> The deal breaker for me is the fee for bank transfers, something I've never paid for before.
You are too young :-).
This also might change. German banks start again to take monthly fees for accounts, so why not for single transactions.
This said, I have to deal with accounts in NZ and Europe. Fees as well as speed for transfers between them is a whole other world when using TW compared to classic banking. These kind of costs have exist forever, SEPA conditions are the exception, not the rule, internationally.
TransferWises multi-currency account is a nice part of the package. I learned here today, this can be done even cheaper by using a Forex broker like IB, but I don't need this on a daily basis.
I guess this is something that might have changed - but I definitely recall being charged for making transfers from Poland to the UK, and same very recently for Switzerland <-> UK transfers. In both, rather insidiously, the outgoing bank cannot tell me what the final fee will be, and I only find out what was charged when less money appears in the recipient account than what I sent.
EU / Switzerland, so I've never experienced this. I thought it was due to SEPA preventing such fees, but that doesn't seem to be the case if I read this section correctly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area#Char.... I guess healthy competition just killed these fees.
I apparently have to pay €0.28 per transfer in EUR with Transferwise. There are competitors (both in CHF and in EUR) that do this for free. I do something like 8 transfers per month, so that's 8*0.28*12 = €26.88 per year, for no added value. Not convincing.
