[mtmail]

Even inner-country money transfers between two banks accounts can take 3 days for no apparent reason. My understanding is it's a mix between risk assessment and banks trying to keep the money to work with longer.

I use https://transferwise.com/ for British Pound <=> Euro. First couple of times takes about 1 day, later (whatever scoring they use) it goes down to hours. I've seen within an hour once.

[mkbkn]

Here in India, local interbank transfers take less than 5 seconds with zero fee. I still can't understand why the ACH system is the US takes 5 working days.

NEFT/RTGS is the system in India which is equivalent of the ACH in the US and it takes maximum 1 hour to transfer funds.

[gus_massa]

It's very strange. Here in Argentina you can transfer money from a bank to another in 5 minutes.

(Disclaimer: Other parts of the economy may not be so smooth :). )

[rahimnathwani]

Within-country transfers in the UK take minutes between most banks, except for large amounts which take 3 days, probably for risk/fraud reasons as you said.

[atlasunshrugged]

Yeah, I've used a few services but so far Transferwise is the best for me as well

[abulman]

I started working for a US-based company a couple of months ago. They pay me through a company that handles the contract.

The CEO pays my invoice on Monday and it gets to the contract company on Friday, if I'm lucky. Good for me though - the intermediate has their bank account with Transferwise - so when they pay me, it's in my account in barely minutes after I get the email they've paid me.

From from Transferwise USD account, it's usually seconds to get to my UK-based bank (one of the first group of 'Challenger banks'), and if I want to pay myself from there, it's also seconds to minutes at most from there, to my personal account.

TLDR: It's a week to go from one US company to another, but just a couple of minutes to hop across the atlantic, and between UK banks.