[E-trademarks] XE.com money transfers (was Good, Inexpensire service for bank wire payments)

[Carl Oppedahl]

On 11/22/2023 4:23 PM, Jim Larsen via E-trademarks wrote:
>
> I just started using XE.com for U.S.->foreign transfers.  No 
> (separate) wire fee.  Indeed, the entire cost of the transaction is 
> built into the exchange rate.  Example: I recently sent payment to a 
> Canadian firm.  Spot rate was 1 USD = 1.3405 CAD.  My calculations 
> suggest this is about 2.9% worse than public spot FX price (average of 
> about 1.38 that day).  So, similar to credit card fees for most 
> services for domestic transactions.  Customer service (on my 
> admittedly low volume so far) was excellent.  I had several calls 
> setting things up and they were very helpful.
>
Yes I recall maybe it was fifteen years ago, American Express had 
launched a money-transfer service (which then got shut down maybe three 
years after launch).  And the supposed great advantage of their service 
over the competition (which in those days was WU and your 
bricks-and-mortar bank) was "the entire cost of the transaction is built 
into the exchange rate".  But they did not say it that way.  What they 
said was "no foreign transfer fee" or something like that.  The main 
sales pitch was, we should switch from our existing money transfer 
service provider over to American Express because our existing service 
provider was surely charging a foreign transfer fee, and if we are so 
smart to switch over to American Express, we will never again have to 
pay a foreign transfer fee.

We opened an account with American Express and we got ready to do some 
foreign transfers.

I recall getting ready to pay some invoice of a trademark firm in some 
foreign country.  And the invoice was denominated in USD.  So my goal 
was to send some of my USD to some foreign country, to a bank account of 
the foreign trademark firm.  A USD account.

Of course one of the important things about any money-transfer service 
provider is that hopefully they permit you to set up an "address book" 
or "beneficiary book" or "recipient book".  The idea is you set things 
up with the name of the foreign firm, and the bank details of the 
foreign firm, and you store it in the book.  And then once you have 
successfully sent a transfer one time, you can have some guarded 
optimism that a second or third transfer to the same "beneficiary" or 
the same "recipient".

So I clicked around and tried to set up the "recipient book" information 
for this foreign trademark firm.   And it seemed to be impossible.  I 
then phoned up the American Express company to try to get tech support.  
The person who answered was absolutely flummoxed and was not able to 
help very much.  It seems that the super smart people at American 
Express had not thought very much about what happens if the foreign 
invoice that is being paid is denominated in the same currency as the 
currency held by the sender (us).  Eventually they somehow figured out 
what to tell us and where we were supposed to click to set up this 
"recipient book" information, and we set it up.  And the money transfer 
went through.

And the foreign transfer fee was $45, something like that.  It was a 
gouge!  Even our gouge bricks-and-mortar bank did not gouge that much.  
Wells Fargo only gouged $42 at that time.

After we did a few bake-offs (paying the same recipient once using 
American Express and again using our previous service provider) it 
became clear that American Express was indeed gouging us on every 
transfer.  The $45 gouge for the actual transfer of the money was hidden 
away in the currency exchange rate.  I guess they figured that either 
(a) we would not notice the gouge, or (b) we were paying on behalf of 
some client and we would be glad to pay the gouge fee so long as we 
could pass it along to our unsuspecting client.

Anyway, after two or three years, American Express quietly shut down 
that service.  By then we had moved along to whoever the next provider 
was -- maybe it was Travelex.

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