I'm the co-founder of a international money transfer comparison engine, AMA if you have questions about international money transfers from a consumer perspective.
- The video talks about a suspense account, basically locking your money prior to it being netted out against others and sent to the central bank. How often do these take place? How does that relate to my checking account having money as "available" as opposed to deposited? In general, which step is responsible for money transfer taking so long?
- What prevents me from going to two ATMs at exactly the same time and withdrawing my entire balance? Is there a single central location for instantaneous money transfers like ATMs?
I am a bit familiar with Interac in Canada, the EFTPOS (pin and chip retail) system here. Aside from the EFTPOS system, it also serves as a domestic interbank transfer service. When you withdraw money from an ATM, the ATM bank connects to your bank via the interbank Interac system, and submits your authorisation to transfer the funds out of your account into the ATM bank's receiving account and gives you the money. This is an atomic transaction done real time, so no double spending allowed. I believe it's conceptually quite similar for the European EFTPOS systems and Cirrus/Maestro in the US. Credit cards work a fair bit differently though.
And yes, the transfer from customer to merchant is in fact usually immediate. If someone buys something in my store, I can 10 seconds later use the debit card linked to the account to spend the funds. That's why reversing fraudulent debit card transactions can be a major pain with not much in the way of guarantee of restitution.
I'm thinking if there are multiple servers you could theoretically do it at the exact same time. Or if there are multiple servers but one database, is the database locked for your account when performing the request?
In the early days (1980s, 90s) this all tended to crash on Black Friday and Boxing Day, taking the whole thing down for entire banks and, a few times, nationwide. Been a good 20 years since that happened regularly though.
This is likely a combination a question of Money Transfer/Transmitter License & compliance, but this is not my area of expertise. A provider like Wise is licensed in the countries where it accepts customers. In this case, Wise is licensed in the US but not in Chile: https://wise.com/help/articles/2932693/how-is-wise-regulated...
As it's a costly and complicated endeavour, they must prioritise the markets they operate in and must have made the business decision not to be licensed in Chile as of now.
Luckily, Monito always try to find local companies filling the gap of big players, and Global66 is an interesting alternative from Chile: https://www.monito.com/send-money/chile/united-states/clp/us...
Moneygram is likely limited in accepting US residents with their US site for similar reasons.