Good morning everyone! My co-founder and I recently moved to the UK after working at Robinhood for over 5 years. We were stunned at the fees it was costing us to move money across borders with existing fintech solutions, so we decided to start Atlantic Money - the world’s first fixed fee (with no FX markup) money transfer product. For £3 you can transfer up to £1M. Let us know if you have any questions!
"We always convert your money at the live rate: the rate on Google."
But this is a lie - I checked. At time of writing, you claim 100k GBP is equal to 131390 USD, while Google claims it's 131620 USD, a difference of nearly $300!
Even saying "the live rate" is a lie. There is no one "live rate" (and therefore no "the" live rate). The price depends on your liquidity providers. IBKR shows "the live rate". Revolut shows "the live rate". Wise shows "the live rate". Google shows "the live rate". Despite all of them showing "the live rate", all of them have subtly different prices because all of them are part of slightly different markets.
Claiming otherwise is a lie. It'd be more honest to say "we pass on the prices from our partners without markup" or something like that.
You should also make clear which rate you're talking about. The market has a spread, how do you handle it? Do you give clients the mid-price or do you just pass through the bid/ask?
The "Learn more" next to the rate info doesn't actually tell me anything more as well. I'd expect it to show me a page with more detailed information about your liquidity and how you determine the price. The box I already saw at the top of the page isn't "more".
Hi and thanks for your interest! We use the interbank rate from global exchanges. Both being from fintech, we are aware that it is easy to mislead (and to be misled) in money transfer and its a reason why we built this product in the first place.
We have worked hard not to have any middle-men that mark up rates in our liquidity provision, and are quite certain that our rates are fair and extremely competitive.
I do think that the takeaway from your comment is that we could build out a part of our page that allows a customer to dig deeper to validate this themselves. We understand the sentiment as there is still a lot of mistrust given the opaque nature of the market, and we need customers to believe that we are truly 3 GBP to succeed.
Our core thesis in building this product is that we will win with a fixed fee on larger transactions, given the variable fee nature of the current industry incumbents(either transparently disclosed, or embedded in the FX spread).
Overall your product looks good but aside from a more detailed page, I really think the wording here needs to be changed.
It's verifiably false that you use the same rate shown on Google so you should remove that entirely. If I can't trust you to honestly describe your service, how can I trust you with large sums of money? I wouldn't be surprised if that caused you legal issues too.
As for "the live rate", I think it just needs to be reworded such that there's no mention of a single rate. Something like "we give you the same price the big banks use".
Overall I think your service looks good but based on how that section is worded right now, I'd actively discourage friends and family from using it, if asked. If you updated it to be more honest, I think you'd have a service I'm happy to recommend.
Fees for international money transfer across currencies are always opaque and borderline deceptive.
If this is truly fixed cost, it would definitely be the first, but it's right to be skeptical.
The only reliable way to discover the actual cost is to do a round trip.
Convert a million X to Y, then convert whatever Y you get back to X, and the difference between that and the original million, divided by two, is the real cost.
Naturally this website won't show you that, because you can only convert from pounds but not back to pounds.
"I do think that the takeaway from your comment is that we could build out a part of our page that allows a customer to dig deeper to validate this themselves."
Or you could remove or change this statement, if it is indeed misleading.
(But I have not checked this personally).
"We always convert your money at the live rate: the rate on Google."
Trust is important and the right wording does matter a lot.
So if people read this on your website and then check for themself on google and see it is wrong - well sure, expect people to not trust your service.
My first question (with only reading your text here) would be: why and how are you cheaper than the competition?
Right now my takeaway would be: because there are possible dark patterns and hidden fees like suboptimal conversion rates included.
I absolutely agree with you, unless their whole strategy hinges on the fact their prices match google (which their prices literally don't), just change the damned copy on the site.
I think this is actually a good shakeup for Money Transfer, they don't even need to rely on putting Googles name in their marketing to sell the product as so many new startups seem to want to do as an appeal to authority or try to present more stability in their marketing.
We appreciate the critical feedback - keep it coming. It's good to talk about these topics in the open. We'll be sure to work on this to make sure there is clarity around this part of our offering.
> We use the interbank rate from global exchanges.
What, exactly, is that?
Do you mean the rate your provider charges you for the transaction in question? (Do you do your internal FX transactions as one upstream transaction per client transaction or do you group them? That will affect the rate.).
Do your rates have a spread? (Your website makes it sound like you only convert one way, so it’s easy to pretend spreads don’t exist.)
Do you actually believe that the best pricing comes from an interbank rate on a global exchange? That’s an interesting theory.
For what it’s worth, for major currency transactions under normal circumstances, the actual market spreads are tiny and not worth worrying about. Certainly for any transaction of reasonable size for a service like this, they are likely to be in the noise. But FX is not free, and if you let people move $100k at a time, it matters.
Ok. So what you really mean is that you (or your liquidity partners) participate in multi dealer platforms so you have a large number of trade desks to work with. But even adding the big players together like Integral, CME & CBOE gets you to what less than 1% of the daily fx liquidity?
That’s fairly far off of the expectation you set by saying you offer “the interbank rate”. Which is a pure marketing fiction.
For context the FX desk at JP Morgan by itself provides about the same volume as any of those aggregate platforms.
[later] fwiw I don’t think how you get to your rates particularly matters so long as they are competitive and your service seems like a valuable addition to the mix of consumer options. I get hung up on this because the fx market is notoriously opaque because the major players want it to be and I think leading people to believe there is some sort of benchmark rate adds to that morass.
Hi dotancohen, we currently support sending GBP from the UK into the following currencies: EUR, USD, AUD, CAD, CZK, DKK, NOK, PLN, SEK. Looking forward to supporting EUR outbound in the near future, and then we'll go from there.
Hi Pkavanagh and thanks for replying to comments in this thread - 3 GDP fee on up to 1M transfer - are you able to disclose more of the business model here?
Im assuming you're talking about "the live rate", since the Google claim is verified to be false.
I'd agree with you if it were unavoidable but I don't think that's the case here. There's no need to make a statement that there's a single rate.
For example: "we give you the best price we can find on the international market, without markup". It still states the goal without raising the falsehood of a single price.
I'm not talking about the law of one price here, just the fact that the global currency exchange trade is decentralised. There's no one exchange that aggregates everything and can give you a single authoritative price.
In other assets, like equities, there often is a single central exchange. If you want to buy CURI for example, it's only listed on NASDAQ, so the price on NASDAQ is The One True Price as far as a normal person is concerned.
It’s not even true (anymore) that CURI is only listed on NASDAQ. It’s traded at lots of venues but there is at least a benchmark bid/ask based on US securities law.
In fx it’s the law of whoever has the most information because there is no benchmark market at all. It’s why fx pricing is so hard to do right.
Based on our experience speaking with a number of institutional players, including traders and banks, what we found is that the institutional rates are unbelievably efficient, but the situation immediately gets worse as you move away from these centers of liquidity.
If you talk to 3rd party institutional FX providers, they'll immediately mark up rates because its how they make all of their money.
OK, sure, but you can look at bid/offer spreads across different market makers to get some sense of how liquid and efficient the overall market is. For GBP/USD, spreads are measured in small numbers of tenths of a penny.
Forex is essentially the largest, most liquid market there is.
FX Prices effectively converge to a single price, because FX is an efficient market with little to no arbitrage that would be visible (thanks to the proprietary trading firms that specialize in it).
Not sure who told you that you could get away without having a cookie opt-out option, but even in post-Brexit UK you still need this. Having the alternative to 'accept all our tracking' be a 'learn more' that just goes to a document is bullshit.
If they got rid of the third party services (in this case, Google ReCaptcha and Google's CDN) they would be fine with their current implementation. First party cookies that are necessary do not require any form of opt-out, and a notice about them is compliant. They are not using any third party tracking for marketing (as far as I can tell). Most businesses are using cookie opt-in regardless of the specifics of their usage because businesses are risk averse, but there is nuance, and it is not an absolute requirement.
No one is perfect my friend. A user pointed out a potential issue in the UK with cookies and a person from the company responded saying they’ve made a team aware.
What else would you expect? The amount of flack people get they post a Show HN is getting out of control.
It's not "a potential issue in the UK" it's an issue across the EU - they were pointing out it's also an issue in the UK even though we've left the EU.
GDPR is not a new or surprising thing, and the absolute basics should be known by any developers working with private data. It's frankly shocking if they didn't know while starting a company in the UK, and I don't know if it's worse if they didn't know or didn't care.
This is a business that it will be vital that they are following regulations, and if they're skipping this, why should I trust they're following the rest?
Customers are opted out by default - opting in is optional. Although I agree it would be nice to have a mechanism to hide the cookie banner. Something we should look into adding.
on the other hand, an internet company playing fast and loose with EU cookie opt-outs seems so par for the course that I would take it as more suspicious if they were not?
> an internet company playing fast and loose with EU cookie opt-outs seems so par for the course
And I, like many, avoid business with any such companies who display a contempt for personal data.
If my ISP did such a thing, they would be very quickly reported to the Information Commissioner. Also, I think you will find the UK is beholden to the GDPR. It isn't simply an "EU cookie" law as you seam to imply.
The company clearly had poor legal advice and/or didn't think things through, yet they want my money and personal data? At the very least, you should consider this error analogous to the Van Halen 'no Brown M&Ms rider', in that it flags sloppy practice elsewhere [1].
They were approved by the UK Financial Conduct Authority. That surely takes some serious legal effort and attention to detail.
Also, their About Us page suggests that they are staffed by people from relevant financial services companies. Plus they are backed by some VCs who would not take risks by handing money to a company if they thought the legal side wasn't up to par.
We don't know why there wasn't an annoying cookie popup. So assuming that the company in general plays "fast and loose" doesn't seem warranted.
Sorry, a bit cranky today. It very much looks like you are just hiding the markup on your fx rate, and not even letting people figure it out by showing your bid/ask.
We sure aren't! We're tired of seeing traditional players hiding fees in the rate - and we're not about it. Our rate is the interbank rate directly from the world's biggest exchanges. Customers really are paying just £3 to move any amount all the way up to £1 million.
My hat is off if you can pull it off, but I have to say it sounds economically dangerous. To you, that is. (And still, as long as you do not show your bid/ask, it looks like you are hiding something in your price.)
There isn't much systemic risk if they're locking in their conversion rates with providers at the time of customer transaction. The risk is in the fee structure: will they attract enough customers to actually keep the lights on with that fee? I certainly hope so, because this is so great if it ends up working as advertised.
Right this second it reports that transferring 10,000 GBP would give you 12,000.71 EUR vs the 11,949.73 EUR you would get by using Wise, which is probably the best known competitor. Seems pretty good to me!
Hi - other founder Patrick here, thank you for your interest and analysis.
It's worth noting that the rates you see on the pages often have a bit of delay - I believe both Wise and Atlantic would end up having very similar underlying FX rates, since there's no markup on either.
However, with Wise, the more you send, the more you pay in fees - so there's a break-even where it starts to become more economical to use Atlantic.
This was a lesson I learned the hard way with my first startup: Be cautious about how much you undercut your largest competitors unless/until you have deep pockets and/or unless you're very sure that their economics makes it impossible for them to undercut you on price, because the more you undercut them the more you're inviting a price war you can't win without deep pockets the moment they perceive you as a threat.
When trying to enter an established market to compete on price as your primary differentiator it's often better to keep your margins higher to start with than offer the steepest cut you think you can afford, and then drop your prices slowly as you build up volume and a war chest.
Great to see more and more competition in the money transfer space, congrats on the launch.
Here's a little comparison by amount received (incl. all fees) with the cheapest provider found on Monito.com (comparison site I co-founded) vs Atlantic Money:
Sending £1000 to:
- EUR: €1,199 vs €1,196.83
- CAD: CA$1,693 vs CA$1,686
- PLN: zł5,737 vs zł5,826.58
- USD: $1,311 vs $1,310
As we can see, the competition on pricing for popular routes will be quite intense! Do you plan on mainly focusing on customers who need to send larger amounts? Or are you planning on developing other differentiators (New routes, customers service, user experience etc...))
Looks great. Another example why we don't need blockchain to do fast and cheap international transfers.
And before you tell me that this doesn't cover all currencies and countries: Ok, but it just shows that this is not technology problem (i.e. can be done with existing and better tech than blockchain), but a business model / regulation problem.
> Another example why we don't need blockchain to do fast and cheap international transfers.
This transfer may take days, as they say on their website. Even slow bitcoin takes only 10ish minutes, or 60 minutes if you want to be safe. More modern blockchains can take seconds.
That doesn't mean blockchain is always the answer, but you're comparing apples and oranges.
Please, don't use crypto. At least not as long as it has all the negative externalities it has today, like fucking up the environment and enabling scammers and fraudsters.
Seems like adding cryptocurrency support wouldn't disable the functionality of sending other currencies, it would be an additional feature so you're not really forced to use it.
What if they just support cryptocurrencies that are "environment friendly", would that change your mind about that point?
Money will always enable scammers and fraudsters, there is simply no way around that. Every single network that handles money (including Visa), enables scammers and fraudsters, even more so than cryptocurrencies.
Based on your last point, I feel like the environment point you raise is just trying to add more juice to your argument while in reality, your argument is mostly based on not liking cryptocurrencies emotionally.
> Based on your last point, I feel like the environment point you raise is just trying to add more juice to your argument while in reality, your argument is mostly based on not liking cryptocurrencies emotionally.
I don't like cryptos because of their negative externalities, not the other way round :-)
As long as the majority of crypto transactions have these negative externalities, any action that promotes crypto is bad. As software engineers, you should already know that blockchain tech is inferior to existing technologies, and that it won't be relevant in the long-term. So why help promote cryptos now?
I agree with other commenters: stay away from cryptocurrencies. Aside from the negative environmental externalities, there are, in practice, very few legitimate uses for them. Your supporting them might bring undue shady business that could jeopardize the service. Also, cryptocurrencies are just really stupid.
Hopefully all the questions end up on an faq on their site (with links and credits).
As a frequent money-mover, i enjoy disruptors in the market...but if basic questions have still to be asked, and answered, then its only thanks to naysayers that there is any chance of transparency and clarity.
"If what you say remains true....."? Escape clause in the tos and eula, much?
Don't keep up the bad work nitpickers. There's a big difference between asking questions in good faith because you want to know the answer, and naysaying because you want to feel like you know better.
Great question! We hold rates for customers for up to an hour and customers can only hold one rate at a time, so the risk is minimal - but we do price that risk into our business model.
So I can shuffle $1M between £ and $, costing £6/hour, and earning guaranteed money whenever the rate moves by more than 0.00003 in a half hour period?
I don't have $1M so maybe I'm not an expert, but it looks like there are plenty of better (and safer) ways to earn money by investing your $1M on traditional investment.
I wouldn't like to be banned and lose access to my $1M (even temporary) but you do what you want with your millions.
Imagine if you buy apartments and rent them for thousands $. Haha, sounds open to abuse!
That's fairly standard, even among banks. I have a bank account and account with their FX desk, when I need to do conversions. They give me a spot rate real close to what you'd "seen on google", but I have to close the offer within the hour or it's not valid anymore. It's a big european bank.
> World’s first £3 flat fee (0% FX markup) money transfer service
You know, I have a Capital One bank account that I opened because it advertised no foreign transaction fees.
And yet whenever I make a foreign transaction on the debit card, I pay 1% more in dollars than I get in FX. That 1% number is eerily consistent.
I still use it. 1% is a reasonable fee. But I'd be a lot happier if they admitted they were charging it. It takes a lot of effort to tell the difference between "ZERO foreign transaction fee! (but your prices are 1% higher than they should be)" and "ZERO foreign transaction fee! (but your prices are 8% higher than they should be)".
This is core to the FX (foreign exchange) business model. You have two places you can get paid: fixed transaction fees and the “spread” on the underlying exchange rate.
Most companies offering FX services will charge both.
Most consumers are not sophisticated enough to do the calculation to blend the fee into the quoted rate to get the true rate. Institutions will be.
The risk of a “no fee” pricing scheme (or why there are fees in the first place) is to avoid getting wiped out by lots of small transactions, where your per-transaction overhead dominates. OP clearly has automated enough that they are not worried about this. And given the amount of manual work still involved in FX (do not get me started on some of the process hell I saw running international payments globally over an “api” payment provider), there is also a lot of room to reduce total cost through automation.
But in summary, everyone is making money from the FX rate spread, and you are always getting charged more than the provider is paying for the currency. The question is just whether fee or spread dominates.
Global money transfer has to be the place where some companies offer the most opaque fees. It's absurd - and we want to compete hard with those businesses by offering cheaper, simpler, and more transparent services to customers.
Our customers always get the live exchange rate, direct from the world's biggest currency exchanges. We add zero markup to the rate. So customers really pay just £3.
It looks like this is for people transferring money from the UK to other countries. But you are not using a .co.uk domain and it doesn't say so on the first page of your website. I have to guess that you only to transfers from the UK from the £3 price tag.
Would be nice to see currency pairs not currently supported by other services (like wise, etc.)
If I was going to transfer 4 or 5 digits of $$, even if I save a couple bucks of fees, I would choose the more trustworthy option (e.g. Wise has thousands of reviews across websites, social media, etc.), even if it means an extra bit in fees. But if you can support currency pairs that aren't supported by the existing players in the space, would give potential customers a very good reason to try out a new app like this.
Without having checked it out properly outside of the landing page, here's a brain-dump of things that competitors get wrong and you can improve by a lot:
1. Support self-custodied 2FA: TOTP/U2F. Do not require phone-number/SMS "for your own protection".
2. Be honest with your customers and users. Don't succumb to dark UX for the sake of control, engagement and growth. Allow setting separate notification settings for marketing/"news"/functionality/security, and don't silently add and enable new marketing channels.
3. Full functionality even on devices without Google Play Services/SafetyNet/Apple. Preferably I should be able to do everything through the web UI, without requiring involvement of a native iOS/Android app.
4. Adhere to a strict interpretation of the GDPR, regardless of where users/customers are geographically residing or located; No sharing PII with third-parties (above what you are legally required to do). No loading assets from third-party servers.
5. Allow access over anonymized channels (mainly tor/paid VPNs)
A pinky promise on the above would make me sign up and recommend you to my network in a heartbeat. Would also be very curious to hear if you agree with me that the above are completely reasonable requirements/requests or if any of them stand out as something you may not be able or willing to do.
It looks like you're aiming for a USP of competitive fees but I think I'm not alone in being very happy to not get the absolutely cheapest rate compared to Wise/Revolut/Paypal/N26/PS/MG et al if you stay aligned with the above.
/ Someone who's fed up with the existing landscape
This is a good list. Point 3 alone would net a lot of customers alone, be it banking or other.
A lot of people, in the tens to hundreds of millions, not through choice of not wanting to use Google Play Services (or knowing what it is) cannot access Play Services on their locally purchased / locked device.
These people are largely outside North America / Western Europe, potential customers for whom a service such as that of OP may be very attractive.
1. We follow a "trusted devices" model, where you 2FA using your phone number for the first login on a device. Future logins on that device aren't 2FA'd. I agree that using a code gen is a good improvement we can make over time.
2. Marketing opt-out is prominent in account settings. Any email that is very strictly not transactional is considered marketing by our team, and can be opted out of. Developing simple, focused products is core to our identity and we won't add irrelevant features that might upsell to 10% of customers. I assure you there won't be a "refer your friends" badge blinking on the home page of the app.
3. Unfortunately we're not on web yet - but we'd love to get there after iOS and Android. We hear from most people that iOS or Android are their preferred platforms, so we have to start there.
4. We share data as required to support financial transactions and other core parts of the business, but we do adhere to the GDPR.
5. I think VPNs are allowed - at least I don't think we block them in particular.
We're excited to bring a fresh perspective and better pricing to a landscape with a lot of providers doing approximately the same thing. We'd love for you to try out the app once it's available - if you decide to register on our site we'll be sure to keep you updated.
Thanks for following up! (BTW, double line breaks if you want to make a HN comment more readable, or double leading spaces for blockquotes)
> We follow a "trusted devices" model, where you 2FA using your phone number for the first login on a device
It sounds like associating and verifying a phone number is required to sign up and use the service - is this something you're open to changing?
> I assure you there won't be a "refer your friends" badge blinking on the home page of the app
That's great! And TBH I wouldn't mind terribly as long as it can be permanently disabled after a first view.
> We hear from most people that iOS or Android are their preferred platforms, so we have to start there
Understandable. At the very least it would be a huge boon if we can expect to run the Android app without hickups on a fully degoogled Android device (e.g. GrapheneOS).
> Are you looking for something like Authy or Google Authenticator here?
Precisely! Both are implementations of TOTP[0] - it's a simple protocol which doesn't rely on any particular implementation.
The other common one with that same characteristic would be Fido U2F[1] (for hardware keys such as Yubikey and Google Titan). If/when you do implement it, make sure to support adding more than one token to facilitate users sorting out their own backups.
Both are open standards that are well-supported with both proprietary and open implementations across platforms.
If you have to initially only pick one of the two I'd go with TOTP.
In addition, for regular users, consider providing free or subsidised hardware keys (yubikey, Google titan).
While many will raise concern with the UX of having to carry around hardware, in the fintech world I think it's a good tradeoff and raises the bar for the industry (I always shudder when I see "we use industry-standard protection"). :)
I did a quick comparison with Wise (previously TransferWise)
This is cheaper for GBP->EUR transactions over £800, but a lot slower (arrives "Friday" instead of within 5 hours. In practice I've found that Wise transfers are normally nearly instant). It's quite substantially cheaper for large transfers (e.g. about £2000 for transfering near their max) and possibly faster. I can't tell if you can lock in a rate like with Wise.
We also support instant transfers into EUR - but transferring money across borders instantly requires capital buffer to be held somewhere, which is a true variable cost that the business can't cover with a fixed fee. So there's an additional 0.05% fee for instant transfers. With Wise you're effectively forced to pay that fee. With us, you just pay if you need the urgency, which people don't always need.
Revolut has likely the most complex fee structure I've ever seen. I think their first 1k per month is free, but after that you get charged. They also charge additional fixed fees just for the international payment.
Revolut is a super app model and there are many reasons one might have the paid plan beyond the 1k forex limit like forex fees free debit card, free stock trading, crypto trading etc
> They also charge additional fixed fees just for the international payment.
This seems new. I have done international payments before and wasn't charged.
Those fees have been there for a while, but for the most part, they only apply to "weird" transfers - particularly uncommon currencies, or landing "foreign" currency in a new country. If you pay dollars to the US, euros to Europe and so on, you typically don't hit them.
I have interests in three currencies, and revolut has been a godsend compared to Wise and direct bank transfer fees.
Not if you have a paid account. I use it all the time to do international transfers between EUR (Germany) and CHF (Switzerland). And they also give you the interbank exchange rate (except on weekends when the markets are closed, they add a markup to cover their asses).
Congratulations to the founding team on launching this but I have the same question.
Revolut transfers are instant and have no forex fees if you are on their paid plans which include other features as well. If you transfer up to 1000 GBP, it is free without a paid plan. How do you plan on competing with them?
On their standard plan, with the first £1k you're not paying for currency conversion, but you're paying a fee for the "international payment". I think that's a 0.3% fee capped at £5, but for a £1k transfer, that's a £3 fee right there. You can see this in their fee structure.
If you're a die-hard Revolut user that subscribes for other reasons or do all your global banking with them, it's possible you'll end up with better overall economics with them. That segment of customers is fairly narrow and we're excited to offer everyone else a world-leading service.
From the rates I'm seeing, it depends how much you're sending. Revolut has "no fee", but their rate is slightly lower. So for large transfers, the £3 fixed fee works out cheaper.
A clever solution, nice work. That said, I'm very curious about your long term view on this model as a differentiator. My understanding is that Wise fees are essentially a pass through to customers, so your differentiator is that you've chosen "slow and cheap" over "fast but costly"... but if you validate that there's a market for "slow and cheap" alongside "fast but costly" won't Wise (and others) introduce the "slow and cheap" option because you'll threaten their place in the market as you also offer "fast but costly"? The profitability of Wise is not predicated on "fast but costly".
I am not a fan of "...but what if you're copied..." argument against the viability of a business, because often the easy-to-copy outward expression of a business is only possible because of difficult-to-copy underlying business strategies. However, in this case, Wise do share the same underlying business strategies as Atlantic (that is, transact efficiently and take a small fee) so the only differentiator (as far as I know) is the product decision to offer cheap + slow (and therefore be able to transact even more efficiently).
There's lots of room for different players in the space and so "there's room for us alongside Wise" is a very valid answer, I am guessing there's a different answer though, so I'd love to understand what you imagine the future to be: maybe you have some insight into why, actually, there are operational complexities that mean Wise aren't going to ever offer this service in the same way.
If they force Wise to offer slow and cheap then we all win. I just checked the cost on a GBPUSD transfer, and it's 350 pounds + some kind of exchange rate cut. The difference between Wise and Atlantic is an entire ocean and I'm not convinced Wise will undermine their gravy train by trying to compete with a plucky upstart. Only if said plucky upstart becomes a billion dollar company; any by then they don't need to worry about being competed out of existence.
We're trying to put that gravy back into your pocket! These are the exact problems that motivated us to build this product - because we ourselves were forced to pay these fees when we moved to the UK from the US.
My understanding is that the fees Wise charges are dictated by the costs of their fast method, rather than, say, a requirement of their business model.
I’m very much in agreement that this is a win for customers either way, and I think it’s a very clever idea — challenging the assumption that speed is more important than cost — I’m just super curious to understand their long term thinking.
That said, I could be completely wrong about Wise: maybe they are banking a lot of profit off big transactions, in which case, this is a challenge to the model Wise are pursuing and would definitely be a significant competitor.
Is there any limitations on transferring to companies? Or is it just to personal accounts?
> Please note that you may only send funds to the country of the national currency. For example, you may only send US dollars to the United States
This seems fairly restrictive. I send USD to Colombia, for example, to pay my staff. The Colombian banks then convert that to COP on arrival. Is there any particular reason why this limitation is in place? Makes it significantly less useful than, say, Worldfirst.
Our outbound payments are all domestic bank transfers, so if your Colombian bank can receive a USD ACH payment by routing and account number it should work.
But I'm guessing your USD to Colombia is delivered by international SWIFT wire? The cost of a SWIFT wire is orders of magnitude higher than a domestic bank transfer, and we wouldn't be able to support that in our fixed fee.
Weird bug on this site... I have crappy $10 plug-in earbuds, and when I open atlantic.money I hear periodic "clicks" of interference roughly every 1300-1500ms (the interval is constant, I'm just not sure of the precise timing). I can't hear anything with the headphones unplugged, and it goes away as soon as I close the tab. Anyone have an idea what could cause this?
Not relative to our pricing! For a £5k transfer we're charging 83% less than Wise. I'm certainly happy to pay 83% less for substantially the same service :)
I'm a happy Wise user, they provide me an easy way to get paid by my US clients when doing contracting work and offer very quick transfers for quite cheap. If you can compete as well as you say on a pair USD-EUR I would be more than happy to try out your service.
Is there a way to get notified when you will add support for other currencies?
Is this only for GBP into other currencies?I use Wise to transfer from my Canadian bank into my Spanish one, would Atlantic.money work for me? Most of the fees I pay are for my Canadian bank to get the money into the Wise system, but this still seems cheaper.
We're starting with GBP → 9 currencies but can't wait to add more corridors. Inbound EUR is next with more coming after. We're starting with a smaller set of currency corridors because we're building this network from scratch - that's why our fees are so low.
I'm not cranky but I do, with good reason, always assume that finance companies are trying to hide fees until it's very definitely proven otherwise. So here's a quick UI suggestion:
> × 1.199473 live rate
Turn the "live rate" into a link that shows where you get the live rate from.
I am worried the 3-euro flat rate is sustainable in the long run. I regularly send money with MoneyGram to family overseas in Armenia and I see that there is a lot of things happening behind the scenes for each transaction.
We've set up extremely efficient bank transfer and currency conversion infrastructure and we're profitable on every transfer, so i can assure you it's sustainable :)
I think this is fantastic! there’s a lot of pessimism here about people kind of assuming you’re taking it out of the spread. Sounds like that’s not happening, and for people who actually use these services they’re going to compare the end amount of final currency among services anyway— which you show front and center. So it almost doesn’t matter what people are saying here but I wonder if there’s a way you can be more transparent about the “live rate.”
Other services are expensive, because they try to serve everyone - they are basically cross subsidizing between their customers that make them all of their money (by moving larger amounts), who end up paying for their customers who move small amounts. On average, this doesn't seem like a big deal, but it ends up being expensive for the folks who move most of the money.
Any plan for TWD? It's a real challenge to transfer USD or Euro to TWD. Fees are crazy high. I can hook you up with the foreigners community, probably 100+ beta testers
Each leg of our transaction carries a substantially fixed fee to the business - which is unusual in currency exchange. Having achieved those economics with our partners, we summed them up, added costs for operations and compliance, and added a margin to run our business. That's how we ended up at £3!
What do you mean flow info? Generally selling flow means letting market makers fill orders for a fee. How much is just the info worth, especially in FX?
1. Needs comparisons against other players by size (as others on this thread are having to work out)
2. It seems better for larger size but that's where the user will start to question the service and trust comes into play i.e. do I trust it enough to warrant the saving of X. I think you need to work on this point via messaging in the design and site in general. For me I would stick with Wise for now.
Thank you - we'll look to include the table more prominently. Our feature in Sifted today does include a comparison table that shows the difference in fees:
Example on the home page costs £3, arrives Friday (it's currently 9am Wed). Slightly beats Wise (£3.69) - but they estimate 4 hours.
I'm not sure how this is 'the world's first fixed fee money transfer product'? Wise guarantees a rate for 2h (which swings both ways so isn't really a markup IMO) - are you claiming to offer closer to spot pricing?
We're fixed fee because we'll charge only £3 regardless of how much you send. If you want to send £2000 on Wise, that fee is doubled. But with us, it's still just £3.
I just noticed that and was about to delete my comment - nice! - for some reason I thought Wise was flat too.
Maybe you should show that off with a different homepage example? Since Wise also defaults to £1000, and at that price point isn't very different to you (and tbh more compelling, given the speed).
Looking into the .money GTLD more, it seems Donuts (Outer McCook LLC, based in the US) is the owner of it, which seems to have been solely created just to own various GTLD. They currently have the largest portfolio of GTLDs (242) which seems to continue to expand.
Not sure how I feel about one company sweeping up so many GTLDs, but that's beside the point. The business seems serious, so not sure what you have against the .money GTLD? Is it a principle thing or something else?
Can you transfer TO the UK? Specifically from Spain and Qatar? I'm literally about to send a huge amount of money home, and it boils me up how much even the reputable money transfer companies take from you on the exchange. It seems scandalous how much money they take for something which is surely, almost entirely automated.
We're starting with offering services to residents of the UK sending GBP outbound to 9 currencies. We're actively working on our EU license, which will allow residents of UK or EU residence to send GBP or EUR to the currencies we support. We're starting with a particular set of currencies as we're building our network from scratch - it's why our fees are so low!
When you say "working on your EU license" is this something that is an extra steo due to Brexit that would have been automatic before? (i.e. you would only need one license for UK and EU)
I guess you need to have a banking license for doig this sort of business ?
And then you can leverage the international bank network, swift being one, and set a fixed price fee, because in reality the fee is actually much lower than 3GBP.
As long as your conversion rates stick then this should be a good business.
Could you please elaborate a little bit more about your interbanking network, your connection to these etc.?
How do you route from UK to Australia, e.g.? To EU?
Do you support instant payments on any of yours connections? If yes, which scheme(s) do you support?
We're operating a hub-and-spoke model. Our spokes are domestic bank transfers in and out of the currencies we support. And our hub is a centralized counterparty where we convert currency. Then we receive the converted currency in our local bank accounts. That currency conversion counterparty is world-leading in the services they offer to institutions, and we're excited to offer it to consumers for the first time.
We support the fastest possible domestic rails (GBP Faster Payments, EUR SEPA Inst, USD ACH Same Day, etc). Unfortunately most domestic rails aren't instant (like USD) - and we can't make them any faster - but for those that are (like EUR) we support instant transfers.
Our default delivery speed is two business days - this incurs no cost of capital to the business. But we know customers are sometimes transferring money urgently, so we offer an Express delivery. This is instant for EUR and as fast as the schemes support for other currencies. Express incurs a cost of capital equal to the currency forward rate, which is a true uncapped variable cost. So we have to pass that on to customers through a separate fee (0.05%), as it's something our signature fixed fee just can't cover. But it's always optional - and customers can always make a transfer regardless of size for just £3.
Hmm this is a good point. To be honest I was in that bucket for a while too. I think you're right, we'll just need to figure out how to prevent US app store users in the US from getting confused. I would recommend you sign up on the website for now and we'll make sure the app is available in the US app store when the service launches!
Do you plan on having transfers without exchanging currencies? I have 2 country presence and have Euro accounts on both countries. Ireland/Turkey. Also will you be adding more countries?
I can do it through a Swift transfer. It is costly, as there can be multiple banks in between and each bank applies their own "un advertised" fees. Also it can't be tracked. It's like throwing money to a worm hole. It can arrive at the destination in a few working days or not. No view into what happens in the worm hole. So swift transfers are unpredictable.
There is Revolut, which can do this free or low cost, but lately this service seems to be akin to swift transfers and can be fee deducted by interim banks. Our circle has been using Revolut for similar transfers up until some of us fee deducted by huge amounts.
So this leaves us with Transferwise. And Transferwise only does exchange transfers across borders.
This is not really something we are happy with because there are exchange taxes applied in Turkey to move it into the Euro account back.
This is a great question and we see it a lot. Really, it highlights just how opaque FX fees are in the industry, particularly with large institutions.
It's important to notice that we're the only product that combines a fixed fee and zero FX markup. Banks are charging you a fixed fee, but marking up the FX rate by 1-3% typically. So you're actually paying 8 EUR explicitly + 1-3% hidden fee which, in total, is a (very high!) variable fee.
I wrote about just international money transfers within the same currency, not about currency exchange. These are different and independent services. It is true that the bank has high spread, so i do not use it for money exchanges, just for money transfers.
But as others wrote, saing 'zero FX markup' is opaque and nonsensical. Proper way to is just to annonuce your spread. Even companies that have some FX markup can offer smaller spread than 'zero FX markup' if they have balanced flows between currencies and can pair most of their transactions internally.
Definitely a corridor we are looking at. INR has some interesting characteristics due to capital controls that we'll need to find a reasonable way to play nicely with. Due to these capital controls, Banks appear to also have a cartel on currency conversion...
We sure do! We're actively working on our EU license and that will enable inbound EUR payments for UK residents, plus EU residents will be able to use the service. We can't wait to expand further.
Since, Wise & Revolut have been mentioned quite a bit and I'm an ex-Revolut & ex-Wise engineer where I built a lot of the FX infrastructure so I'll throw in my 2c.
My assumption of what you & Neeraj are doing based on your backgrounds:
You've decided to build a smart order router for retail FX hence the slow transfers because you need to wait for the spot order to settle T+2.
Story at Wise
Funnily enough Wise started in the early days with a fixed fee of £1!
Since all Wise did was match orders between customers so no money was actually moving borders hence no need for conversion or transfer fees etc.
But that fixed fee model was quickly scrapped when Wise started making the market between customers and improving the product experience by introducing rate locks (hedging costs), instant transfers (buffer costs) and actually started considering all the other cogs that go into making an international FX payment.
But there's one significant cost of high value transfers that's been a struggle for both Wise & Revolut to bring down even at scale:
The transaction monitoring, AML & support costs of high value transfers - a single high value transfer can easily cost £3 - £150 for all the due diligence needed to get it done.
If you're going to keep the product fixed fee - this is where you'll need to focus in terms of innovation.
The Story at Revolut
Revolut has an Unlimited Zero Mark up FX with a single free SWIFT transfer (every additional international transfer is capped at £5) on the £6.99 premium plan.
But international payments is relatively a recent addition. The vast majority of the time when people are sending money to each other on Revolut, it's a Revolut-to-Revolut or Revolut to local own bank account payment.
Revolut's core strategy is to be the everywhere wallet so that when you're sending money to your family member in Romania from the UK - you just do it as a Revolut to Revolut payment which is bit different to the gap you're trying to fill.
And, there's very little interest at Rev to deal with high value transfers because the AML, transaction monitoring and support costs are too prohibitive when transfers between users are free or capped at £5 for SWIFT payments.
Is there a market for this product?
A resounding YES.
This is something we realised at Wise - we weren't as competitive as we liked to be on high value transfers and even though they committed resources to improving this - in typical Wise fashion the progress is very slow.
Now I'm not convinced you'll stick at the £3 mark for long but there's definitely a large untapped market here.
I'm confident that you & Neeraj have what it takes to win in this market & will be rooting for you from the outside!
P.S. The app doesn't seem to be available in the UK app store?
Thanks for sharing your story and for the thoughtful feedback BukhariH! We thought a lot about the current players and offerings in the space, and came to similar conclusions about some of the pitfalls.
That being said, we have made two observations that we are looking to explore by launching Atlantic Money:
1. By deliberately going the super-app route, and trying to be something for everyone, super apps are crappy user experiences, and they aren't a very strong business (outside of south-east Asia).
We are looking to be a focused product, and are committing to not building a bunch of additional features into our app over time that customers probably don't want and are likely going to make the experience adversarial.
2. Super apps are not targeted.
We believe that costs can pile up if you don't have a target customer. Our thesis is that we want to be a very good option for customers moving larger sums of money, and we've explicitly focused on that segment in terms of corridors, and our fixed pricing.
We'll see how it goes with the launch, but would welcome any feedback - either here, or feel free to reach out directly.
£3 flat sounds basically impossible become profitable on. Especially considering you're going for higher volume customers. Yes you have chosen a segment with low overheads (bank to bank transfers), but you will still have the burden of costs that scale very poorly with the volume of £ moved and number of customers served (e.g. CS, AML, KYC etc). Usually revenue (and some costs) that scales with volume is the route to profitability here, but you've explicitly forgone it!
So, in my opinion, your prices will have to rise substantially (most likely) or you will do something akin to what Robinhood did with PFOF and make the customer the product, which is to say, exploit them without them knowing. Sorry if this sounds harsh but your setup currently falls into the category of things that sound too good to be true, would love to hear how you plan to overcome it.
Having said all this I wish you the best of luck, hope to be proven wrong!
(edit: to clarify, i'm considering a business model without significant cross subsidisation - in which case this transfer product would still be loss making in isolation)
That's not "money" in a useful sense for most people in most places. So then you're left with the problem (and expense) of converting it to/from usable money at each end.
We're hearing average people are most interested in transfers of fiat currency between bank accounts. In our research, we could use crypto in our central treasury for conversion or cross-border transactions, but the fiat ⭤ crypto onramp and offramp steps remain so those transfers are not quite instant or free. But if there's a way to use crypto to make our transfers faster and cheaper, I'm all ears :)
> Moving money across borders is virtually free and instant.
If you want cryptocurrency at each end, sure, and don't mind exposure to the rapidly fluctuating values, and pick a cryptocurrency that has low transaction fees.
But this is a lie - I checked. At time of writing, you claim 100k GBP is equal to 131390 USD, while Google claims it's 131620 USD, a difference of nearly $300!
Even saying "the live rate" is a lie. There is no one "live rate" (and therefore no "the" live rate). The price depends on your liquidity providers. IBKR shows "the live rate". Revolut shows "the live rate". Wise shows "the live rate". Google shows "the live rate". Despite all of them showing "the live rate", all of them have subtly different prices because all of them are part of slightly different markets.
Claiming otherwise is a lie. It'd be more honest to say "we pass on the prices from our partners without markup" or something like that.
You should also make clear which rate you're talking about. The market has a spread, how do you handle it? Do you give clients the mid-price or do you just pass through the bid/ask?
The "Learn more" next to the rate info doesn't actually tell me anything more as well. I'd expect it to show me a page with more detailed information about your liquidity and how you determine the price. The box I already saw at the top of the page isn't "more".