Hey everyone,

I've been looking into a "borderless account" at TransferWise (http://www.transferwise.com) as a potential alternative to using PayPal for international purchases. While PayPal has proven to be convenient it is very expensive for international transactions. They tack a 10% currency exchange fee on top of the dis-advantageous exchange rates they apply to transactions. I've kept these fees invisible to the paying customer (meaning I don't pass them along) but I definitely see these fees (as do other vendors using them).

Before I delve too deeply into designing their service into my sales I wanted to see if anyone here has experience with using it. I did set up an account with EU and AUD that I can supposedly be paid electronically by locals in those regions. In these two cases, TransferWise provides me with banking information that I believe I would share with the customer so they could electronically transfer funds into my "local currency account". Is this a common method of electronic payment in Europe or Australia? We certainly don't do transactions this way in the US.

Interested in your experiences (if you have any) with TransferWise as a service and/or about whether such electronic transactions are the "norm" in these places.

-Rob
-visit http://www.kahr.us to get my daughterboard that helps fix WPC pinball resets or for my Pinball 2000 H+V video sync combiner kit

Hmmm - PBR's use sounds different than how i envisioned using it. I was under the impression I could simply share country-specific banking information provided to me by TransferWise and individuals could use their existing accounts to electronically transfer funds into my TransferWise account. I can choose to hold the money in that currency with no fees or convert it to my currency (US$) for just the exchange rate. This keeps the exchange fee on my side of the equation (but at a significant reduced cost compared to PayPal) and doesn't require potential customers to create "yet another" online account somewhere.

For example, in Australia if I were to provide an invoice for $100 US and ask it to be paid at as $134 AUD (calculated using the TransferWise calculator just now) along with these banking details: "Account Holder", "Account number", "BSB Code", and "Address", would it seem natural/logical/automatic for an Australian to recognize these details and know exactly how to proceed?

Same example for EU would be $100 US is 87 EU today, the bank details would be "TW Account Holder", "IBAN", "Bank Code (SWIFT/BIC)", and "Address". Same question, something a European would recognize as something as routine as any other "local" transaction?

If providing these details doesn't trigger familiarity then this just translates into me next explaining how to do the transfer which means I've not really saved anything compared to PBR's model where they are explaining to a customer they need an account in some third party's website.

It looks to me like I can use the service in this way (i.e., to receive payments) for the British Pound, Euro, and AU$. It does not look like it provides this service in NZ or Canada yet which is a bummer.

Thanks for the responses so far - Looking forward to learning about how it would integrate into banking!

-Rob
-visit http://www.kahr.us to get my daughterboard that helps fix WPC pinball resets or for my Pinball 2000 H+V video sync combiner kit