[westoque]

Cryptocurrency.

Have you sent someone money internationally before? How about across different banks? Typical transfers process at around 3-5 days. With the help of cryptocurrencies like Ripple, Steller and the like. Transfers happen in seconds. This will grow because now, banks will utilize this technology to get rid of the old one (Swift anyone?) and will save banks lots of time and money.

[raverbashing]

> How about across different banks?

This is a solved problem in most of the world, except for US and Canada

(Inside SEPA they're almost like a domestic transaction as well though it takes a couple a days)

[kitx]

Second this. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, billions of people are going to come online over the next five to ten years. If (according to the World Economic Forum: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/2-billion-people-worl...) there are really 2 billion people unbanked, we stand to see cryptocurrencies and cell phones lead to an explosion of people connected to the financial system.

[alasdair_]

I send through transferwise. It's very fast and the exchange rates are very close to the forex rates - it was a lot easier and cheaper than using bitcoin.

The trick is to match flows of cash so they money isnt actually transferred internationally - my cash from the uk was sent to someone else in the uk and my US bank account was credited from some other US-based bank.

[tompazourek]

It's quite smart what Transferwise are doing.

When a transfer is made from country A to country B, the money gets first transferred from the sender in country A to local Transferwise account in country A (avoiding fees and conversions). Then they send the money from local Transferwise account in country B to the recipient in country B (again avoiding fees and conversions).

The magic is how they ensure that the local Transferwise accounts in each country have enough money to do the transfers. They own a bank account in every country they operate in, and the money flows between those bank accounts. They need to move money between their local accounts in each country while minimizing the amounts transferred, but also minimizing the fees and conversions. When they actually move the money is up to them, they just need to ensure they have enough on each account. I guess there's a lot of variables to optimize for, and it would be interesting to know more details of the process.

I've also seen a company called Azimo trying to do a similar thing, but I haven't tried them yet.

[dnautics]

Crypto currency is very useful for transfers to difficult regimes and across many borders but I fail to see the case for a value add for distributed trust between banks (since there's generally an existing trust model anyway). There are other distributed technologies on the horizon where a cryptographic ledger is going to be super useful, but I don't see it for banks.