Even if you’re not a regular traveler, you must know that dealing with foreign currencies is inevitable; it’s a fundamental part of traveling, but most of the time, moving your money abroad feels even more complicated than the trip itself. Fortunately, the landscape has changed a lot, and has started to move beyond the traditional bank transfers into a more digitalized approach. In this guide, we will explore this new terrain and offer a different path to manage your funds in a foreign country.
The Cost of Traditional Banks
While your local bank offers a good sense of security that can’t be matched by any other method, it’s not the best when it comes to international money transfers. For example, if you need to send money from Canada to the Philippines, you will probably be faced with a ton of different verifications, fees, and hidden fees.
Also, traditional bank systems usually use older and slower networks like the SWIFT system, which can involve several intermediary banks. But those are not even the biggest drawbacks; the biggest one is often the exchange rate. This can easily add up in costs, reducing the final amount a lot.
For example, if you transfer $1000 dollars, besides all of the fees and hidden fees, the bank markups can take the total cost up to thirty to sixty dollars additional. The worst part is that this expense is rarely enumerated clearly on your receipt.
This lack of transparency, combined with fees that go up to forty-five dollars or more, makes the traditional transfer an expensive choice.
A New Generation of Transfer
Nowadays, as a response to the unclear and many times complex practices of traditional banking, a group of specialized financial technology companies has emerged. Those companies have built their services around efficiency and transparency. Solving this way many issues that most travelers had with traditional transfers.
These providers, like Wise, RiaMoneyTransfers, or PayPal, work mostly online with digital platforms. Compared to traditional banks that have several branches to maintain, those options reduced their overhead costs a lot. This reduced and easier to maintain business model allows those companies to offer more competitive exchange rates with lower and clearer fees, especially when it comes to international money transfers.
Their entire process is designed for clarity, showing you the exact exchange rate you will receive and the total fee before you confirm the transaction.
Also, many of those services offer a transactional speed that banks can’t match, with some transfers completing in just a few minutes instead of several business days. This is a feature that has set apart those services from the traditional bank system, especially useful when it comes to an emergency situation far from home.
Conclusion
As you can see, visiting a foreign country is no longer stressful to plan. By adopting those modern financial tools, anyone can easily transform a traditionally stressful aspect of traveling abroad into a simple task. Not only that, but this change gives a lot of people peace of mind, thanks to how fast transfers are usually done. These aspects combined result in directing your attention where it belongs: on the experiences and connections that define your journey.
