>in Europe you can wire money across borders for free

do you mean "electronic funds transfer"? because "wiring" is an old school thing that uses Telex machines and and gets processed by people and I would doubt it carries no fee. (It's probably been modernised so that people handle virtual slips of paper, but it very much carries the feel of an "order on a slip of paper" type of transaction and is far from instantaneous.)

I'm genuinely asking, I only know about the US systems where electronic funds transfer is known as ACH which is an automated clearing house, and wiring is called wiring. From the US, I can wire to European banks. I can't ACH.

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9dev 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t think more than a handful of Europeans have ever heard of wiring the way you describe. Everyone over here has a bank account with a debit card and is used to transferring money to someone using their international bank account number; PayPal is in use for convenience, but not really necessary actually. People have credit cards for travelling abroad or online purchases, but that’s about it.

	▲	fsckboy 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		not more than a large handful of Americans have heard of it either, till they become "established" so to speak. It's for moving large amounts of money, and for ordinary people that would only be like when you buy a house, you wire the money to escrow. Europe has the same wire system, it's international.

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hvb2 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I used the term wire because it most closely resembles a sepa transaction. You put in the receiver's details and hit send