusions about some of the pitfalls. That being said, we have made two observations that we are looking to explore by launching Atlantic Money: 1. By deliberately going the super-app route, and trying to be something for everyone, super apps are crappy u…

How do you plan to become profitable?

£3 flat sounds basically impossible become profitable on. Especially considering you're going for higher volume customers. Yes you have chosen a segment with low overheads (bank to bank transfers), but you will still have the burden of costs that scale very poorly with the volume of £ moved and number of customers served (e.g. CS, AML, KYC etc). Usually revenue (and some costs) that scales with volume is the route to profitability here, but you've explicitly forgone it!

So, in my opinion, your prices will have to rise substantially (most likely) or you will do something akin to what Robinhood did with PFOF and make the customer the product, which is to say, exploit them without them knowing. Sorry if this sounds harsh but your setup currently falls into the category of things that sound too good to be true, would love to hear how you plan to overcome it.

Having said all this I wish you the best of luck, hope to be proven wrong!

(edit: to clarify, i'm considering a business model without significant cross subsidisation - in which case this transfer product would still be loss making in isolation)

Re: Show HN: World’s first £3 flat fee (0% FX markup) money transfer service

#198

Post by opportune »

londons_explore wrote: post #109
opportune wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs 6 quid to enter a reverse iron butterfly with like a 30m expiry on $1M of underlying. I don’t know enough about forex to determine whether that’s a reasonable premium, but it seems like a pretty good deal at its face

You only pay the £6 if you complete the deal. If you cancel midway, it's free. Oh - and it's £3.

3 quid per leg, 6 for the reverse iron butterfly position which is both legs
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