[martinald]

1% is enormous for this. I think the cost of a SWIFT transfer is maybe $3 to them, regardless of amount. If you're doing $100k/month of USD sales and payout once a week, it is a huge markup.

They are clearly losing money on their (really expensive) forex fees so are trying to recoup this by this payment.

There is no intrinsic reason I see why the fees are so high for this.

Edit to add: they actually use ACH for US bank USD payouts, so even less cost than SWIFT.

[pjan]

Again, in my understanding is Stripe not forcing you to—-as a EEA business——settle USD in a US domiciled account; you can settle the USD in an EEA domiciled account and not incur the cost. If you then want to repatriate the money to the US with your bank, you can do so yourself.

I also just looked it up how much this costs with my bank, and it's a minimum fee of $25 + agent/intermediary bank fees on top of it, for amounts less than $5,0000.

I assume that Stripe can negotiate better rates though, but for the sake of simple pricing, and cost-averaging over different amounts (which are, given that they serve the long tail, likely heavy weighted on smaller amounts), it is not inconceivable that this 1% is closer to cost than one might imagine.

[poxrud]

Banks do not charge a percentage of the transfer for wires or ACH. It is a set fee, usually in the range of $15-35 (stripe probably pays less than a dollar). That is a huge difference between charging 1% of the transaction.