Wire transfers have borderline predatory fees unless you're moving thousands of dollars, and there's still the issue of "oh you entered one of the numbers incorrectly, hopefully they give you your money back!"
This is a distinctively US feature. SEPA transfers cost (next to) nothing, and the IBAN has a checksum, so entering a single digit wrong will get the transaction rejected.
They have bank accounts everywhere. They just avoid transferring money between them in the first place. As long as an even amount of money is going in each direction, they won’t have to.
Only if flow gets too out of whack but that means their rates are too one-sided.
That’s the forex business in a nutshell. They don’t convert money, they just exchange it.
I've used Zelle and it was easy. My bank is suggesting them (they have first class support), but I have no idea if they are otherwise better/worse than paypal. Most of the time if I owe money it is either credit card or I used my bank's bill pay (which sends a physical check if they don't have an electronic arrangement)
I did a wire transfer once, $15 in fees, but since the amount was from a house sale (to get from the bank where the money was deposited to my mortgage bank - they couldn't do this direct which was annoying). I wouldn't do it for normal things, but with that much money involved I don't blame the banks for some friction and the cost wasn't much. Hopefully I never do one again, and also I hope I'm an oddity for even doing it at all.
Which is exactly what I want, most of the time — I want to write a check, but without the hassle of paper, or the recipient having to explicitly deposit it.
generally speaking, is it more complicated for these kinds of payments to be done via wire/swift/etc versus paypal?