[toomuchtodo]

I use Wise often to move money between USD, EUR, and AUD, and it plugs right into my US credit union and brokerage accounts. International transfers settle in under a minute to Australian and European bank accounts in my experience.

[swat535]

Wise, like any other fintech is fun until it randomly closes your account and bans you. No one can ban you / freeze your assets with Crypto, that's a good selling point imo.

[toomuchtodo]

Only if you stay in cryptoland. As soon as you hit someplace with fiat rails, in a jurisdiction that requires adherence to regulatory requirements, your account is just as regulated.

Crypto has its own failure modes: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

(day job is in US financial services, have consulted on implementing aml/kyc/sanctions support for where crypto rails meet traditional finance infra)

[swat535]

Wise, like any other fintech is fun until it randomly closes your account and bans you. No one can ban you from Crypto, that's a good selling point imo.

[stevenjgarner]

When you send USD to an AUD account via Wise, no money actually travels between the US and Australia. Wise maintains massive pools of local currency in bank accounts all over the world. When you deposit USD, it goes into Wise’s US bank account. Wise's software detects the deposit and instantly triggers an internal payout from Wise's Australian bank account to the recipient's AUD account. Because Wise is using local banking networks on both ends (like FedNow or RTP in the US, SEPA Instant in Europe, and NPP/Osko in Australia), the transfer can settle in seconds. It’s essentially a matching engine, not an international wire.

Credit risk and identity dictate the speed of the funding step. If you stripped KYC out of the equation entirely, the bottleneck wouldn't just be speed — the legacy banking system would refuse to route the transaction at all.

It is important to distinguish that you are fundamentally involved in a credit network, pulling funds not pushing funds, that just gives the illusion of speed. For verified users, the sub-minute speed is a mix of local real-time banking rails and Wise extending short-term trust that the incoming funds won't bounce. For an unverified or high-risk user, Wise forces a holding period until the money physically clears, dragging the process back down to standard banking speeds.

[lxgr]

Neither does money "travel between the US and Australia" for a regular old SWIFT and correspondent banking based international bank transfer. When you send money internationally, your bank also "taps into pools of local currency" of their various correspondent bank(s). All of this could also happen instantly if they wanted it to; SWIFT is a real-time messaging network.

Wise's innovation was to provide their service "over the top", i.e. unbundle wire transfers from your bank's default offering. This has driven down both speed and pricing, in the same way that dial-through (e.g. calling card based) long distance carriers created massive competition and drove prices down in long distance calling, while under the hood it was all still just regular phone calls.

[inigyou]

When you send USD to an AUD account by any mechanism no money actually travels between the US and Australia. Usually USD is transferred from one US bank to another, and AUD is transferred from one Australian bank to another.