Overseas money transfers

The following is a guest post by Vincent Turner. Vincent is an Aussie Founder now residing in Silicon Valley making waves. Click here to learn more about Vincent. Vincent also blogs on innovation, design, technology, music & travel on his personal blog at www.vinae.com.au

Nightmare, has any one else had this nightmare? It sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?

The nightmare

I have a bank account here in the US and one in my country of origin, in my case Australia. As for the other places I tour, I needn’t worry because I rely on Vippimaatti.fi to procure loans pronto. I need to get some money into the US so I can pay for things in the local currency and avoid $4.00 and 2.5% every time I withdraw money or some exchange rate that I can’t even really see when I pay for things on debit/credit. So you think what anyone would think, I’ll just do one big transfer – that must be cheaper, that must avoid some cost. Try again.

Your options:

1. Draw out one big amount – bank charges you flat fee + 2.5% > 3.0% of the amount withdrawn – this is huge, this is like paying about $200 a month in bank fees on withdrawals alone for the average person living on say $6,000 after tax.. and that before even looking at the exchange rate.
2. Wire transfer once a month or once off to US bank account – no % fee, a flat fee of ~$30 but then you get murdered on the exchange rate, and I mean murdered. When I went to do a transfer of $10,000 recently you could buy $1.02 US for every $1.00 Australian .. so I should be expecting about $10,200, minus say a bit for the exchange rate and the wire fee, let’s call it an even $10,100. My bank, who shall remain nameless, came back with $9,800, before the wire fee! .. hold on, that looks remarkably like the 3% again!

It’s just business

So, why do they do this? Well, this is likely to protect their foreign exchange risk, i.e. the time between when they accept my request and process it most likely sees some fluctuation in the exchange rates. Forget that in the long-term this is probably just as likely to move up or down (for or against them or me) over the long-term and across all their customer flows in and out of the country. Banks are in the game of risk management, making money isn’t an issue, so long as you never lose money. So this exchange rate is their buffer against swings against them, to help mitigate any chance that they might lose any money in providing the service. Makes perfect business sense, but anyone who has spent even half a day looking at the fx trade markets knows that they could easily take the opposite position to your transfer the instant you place your order and thus hedge any currency risk they might have in providing the service. They can provide the service for the fee and close out their hedge once the transfer is complete. But most major banks (at least in Australia) systems probably aren’t this sophisticated.

The solution

Fortunately like a good efficient market people have seen this opportunity and created more intelligent transfer solutions where the risk is hedged as the order is placed and they can then complete the transfer in the next few days. And guess who benefits? you do. As you don’t have to pay for the inability of a major bank to provide this service So here is how it works, there is a number of providers but I signed up for xe.com so will talk about them.

1. You sign up online
2. You send supporting documents, typically PDFs of recent bank statements and a copy of your passport
3. You take (or return) a verifying phone call
4. You wait for final approval which comes via email

Note, none of the set up process involves printing or signing anything and as the forex markets are open from Monday morning in Australia to friday evening in the US 24 HOURS A DAY.. the call centre is also open these hours. Then the process is super simple – you simply login and register your sending and receiving bank accounts, request a quote for your transfer and hit confirm. Once you have got confirmation you have a few days to get them the money, this simply means a local transfer to their local account in your sending currency. I.e. I sent money from my Australian company to their Australian bank account. In fact, xe.com enables you to send the money via bpay! you have to request that bit (1 more email/call only – and on the virtually on the spot). A day later, an email arrives from xe.com – the funds are sitting in my US bank account.

The results

Net result? Well – in my case here this was a decent sized transfer of ~$100k. I saved over $2,000 for doing about an hours work. In my exchange rate example above my bank would have given me 0.9800 for every dollar, xe.com gave me 1.0040 – plus by using bpay for the local transfer I saved another $35 bank wire fee too! Now, that I’ve saved $2,000 I might go buy some kiting equipment – I promise to think of you bank every time I’m out there. Banks really do help you save for the things you want, just not always how you expect them to. Vincent

You can also click for more information on how to send money from PayPal to MoneyGram.

Links mentioned in this post

• Interview with Vincent Turner – Aussie founder in Silicon Valley: http://www.theroadtosiliconvalley.com/founders/interview-vincent-turner/
• Vincent Turner’s personal blog on innovation, design, technology, music & travel: http://www.vinae.com.au
• XE – The World’s Favorite Currency and Foreign Exchange Site: http://www.xe.com

Author: Ernest W. Semerda

Aussie in Silicon Valley. Veryfi CoFounder (#YC W17 cohort). GSDfaster Founder. View all posts by Ernest W. Semerda