111–120 of 176 posts
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CapitalOne doesn't charge any foreign transaction fees on their credit cards.
Yeah but they charge on atm withdrawals and the exchange rate could be the banks rate depending on the card.
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It would correlate strongly with people trying to evade taxes and/or launder money. PayPal doesn't like to facilitate illegal activity. I'm not theorizing about this -- I have first hand knowledge.
Ok I am not trying to be dense. I really am curious. Maybe it correlates strongly, but there's nothing dishonest or illegal about it that I can tell. PayPal has all your personal info. They have your bank account info on both sides. People transfer money between. So maybe it's a pattern that money launderers use, but so do regular people. What am I missing?
If 1% of all customers are fraudulent but 5% of customers with multi-country bank accounts are fraudulent, that might be enough to tip their risk/reward balance.
And I've dealt with this first hand. I have paypal accounts and legal bank accounts in multiple countries, and when I've tried to move money between them I get a call from customer service saying they blocked the transactions, and "you're not supposed to do that with paypal".
For everyone that's interested in TransferWise, I'd recommend Revolut ( https://www.revolut.com/ ) instead. They have no fees for transactions or currency changes (up to a quite high limit), as well with a lot more features (international prepaid MasterCard that charges no fees ever being my favourite one, and you can go to ATMs for free as well). I've been a happy customer of them for quite some time and I have abso…
Thought I'd give these guys a chance. Your brief write up piqued my interest. Their website says, give us your phone number and we'll send you a link to download the app. I'm thinking this is great, a direct APK download and no Google Play Store interference, they just want to protect the download link a bit. I enter my phone number. I receive my SMS with the download link ( http://revolut.com/get ). Not being an htt…
That's going to reduce the number of customers they get a lot more than a redirect to the Play Store.
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Thought I'd give these guys a chance. Your brief write up piqued my interest. Their website says, give us your phone number and we'll send you a link to download the app. I'm thinking this is great, a direct APK download and no Google Play Store interference, they just want to protect the download link a bit. I enter my phone number. I receive my SMS with the download link ( http://revolut.com/get ). Not being an htt…
Because they'd have to talk users through allowing direct APK installs, complete with all the scary warnings. That's going to reduce the number of customers they get a lot more than a redirect to the Play Store.
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You are right, but the Poland corridor was probably the key to proving the model though.
Why would either be lucrative? AFAIK within the EU bank transfers are free of fees.
I used to study remittance flows for a living. This was a problem that was (is?) begging to be solved. Incumbents like Western Union have always been very expensive and borderline evil. There are well known “corridors” of remittance flows that are still yet to be captured - like Kerala (India) Saudi Arabia (Middle-east more generally); Mexico US; US LatAm etc. My guess is TransferWise captured the UK Poland corridor…
For me, Transferwise is still very expensive. I use ICICI bank to send money to India and it goes straight to recipient bank account in less than 2 hours along with market rate (xe.com)
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It's insane, borderline criminal. I knew someone who wanted to convert ~1m AUD -> USD -- and the banks were still trying to offer to do at 2-3% ! At that amount, you can open a brokerage account and trade through EBS or CNX directly and pay basis points.
With a brokerage account, how easy is it to get your foreign currency sent to a bank account in that country?
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Just withdraw cash on a credit card from a regular ATM. Most "normal" credit cards charge on the order of 3% over spot on the FX, some cards further charge a flat fee, but this is still better than those markups. It's even possible to get cards that doesn't charge a fee and gives you spot FX, even for cash withdrawal (Halifax Clarity in the UK is one). That leaves any fee the ATM might charge you, but if you can find…
Charles Schwab checking/debit: no foreign transaction fee, uses the exchange rate, and refunds all ATM fees internationally.