[vianneychevalie]

I can't imagine it has a lot of manual work involved, exactly for the same reason you do: I haven't paid a cent for international or domestic wires in years. I'm in the EU, but I've done wires to Swiss or Lebanese accounts as well and no fees anywhere.

Maybe it's local regulations defining whether a human should be part of the loop?

[elric]

(International) payments frequently involve dozens of systems. Some steps are manual, even if you're not being charged for it. This is especially true if somewhere along the way the transaction is flagged as being suspicious (which can happen for any number of reasons, including innocuous ones).

[atdrummond]

Sadly that's very much a European thing. I never pay much or anything from my European accounts but even our very large, corporate client account stateside we pay I want to say $15 for domestic, $40 for international?

[spiralx]

Never underestimate how antiquated US infrastructure can seem lol. But to be fair European banks were always motivated to develop robust protocols for international bank operations due to the number of countries in Europe, even more so with the advent of the EU. US banks could talk to US banks, and I'd guess Canadian and Mexican banks would have just had to put the effort in to being compatible with the US system.