Are there any workable alternatives to Paypal, when sending funds between people in different countries?

Within Canada, I can use direct bank eTransfers, which are secure and normally fee free. But receiving money from people in the USA is becoming very, very expensive with Paypal now. Their "cut" is nearly 10%.

So I'm looking for alternatives to that. Given the fragmented banking "system" down there, I'm not sure there is an alternative.

Anyone?

I'm looking at https://wise.com/ but they certainly don't make it easy to figure out how their system works.

Lots of info there on how to receive money into their accounts, but very little information on how to get the money out of there and into MY bank account.

It looks like I would have to pay fees once to receive money from others, and then pay again to SEND money to myself (my bank).

???

Isn't that the rationale for Bitcoin and other crypto stuff? (Ducks. Covers.)

I thought the rationale for those was to enrich their "inventors" ?

Depending on the volume of transactions, perhaps look into opening a US bank account. There are options out there for Canadian citizens.

Looks like TD Bank offers the ability to transfer from a US account to a Canadian account.

I'm not sure what the fees are.

EDIT:

When I was living in Mexico, I used Wells Fargo's ExpressSend service that allowed me to do transfers at pretty close to market exchange rate for a flat $5 fee, although there were daily/monthly limits. Money went straight from my US account to my Mexican account in a matter of minutes (perhaps 20 minutes or so.) Not sure if there's something similar out there for Canada.

TD Bank Canada does have a ‘somewhat’ straightforward method of moving money between their US$ account at TD America bank and TD Canada Trust US$ account within Canada. I don’t use it very often.

RBC Canada has a similar capability with RBC bank US (Georgia).
US$ cross border between my RBC Canada US$ account and RBC US US$ accounts transfers across the border immediately.

I steered clear of PonziCoin... uhhh, I mean BitCoin and the like by investing only in tangible assets with a proven history of capital gain. Dutch tulips and Beanie Babies did well in the past!

tanstaafl.

The last few times I used Wise to transfer money from USD to GBP, there was no fee to accept the USD, but there was a fee (about 0.4% at the time) to convert to GBP.

How did you subsequently retrieve the money from Wise into your own accounts?

That was retrieving it into my UK bank account.

When setting up the USD-denominated account in Wise, it gives you a routing number, account number, etc. You get the sender to transfer the money into that account. To receive the money, I just set up my UK bank account as a recipient and did a one-shot transfer. The USD-in was free; the GBP-out had the 0.4% fee (plus forex).

Wise has two different services, there's "Wise accounts" where you can transfer money in, hold a balance, and transfer it out again, and then there's "Wise transfers", where you (in my case) do a US domestic wire transfer to input the dollars from a US Schwab account, and in the same operation it does a UK bank transfer to output the equivalent pounds into my normal UK Natwest account. There's a nerve-wracking hour or so in-between Schwab confirming that they've hurled the money into the void, and Wise confirming that they've received it, but apart from that it appears seamless and fairly cheap.

I think I did the Wise account thing: I seem to recall that I had to manually initiate the second half; Wise were happy for the USD to sit there for a while.

Mmmm. Sounds like it's all above board and not too onerous then. I may give it shot next time around rather than Paypal.

Thanks guys!

I also used Wise back in the days when their name was still "TransferWise" and yes, they are above board (or at least they were at that time).

I seem to recall that the trick was making sure that the sender and recipient communicate clearly about things like names, emails, and account numbers. If not, money might get "hurled into the void", as Peter so succinctly put it.

I would definitely recommend Wise, I do use it quite extensively between GBP, USD, CAN and EUR. Exchange fees are low.

There is a small one-time fee to get bank account details for each of your currencies and then this makes moving money around very straightforward, helped with an easy website and app.