Don't non-consumer account holders pay much higher fees? I seem to remember they were okay if you can have a very low transaction cap, but if you need to accept/send many payments, you had to get expensive subscriptions or pay per transaction.
Almost certainly still cheaper than literally any alternative, though, since you need that bank account anyway and I will get very much doubt they'd take as big a cut as the paypal mafia.
Yes, bank accounts for commercial purpose have different fees, but unless they pick a completely stupid bank it's still multiple orders of magnitude cheaper than any other transfer.
Only downside of SEPA is that it is a lot less common outside EU/Europe and then more expensive and instant payment is not really possible (there are some vendors offering solutions ...) but that doesn't seem to be their aim. (Would be: "click here to get a license for a commercial download")
Can you not just enter an international bank account number (IBAN) into online banking outside of this area? How does transferring money work then, do you need to send couriers with cash or use third parties like paypal? IBAN is the most basic infrastructure I know of, and I've heard that in the past you also had bank routing so this paying via banks (and banks settling it later) can't be new.
I should ask my boss how we get money from customers in other countries. As far as I knew we just give them our IBAN, chamber of commerce number for tax reasons, and it just appears in our account.
> As of May 2020, 77 countries were using the IBAN numbering system
-- IBAN Wikipedia [0]
It’s not that widespread. For international payments, you can do international bank transfers which have fees associated with them which can be shared or put on one side of the transaction only. It’s often easier and cheaper to use a 3rd-party provider like XE or TransferWise.
Amazes me that there is no standardized way to do money transfers between big countries that we very commonly buy/sell stuff from/to like the USA, China, etc. Thanks for the info and link!
