Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xinayder 441 days ago
Yet we, a developing "third-world" country, have a better functioning payment system than the US, where it takes days, or even weeks, for a wire transfer to land, and you pay a huge amount of fees for that.

Cases in point:

- To transfer money to a broker, I need to pay around $5 in transfer fees via ACH or wire

- I want to change the custody of my stock market assets from one broker to another, and it will cost me $75 to move $60 worth of shares. Meanwhile, in Brazil, this process is free in every broker.

4 comments

> To transfer money to a broker, I need to pay around $5 in transfer fees via ACH or wire

I suggest switching to a better bank. This is unreasonable, my ACH transfers are free.

> I want to change the custody of my stock market assets from one broker to another

$75 sounds like a bargain, given the complexity it involves: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/how-acats-transfers-w...

But anyway, I recently transferred some assets between brokers. It was free because the sending broker's fee to transfer assets out only applies when transferring the whole account. The receiving broker is happy to receive the assets, and shouldn't be charging any fee.

I don’t understand this binary. The UK was able to create a near-instant bank transfer system without monopolizing in the same way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments

It costing more for instant transfers is just a regressive tax on the working poor.

I can't find the details of the UK system, but it's not "monopolized" in Brazil. Perhaps due to the fact that the infra is provided by the Central Bank, and banks choosing to implement Pix support must implement the Pix APIs in their system.
Everybody adopting an open protocol is "monopolizing" now...
It's cool that "we" have a payment system, however, I would never be comfortable using something whose people in charge are those that keep us (not me particularly because I've gladly left the country almost a decade ago) in this misery.

I use Crypto for everything you've mentioned. It's instant, almost free, and alexandre(he deserves a lowercased a) can't take my money if he feels that writing his name in lowercase makes me unworthy of my civil rights.

Do you have a guide on how to use it or what services accept crypto for this purpose?
Isn’t this what FedNow is for in the US? Genuinely curious since I feel like transfers still take days. My assumption is that it’s not fully adopted yet, but my understanding is that the US is in the process of adopting this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow