Where I live ordinary bank transactions are free for ordinary consumers. I never pay a transaction fee or any annual fees. My bank used to charge an annual fee for a credit card but they have stopped charging now.
In fact in my whole life (I'm 65 so about 50 years of having bank accounts) I have never paid transaction fees for ordinary transactions (in the UK and Norway).
Where I live (USA) I tried to transfer money between my Wells Fargo account (that charges large fees for foreign ATM withdrawals) and a credit union account (that required heavy bureaucracy to open a business account, that's why my main accounts are in Wells Fargo, but the credit union withdrawals at the foreign ATMs are free). Wells Fargo offered Zelle for ACH but I got confused. Then I tried transferring through Robin Hood, where I had both accounts connected. RH presented a pop-up saying that if I want to transfer to a different account from the funding account, I have to email them some documents to comply with AML. Same with WeBull. PayPal charges fees. So I came to the conclusion that the only simple way was to write myself a check, and deposit it in the phone app to the other account. And that is only permitted because checks were created before the current Orwellian financial system. But I could not write a check, because I am abroad and do not have my checkbook.
The baroque steam punk vibe of signing a cheque to yourself, then depositing it to your own account by taking a photo of it with your handheld supercomputer... I must order some more cheques.
I wonder if you could just fudge it with Photoshop (Gimp)? Could you get in trouble for forging a cheque to yourself?
Yes, I think cryptocurrency has a potential use case of cheap international transfers. I too faced issues living abroad and transferring money back and forth from the US. There are both flat fees, making small transfers expensive, and %age costs, since banks don't give you spot price for cross currency transactions but instead skim the spread between spot and whatever exchange rate they choose.
If the above doesn't sound correct to a reader here, then either you've never lived outside of the US or, please tell me how to transfer money via banks and not get fleeced.
You can add non-WF banking destinations once you are logged in. They put up a disclaimer to expect registering the account as a recipient to take up to 3 business days.
Articles on the Internet from May of this year claim that there are no fees, even outside the WF ecosystem. However, they refuse to publish fees as they vary by account.
I do wish you luck, and I hope that it was just a matter of that link being hard to find (they definitely try to funnel you to wire instructions.)
Living in Germany here. Many traditional banks charge a monthly fee of 10 euros for maintaining the bank account.
Additionally, my parents wanted to send me some money from another country and the cheapest fee they could find was $10.5 (Wise) most other options were from $30 to $100. This was for transferring roughly $2000.
I can agree that for a simple in country tx I've not had to pay living in Germany, that is largely because of smaller banks challenging and whittling down fees.
I might not be remembering well, but I sort of remember receiving extra charges from my bank (Germany at the time) because I passed the number of transactions limit for the month. All transactions above the limit came at a charge.
Greece here, transactions cost 3 EUR. I think they're possibly free if you use the same bank, but the apps are cumbersome to use and the potential for fees is a deterrent, so nobody uses them for transactions of less than hundreds of EUR.
You mean that a transfer from your Greek bank account to another Greek bank account would cost you 3 EUR?
What happens if you get a bank account in another EU / SEPA country (e.g. via n26) and use it instead of a Greek bank account? Would there be any downside? Would a Greek company paying you a salary refuse to transfer the money there rather than a Greek bank account?
> You mean that a transfer from your Greek bank account to another Greek bank account would cost you 3 EUR?
Yep! Sad.
> What happens if you get a bank account in another EU / SEPA country (e.g. via n26) and use it instead of a Greek bank account? Would there be any downside? Would a Greek company paying you a salary refuse to transfer the money there rather than a Greek bank account?
No, transferring money to N26/Revolut is free (well, minus whatever fee the Greek bank will charge, which I think will be 3 EUR), but receiving money from N26 gets a 3 EUR fee again...
If the payee has a Greek bank account I suppose? But then it means that if both payer and payee have a n26 bank account and use it in Greece, they don't have to pay this fee anymore, right? So why would they use Greek banks?
I just don't see how this 3 EUR fee still exists given the current competition.
> If the payee has a Greek bank account I suppose? But then it means that if both payer and payee have a n26 bank account and use it in Greece, they don't have to pay this fee anymore, right? So why would they use Greek banks?
Indeed! I think Greek banks are just running on inertia now, they'll soon have to abolish these fees. One thing keeping people from switching was ATM usage (N26 only lets you withdraw for free up to some amount). This was especially since until a few years ago we were pretty much cash-only, but now that we're basically card-only, there's much less incentive to use an ATM.
Ok I see. Yes you're right, needing cash also helps incumbents, ATM operators can also charge whatever they want when you withdraw. Let's hope these fees disappear soon.
As far as I know, the only actual legal requirement is that SEPA transfers to other countries can't be more expensive than in-country bank transfers. It just happens that a lot of European countries don't generally have charges for bank transfers.
Yeah I knew it's not a legal requirement but still I thought it would lead to zero fees everywhere, because now when you need to do a lot of transfers, it makes sense to create an account in a foreign SEPA bank and then even the transfers to greek accounts would be free. Granted I don't know how much are bank transfers used in Greece (given the fee probably not to their full potential).
You do, but I've found that some countries don't really want you, and they'll slam you with onerous KYC requirements to drive you to leave. I currently need to fill out 30 pages of documentation and have "a Skype call" with my bank "for verification".
A lot of banks in many countries charges heavily for not maintaining the minimum balance. I think a lot of people can't afford that. Though the minimum balances are usually much lower than a normal BTC transaction.
Where I live (Canada), transactions are usually "free" up to a certain amount per month, but they often hit you with monthly fees. That is unless you can maintain a minimum balance in your bank account, in which case the fees become the interest they earn off that chunk of cash, I suppose.
I'm in Canada too and a couple years ago my regular bank sent me a notice saying they needed to increase my fees on my account plan by $1 making it a total of $16 per month IIRC. I already thought $15 was a total ripoff and trying to squeeze the extra $1 a month out of me got me annoyed enough to go looking for alternatives.
I got a free Tangerine account for free unlimited debit transactions. As a bonus I can withdraw cash with no fees at Scotiabank ATMs in addition to my normal bank. They also give you a VISA debit card that can be useful as a backup card for important online services (as long as you keep some money in it).
I also got a free (prepaid) Stack Mastercard. They give you a virtual credit card number you can use online plus a physical card. The main benefit though is 0% (or near 0%) foreign exchange fees. Most online services bill in USD and my normal bank charges around 2% extra in fees for the foreign currency conversion.
Then I reduced my normal bank account to the bare minimum $4 per month plan. So instead of squeezing an extra $12 per year from me, my bank gets $132 less per year now. However, that shows you why it works. Even if 9% of their customers do what I did they still make more money and I'd bet a ton that barely anyone reevaluates their banking because of a $1 per month increase in prices.
Canadian banks have a cosy non compete arrangement, and they are allowed to charge enormous Interac and CC transaction fees. Tangerine (Scotiabank's online only brand) and Simplii (CIBC) offer no fee accounts and unlimited free Interac. Canadians are very traditional and change resistant too, they like to go into the physical bank.
I think cheques still exist because there is no system in Interac for associating a destination account reference with an Interac transfer. In Australia cheques have been replaced by BPay (owned by the banks) and PostBillPay (owned by the Post Office) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPAY. In fact, I've never had to use a cheque as an adult except for e.g. buying a car/house. Interbank transfers and instant payments (Osko) have been free for ages, at least 20 years. https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2020/mar/two-ye...
It shows how arthritic banking is in the West that payment systems like AliPay haven't been allowed.
In fact in my whole life (I'm 65 so about 50 years of having bank accounts) I have never paid transaction fees for ordinary transactions (in the UK and Norway).