Thread by @kaarmann

Spent the last 8 years researching, why sending an email is nearly instant, but moving $$$ is slow like a bad movie. Especially internationally.

👇 Thread below on what we learnt and built.

1/ Most of the world's money lives on accounts in 26,000 banks. "Speed" means how fast it can move from my account to your account. To another bank, often in another country.

Domestic money is pretty fast, we're here to fix the international. 🌍

2/ Banks still tell you that your international wire will arrive in "3-5 business days". In fact they have very little control over it.

3/ We've gotten precise and militant - when we say it will be usable on the recipient's bank account "8am, tomorrow", it will be there. 🤓
transferwise.com/gb/blog/transf…

4/ Email is instant, some payments are too. In September we delivered 260,000+ transfers from the sender to the recipient's bank account under 20 seconds. All in. ⚡

In Q3 we had 50% more instant payments than in Q2.
But when you zoom out the story is not so pretty.

5/ Why does it take so long to move the money across borders? It is a 3-step process:

1. Receive money from your bank account in country A;
2. Process, check, convert;
3. Deliver to recipient's bank account in country B.

6/ Getting money from your bank account to ours - that's the slow part. Paying from a card is fast, but expensive. Bank transfers are fast in some countries - UK, SG, HK, but slow in the Eurozone, Australia. ACH in the US and direct debit in Canada take a day at best.

7/ Trick: Plan ahead! Park your money on the TransferWise borderless account balance before you need to make the transfer, so you skip the slowest step when the day comes. ✌️

You can still keep using that money using your new debit card.

transferwise.com/gb/borderless/

8/ Once we have your money, getting it to your recipient is getting really fast in some places.

Congrats Singapore and the UK. 🇸🇬 🇬🇧

9/ Want to know more:

[Blog] How long should it take? transferwise.com/gb/blog/transf…
[Blog] How does speed work on TransferWise? transferwise.com/gb/blog/how-wo…

What should we share next about speed?
Which route/country would you like to get faster?

(c) Jonty Smithers.