Are there any kind of odds that the U.S. will join a fully-automated transfer network with at least other western countries? I recently did my first EU->US money transfer and was amazed at how much worse the experience & cost was compared to doing a Denmark->Germany transfer. Within Europe, even across borders and currencies, the transfers are now cheap and fully automated: you just identify the destination account by IBAN, and it's routed automatically. It doesn't seem like it would be impossible to link up U.S. accounts to allow IBAN-identified fully electronic transfers too, versus the current really primitive system where you enter a bunch of information and some humans eventually enact the transfer. But afaict there's no movement in that direction. There's talk about an EU/US free trade area, but why not a rationalized transactions treaty?