I'm not sure whether their fees are really that low. For transfers between your own accounts, for anything over very small amounts, I found that their 0.35% variable fee is pretty large compared to adding the funds to a brokerage account and then doing the conversion there (ie. IB charges 0.002% on currency trades, with a min of $2), and transferring back out into the desired currency.
Well, for starters most transfers I and my friends have had to make are not to our own accounts. There's also the time issue - I have an IB account, and love it, but most of the time I'm using Transferwise because I'm in a different country and paying someone, or because I need to move money between my own accounts quickly. Transferwise is literally instant for about half the transfers they do, which is incredible. Meanwhile with IBKR I'm usually out at least three business days for any USD funds to show up in IBKR, plus whatever time to wait on the foreign currency side. Then there's also the UI - sometimes I need someone else to transfer the money, or IBKR's login system is locking me out, etc etc, and in those cases Transferwise always wins. Or if I'm transferring under 25k and I need to do it outside of market hours - in that case my transaction is an odd lot at IBKR, getting me (oftentimes) bad rates, and I might as well use Transferwise.
Don't get me wrong, I like IBKR and I do use it, but Transferwise is definitely more useful 90% of the time.
Yeah, you're definitely paying a premium for them handling smaller quantities, end-to-end, in one easy tool. IBKR requires knowledge of Forex trading, but is hands down the cheapest and fastest solution - for those that are able to work it. To be fair, that describes basically all of IBKR.
It's still mind-blowing to think IBKR charges $20 per million, when the airport Travelex will charge you $20 per hundred lol.
Could you explain how this works, or point me in the right direction on what to read? I'm interested in not using Transferwise as much if this is better.
You'd open up a trading account, deposit funds from one country to it (generally free in EU/UK, can be done with a simple bank transfer, though can take 1-3 business days). Rather than the common use case of a brokerage account to buy stocks/invest, you place an order into their IdealPro order book they run to buy the currency you want (might have to jump through 2 trades, they don't run every single pair). Generally this is tailored at larger investors, so anything under $25k is subject to some additional fees due to being a small size (https://ibkr.info/node/1459), but still significantly less than the 0.35% TransferWise charges. The costs for you are commission (<0.2bps), potentially small size fee (1-2 bps), and crossing the bid/ask spread, which is ~0 for currencies). When that order has been filled you now have the desired currency in your account and you can transfer it back out (potentially to a different country or different account).
