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Comment by vezycash | Hacker News Reader

About TransferWise. I checked their site based on your recommendation. However, something bothers me.

There's a form on the Top-right corner. "You send," "You Receive." I tried checking how much would be received in dollars if I sent $1000. However, the form wouldn't let me. It doesn't allow comparison between the same currency.

It felt shady to me.

I've sent this message to them already. But wow! They do support a lot of countries - far more than Stripe. I'm surprised I've never heard of them before.

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> It doesn't allow comparison between the same currency.

Their use case is transferring funds between currencies, why would you want to do that?

The site says "transfer money abroad". If for some reason they only want the more difficult kind of transfer, it would help to make that clear.

I'm confused by you asking why when the answer is both obvious and explicitly stated in parent comments. Sending someone money in a different country, but they happen to use the same currency.

Since transfers are bank account to bank account, this would mean somebody abroad (say in Europe) would have USD denominated bank account? As far as I know TransferWise does require your recipient to have a bank account in the location where they want to receive the money, meaning usually transfers between accounts denominated in different currencies.

If its within EU there is of course no point in using TransferWise as EUR-EUR transactions are practically free.

It wasn't clear to me which is why I asked. I agree for that case the headline is a bit misleading though.

In the EU it's nearly always free to transfer funds between the same currency, even between different countries. Banks still get people with the exchange rates or high fees to make transfers between currencies. TransferWise is a UK company, so that being their primary market, they took off from European workers in the UK wanting to send money home.

Just for comparisons sake, my use case is transferring money between Ireland (EUR) and the UK (GBP) and vice versa. Compared to my bank they have both better exchange rates, lower fees, and are quicker.

Heh, I said the same thing - their explanations and their site needs a bit of rework. As it is, they look shady :-)

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