[chx]

That pain is so huge I just can't forget it. I am a Canadian resident , a dual Canadian-Hungarian citizen, my brother has accounts in Austria and Hungary, my clients are in the USA chiefly but also all over the EU. So international wires are quite a thing.

Here in Canada, the traditional way I could send money was going to a bank branch , fill out a very long form to be able to do a SWIFT transfer and pay through the nose for it.

Then came VBCE online, an FX company which was OK-ish except you needed to ask them to add everyone wiring you beforehands. And they demanded to have an up to date passport on file.

Then came transferwise and the world turned into a happy place.

[dgudkov]

Many Canadian banks allow sending wire transfers online. For instance, with RBC you can send up to CAD 10K equivalent online for a CAD 15-20 fee. The UI is rather simple and they even have 2FA for transfers. RBC also has the more advanced RBC Express for online banking but I don't know much about it.

However, it's still worse than TransferWise. If a wire transfer is sent via RBC online, the actual amount received by the recipient is frequently $25-27 less which is supposedly due to some random routing fee (it's not possible to specify an intermediary bank in RBC online). As a result, the total cost of a wire transfer ends up being CAD 45-50. In TransferWise a wire transfer costs C$6 to send and the received amount is always the same as the sent. The UI is simple, and the support is helpful (never had problems with them).

[chx]

I just looked into the (relatively) new CIBC Global Money Transfer and it quotes me 4313 CAD for the other end to receive 1 000 000 HUF while TransferWise quotes 4298.23, a tiny 0.34% difference. However, TransferWise still has the huge, huge advantage of not sending a SWIFT transfer in a lot of countries -- this is the fee you mentioned, the recipient can be charged for receiving a SWIFT wire and you can't know ahead of the time -- when sending a proper wire from the branch you can volunteer as tribute erm accept those charges but the Global Money Transfer doesn't allow for this AFAIK. TransferWise uses local giro wherever they can. It also makes for a smoother experience, I just looked into it and quite a few forums are full of complaints -- SWIFT is old and finicky, no doubt at that. They also offer accounts connected to various giros as well , so you can have a HUF account, a SEPA enabled EU account and so forth.