EU cross-border payments outside Eurozone: MEPs scrap excessive fees | Hacker News Reader

EU cross-border payments outside Eurozone: MEPs scrap excessive fees

europarl.europa.eu

63 pointsriffraff20 comments

As someone from Bulgaria, I am really glad they are doing this. At the moment it would cost me 10 EUR to make a SEPA payment from my bank to another country in the Eurozone. A few years ago when SEPA was first introduced I was able to make the same payment from the same bank with just a 2 EUR fee. Banks were not happy that people turned away from SWIFT so they simply raised the SEPA fees. I am glad that Transferwise and other fintech companies are able to offer cheaper payments but I would still prefer the banks to have a reasonable fee in the first place.

It's very similar to the EU mobile roaming situation that took years to get better but is now very convenient and I don't need to buy prepaid SIM cards whenever I visit another EU country.

This is very cool to see, and something that should have been at the heart of the EU monetary union project, we're it to serve "the people" and not just "the corporations, in the hope that trickles down". Very similar to the just unjustified and unnecessary (and hopefully soon to be gone) telco cross border BS.

Of course, if the cost of currency exchange is estimated, it won't necessarily solve the problem I faced transferring money from a German to a Swedish account to pay my rent at the time: not knowing exactly how much of the sent money would end up arriving, and how much would be used up for fees, I had to resort to other payment services with much higher fees... This is purely a UI problem of the banks I tried, but that also means apparently the almighty market does not give them enough incentive to solve problems that are not those of rich people. Who'd have guessed.

I was in the same situation and just made sure to always pay an amount in euro that would definitely be too much in Swedish Crowns once converted. Better to pay 1% extra than to lose much more paying ridiculous conversion costs to my bank.

Transferwise must not be happy about this. I use them for all my payments outside of the eurozone and it saves a boatload of money.

Transferwise is maybe the real reason why this law is created. It gives bad reputation to the banking system.

SEPA solved the high fees that were common before... in some countries :/

Banks still apply cutthroat conversion rates, the law only stops extra commissions.

TransferWise still offers a very useful product even after this.

Transferwise just hiked fees the other day.

I've recently started to use them for my freelance income as well (I'm not in the EU), and it's amazing how much I was paying for regular SWIFT transfers.

I don't know if there's any relationship to this news, but TransferWise is putting their fees slightly up next month.

They're probably not going to lose sleep over it - their borderless account gives you accounts in any currency, you get the transfers very fast and can just withdraw to a cash machine, or transfer to your local bank account. I love it so far. Plus still the best outside EU.

The first time I saw TW I thought they were a scam with those fees for EU-non EU payments. SWIFT and even Western Union were a ripoff.

Transferwise would only suffer if banks were to offer significantly better FX conversion spreads.

My UK bank (Lloyds) charges 16 times as much as Transferwise for EUR/GBP (5% vs 0.3%) plus higher fees on top of that.

Currencyfair is another good option by the way.

As someone having a GBP, EUR and a BGN currency bank accounts, transferring money from one to the other is really painful and is currently solvable at low cost only by some digital banks - Revolut, n26, Transferwise.

Also interesting that the legislation was pushed by a Bulgarian EMP - Eva Maydell, where fees seems to be the highest.

Finally, I was waiting for this.

I was sending money from UK to Romania and it was so expensive. About time to challenge those fees.

Those fees look very high for intra-EU transfer, I think they carried over from the old SWIFT system?

SEPA fixed that, but obviously some countries need to be forced to remove the high fees -_-

Also, you may be happy for about a month heh

Next step should be regulating currency exchange rates. Not sure about rest of Europe, but banks here have such a high spread they effectively add 2 to 4 % fee to every transaction. And it's even worse than normal fees, because it's hidden from the clients.

If you know about it, you can do something about it (like using Revolut or some credit cards with better exchange rates), but most people just get stolen from.

Revolut. I'm not saying they will forever offer interbank-rate exchange, but currently they do.

And this is a very simply commodified service, so it should be solved by new entrants to the market.

I ask my bank for an 80% discount on their official rate to exchange USD <-> EUR. They comply.

There are alternative brokers, such as Interactive Brokers, that will also offer great rates. A magnitude better than Transferwise when dealing with larger amounts.

According to new regulation, these fees must now be displayed upfront, so that the customer may compare options transparently.

If you're doing a currency exchange along with the transfer, XE.com is a better choice than TransferWise - they only make money from forex, and their rate is still competitive to TransferWise, which also charges you a transfer fee.

Wow, look at the percentages these people have been scamming off of everybody for years! That must amount to massive numbers of euro's total. Hilariously, people will be happy with this news.

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