EEA third-party for Local Currencies?

dminca

I love the idea of Local Currencies, but if you're a German resident not sure if it's cost-efficient and wise enough to transact currency through a UK currency provider.

Firstly, you'd have to suffer the SWIFT network fee, which doesn't make any sense if you're trying to transact in non-euro EEA funds (RON, BGN etc.), secondly these transfers take a lot of time to issue (2-4 days typically) but in a busy world, you need to move funds in a time-efficient way, right?

Could you please consider in future updates to choose a different currency provider (other than Currencycloud) that's actually part of EEA? After all, bunq E.V. is an European Bank 🇪🇺

Thank you for your hard-work so far and really love what you've built here 🙌

PS: EEA stands for European Economic Area

Jakob-Y

Daniel Totally understand the issue. And totally support the request for an alternative to SWIFT. Therefore, you got my hi-five :)

But just to clarify: If Currencycloud would be completely based in the EEA, this wouldn't change much on its own. When sending currencies other than the Euro, the only alternative to SWIFT is that country's domestic payment network. A German or Icelandic bank wouldn't have better access to a domestic Romanian or Bulgarian payment network than a UK bank would. And Currencycloud already has subsidiaries here, they're not a UK-only company.

You didn't mention it in your post explicitly, but maybe you were thinking about the SEPA in contrast to SWIFT? That is only used for Euro bank transfers. And not restricted to EEA countries anyway. The UK is still part of it, and some other non-EEA countries are also.

What would be really great therefore is more Local Currencies being not just connected to SWIFT, but also to a domestic payment network. This is already the case for USD and GBP local currency accounts at bunq. And Currencycloud, as far as I know, is already working on support for more regions.