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by noduerme 257 days ago
Wow... depositing more than $1k would trigger AML. That's incredible. In the US it's not uncommon for contractors to pull $10k cash at the end of a week to pay their workers. Some of that may be due to tax evasion or, just as likely, the workers being in the country illegally. I suppose this is another major reason cash is still "tolerated" in the US, because the casual labor market depends so heavily on undocumented workers. No one besides a few ultra-nationalists would really want to enforce such a thing, as it would drive up construction costs. And the nationalists are paranoid and stock up on cash and gold themselves.

Honestly, that system sounds a bit Orwellian. But also, does that mean that you have to pay a bank transfer fee every time you buy anything?
3 comments
renhanxue 257 days ago
Generally there are never any transfer fees for private individuals doing domestic transfers. The banks just provide that service for free and eat the cost. Businesses wanting to accept payments via the Swish app usually pay a flat rate of the equivalent of approximately USD $0.15 per transaction (exact terms depends on which bank you use).

It's also worth noting that credit card interchange fees are price controlled in Europe; there's a EU directive that caps the interchange fees at 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards. Because of this, cashback on credit cards is pitiful in the EU; you can get 0.5% cashback but not much more than that.

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hashmush 257 days ago
> But also, does that mean that you have to pay a bank transfer fee every time you buy anything?

No, not at all. The Swish rails are free to users. But I've never had to pay any transfer fees for domestic transfers anyway. They are just much slower than using Swish (instant transfers) and much more clunky (bank account number etc. vs. phone number/QR-code).

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SiempreViernes 257 days ago
Not every time, very certainly less than on 5% of all normal transactions, and the actual fraction will depend more on whether you count currency conversion fees and how frequently the person you are asking is buying from outside the EES.
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