Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TransferWise announces $280M investment

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 176 posts

Re: TransferWise announces $280M investment

#31

Post by koyote »

richardknop wrote: post #10
marcosscriven wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, from the 18th December, that's stopping: https://monzo.com/blog/2017/10/17/atm-limits-announcement/

It's only for ATM withdrawals. If you are in first world country where card payments are well integrated this is not issue for you. Granted, in many developing countries you need cash so this will be issue.

ATM withdrawals is the main selling point though.

There are plenty of cards in the UK that do not have a foreign transaction charge on purchases (nationwide, lloyds avios, for example).

Re: TransferWise announces $280M investment

#32

Post by richardknop »

chrisper wrote: post #16
Numberwang wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was considering them until they changed their name. I just can't get over it.

And what was their old name?

Mondo. But it turns out there were some copyright issues (some other Mondo already existed) so they changed their name to Monzo.

Re: TransferWise announces $280M investment

#34

Post by Dobbs »

dovdovdov wrote: post #22
a_d wrote: post #2

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…

It's clearly a service mostly depending on eastern (central) european migrants working in the UK. I wonder if brexit doesn't fall through what will it do to their single leg business. And even if brexit fails, these people will become less and less dependent of their home country. (moving close family to the uk, paying off mortgages) So yeah, my point is these untapped areas can dry off quick. (I'm talking a decade m…

I use transferwise for US => UK. It also seems to be the most widely recommended of the services in the expat community.

Re: TransferWise announces $280M investment

#35

Post by richardknop »

koyote wrote: post #31
richardknop wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only for ATM withdrawals. If you are in first world country where card payments are well integrated this is not issue for you. Granted, in many developing countries you need cash so this will be issue.

ATM withdrawals is the main selling point though. There are plenty of cards in the UK that do not have a foreign transaction charge on purchases (nationwide, lloyds avios, for example).

From my experience though, Monzo has been much more reliable when traveling. It works in much more places in Asia for example. I traveled around Asia for a while before with my TSB UK debit card and it was getting declined almost everywhere, even in big cities like Hong Kong or Taipei (and yes I called TSB and told them I will be traveling Asia for few months in case they have some restrictions on debit cards in place, didn't help at all).

It got to a point I had to open local bank accounts and do wire transfers from my UK bank account to local bank accounts and use the local debit card. I just couldn't get my TSB/Lloyds card to work anywhere except high end western shops like Apple Store.

Re: TransferWise announces $280M investment

#36

Post by mseebach »

thisisit wrote: post #15
a_d wrote: post #2

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…

I have zero experience in remittances, so I could be wrong but the whole model seems very capital intensive. It needed ~ 1 billion dollars worth of transactions to turn a profit. [1] [2] Isn't that supposed to be a bad idea, specially for software based companies. [1] Transferwise model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransferWise#/media/File:Trans... [2] The company started back in 2011. And select quotes from the ar…

That's not what capital intensive means[1]. A company that has low margins as its business model necessarily needs to have a large body of transactions to get much revenue.

Six years to get profitable is not really a remarkable period for a VC-funded company.

1: It means requiring lots of capital to get set up, eg. because you need to aquire expensive assets to run your business. Buying your own hardware is more capital intensive that running cloud, even if the latter is possibly more expensive in the long run.

Re: TransferWise announces $280M investment

#38

Post by riffraff »

dovdovdov wrote: post #22
a_d wrote: post #2

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…

It's clearly a service mostly depending on eastern (central) european migrants working in the UK. I wonder if brexit doesn't fall through what will it do to their single leg business. And even if brexit fails, these people will become less and less dependent of their home country. (moving close family to the uk, paying off mortgages) So yeah, my point is these untapped areas can dry off quick. (I'm talking a decade m…

not just the UK, this is the same pain point for everyone when interacting between Euroland and the rest of Europe too.

Germany + France + Italy + Spain have _a lot_ of people sending money to non-euro countries.

EDIT: this could dry up quickly anyway though. My bank charges idiotic amounts to change and trasnfer money, I doubt there is any technical reason they must, they can get to TW level trivially, it seems, they just don't care enough.

Re: TransferWise announces $280M investment

#39

Post by chris_overseas »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #27
andy_ppp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually plan to start charging for this because ATMs charge them: £200 free allowance per month, 3% charge for withdrawals thereafter everywhere outside the UK From here: https://monzo.com/blog/2017/09/13/atm-fees-abroad/ I would have just transparently passed on whatever the ATM charges rather than this weird 3% fee.

I'm a Monzo user and really unhappy to find this out. I spend most of my time in mainland Europe and the free transactions and no ATM fees are the only reason I am a user. Can anyone comment on how Revolut compares? One pain point is that I always get asked if I want to pay in GBP or EUR, or even the cashier selects without asking me, in which case I get massively ripped off if they select GBP. With Revolut will the…

I just used a Revolut card during a two week trip around Iceland. It worked fantastically well. Iceland's interesting as some places charge in Krona, some in Euro, but in either case I was charged the live mid-market rate to the GBP with no extra spread or fees.

You're also allowed to withdraw roughly £200/month worth of cash (any supported currency) without any fees. Beyond that there is a charge, I can't remember how much offhand but it's not too crazy.

The one problem I had with the card was at their petrol stations. Most are self-service and require the card to be pre-authed before the fuel will start being pumped. Revolut doesn't support this so I had to use another card or find stations where I could pay in store.

Re: TransferWise announces $280M investment

#40

Post by phillc73 »

seanalltogether wrote: post #7

Transferwise has been a godsend for me the past couple years as I've been moving my life to the UK from the US. XE was bought out awhile ago and hiked their fees up, while banks like HSBC have always had high rates to begin with. Although I'm wondering if jumping on a bitcoin exchange like GDAX to go from USD -> bitcoin -> GBP would be even cheaper these days?

Just to add another data point, TransferWise have been the single most useful financial service for me over the last three years.

In 2000 I moved from Australia to the UK. Transferring money between AUD and GBP accounts was always a bit painful. The banks charged too much and took too long. I even signed up with a dedicated forex trading firm, but at the time they did not offer an online service, so there was still enough friction with phone/email to limit my use.

Three years ago I moved to Central Europe and acquired a EUR account. Soon after I discovered TransferWise and have used it regularly ever since. It works, it's cheap and it's fast.

Post reply on HN