41–50 of 176 posts
I wish they would issue credit cards soon. Every time I pay with credit card while travelling, my bank charges 1.5% for each transaction, in addition to bad conversion rate.
Can anyone say how TransferWise compares to CurrencyFair?
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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.
My use case is frequent trips to Sydney for work - a surprising number of cafes and restaurants there are cash only.
Was your experience all within the inner city?
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…
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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 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…
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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).
No, it's not.
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My use case is frequent trips to Sydney for work - a surprising number of cafes and restaurants there are cash only.
That is fascinating. As someone who lives in Sydney's outer suburbs, I simply never need cash. For anything. It's almost the exact opposite of Germany, where I lived for most of the last 5 years. Was your experience all within the inner city?
For sure many coffee shops and convenience stores accept card, but I definitely find myself having to pay cash quite often (just for instance, the laksa place on Hunter street).
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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 capi…
So the question is if the margins are so low that they need a billion dollars to make a profit, what kind of scale do they need to be worth a billion dollars.
And it somehow it makes me question their business model as well. Sooner or later they will be tempted to raise fees and get more profitability.
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?