Hacker News Reader

Comment by astazangasta | Hacker News Reader

It's bizzare that our financial sector is the largest area of the economy and yet has not managed to produce any innovation in this regard. Shouldn't banks be giving us easy ways to transfer money? Isn't this their function? Financial services?

View on HN

Here in Canada, I can do an email money transfer to virtually any financial institution. All the recipient needs to do is bank with one that supports it and use online banking.

I don't know how innovative it is, but it works relatively well.

https://www.interac.ca/en/interac-etransfer/etransfer-detail

I would feel a lot better about using email transfers if my bank had better security than my bloody smartphone, but as it stands my pin can't be any more complex than the pin to my smartphone. Canadian banking security is embarrassing, though I understand its not much better elsewhere.

Yes, Canada is ahead. On the other hand that email money transfer incurs a transaction fee from most banks.

What pisses me off is that we have a nearly ubiquitous way to send money in the physical world--a cheque. Yet, in the digital world we stumble to achieve the same.

I blame the profit driven corporations as each solution incurs a transaction fee and/or a proprietary solution with no interop with other systems.

My experience doing B2B money transfers: For those out of country I paid a $25-50 fee to do a wire transfer. Meanwhile bank transfers within Canada required a cash withdrawal (or bank draft), followed by a trip to the other bank to perform the deposit. Sigh.

I'll be staying in BC for a while this year. It's the first time I've seriously looked at Bitcoin to transfer money from Australia. The problem I have is the fees are from both sides - the Australian bank and the Canadian one.

Has anyone tried TransferWise?

I've used OzForex for $20k. Deeply satisfied.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the transaction fee either.

My bank allows me to set up personal payees, though I have to go into a branch to do it. It acts just like a bill payment, which I get for free. The downside is that it takes a day (if the recipient is at the same bank) or more (if they're not at the same bank).

The plus side on the email transfer is that it is virtually instant (~5 minutes usually).

I (bank at B of A) just did this with my wife (Wells-Fargo). No transaction fees that I see.

Yet it's still slower and more expensive than sending a friend a photo of a physical filled-out cheque. Ridiculous.

edit: s/screenshot/photo/

I've found that email transfers take about 5 minutes, it's not terribly slow at all. The expense bothers me though.

Why? That isn't their function. They aren't making money off your checking account.

Do you think these companies have contracts with all the banks, everywhere in the world?

The back-end is made from ACH/SWIFT which are indeed from traditional financial services. Access to these key services is restricted for liability reasons, although you can indeed make a wiretransfer from most bank accounts online. I can do 4 of these a month without any charges.

In much of Europe, there's more or less no limit. In some countries like Belgium, direct bank transfer is so common[0] your IBAN is printed on your credit card. Others are significantly less enlightened in that regard.

[0] as in, it's a perfectly normal way to reimburse friends or colleagues who've paid stuff for you

Yep, we don't even think about this in Australia. All the banks have web/mobile apps with solid transfer tools. Same bank transfers are instant and to other banks are 1-2 business days.

In Canada there are dirt simple ways to transfer money. Every bank has an app. Every card has a chip. And so on.

Chase actually has a great solution, Chase QuickPay. Here in Chicago it is very popular. https://www.chase.com/online-banking/quickpay

Canada has a similar solution, but it works across all of the big banks. Chase's solution is only for Chase customers, though it appears that the recipient doesn't necessarily need to be a Chase customer.

https://www.interac.ca/en/interac-etransfer/etransfer-detail

It's not limited to Chase. It's called clearXchange and was started by the 3 big banks (Chase, BoA, Wells Fargo) and is now extending to more: https://www.clearxchange.com/payments/member-banks

clearXchange allows account holders in any of the member banks to send funds to each other and it takes about 1-2 days after the first transaction. It also allows sending funds via cellphone. If you have a Wells Fargo account, you can send funds to a BoA account holder using just their phone number.

I think the banks have done a horrible job of advertising this free no-strings-attached service.

Innovation and long-term market share are probably inversely correlated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com