XE Trade: sending money internationally fee-free

After trying out XE Trade last year to convert Canadian dollars into US dollars for my own personal use, I decided to try it for business use. My company has a sub-contractor in the UK, and our alternatives were to send a wire transfer or a cheque. A wire transfer typically charges both the sender and the receiver fees, while a cheque takes time to send, deposit, and clear.

XE Trade was easy to use, fee-free, and fast. By “fee-free” I mean that they did not charge an extra fee on top of their regular currency exchange spread — and I’ve found their spread to be quite competitive. I just had to choose “ACH/EFT” as the sending method. I now intend to use XE Trade on a regular basis for my company.

The setup process required me to send XE Trade quite a few company documents electronically. Once set up, however, I just had to enter the recipient’s bank account information and then pay a bill as if it were any regular bill (such as a credit card bill). For more information on that general process, see my previous review.

Here is the timeline in business days for how long it took for me to set up a business account with XE Trade and send a payment in Canadian dollars from a Canadian bank to be deposited in British pounds in a UK bank.

Day 1: Registered for an XE Trade account
Day 1: Received an e-mail (in my spam folder) asking that I send over scanned documents (driver’s licence, certificate of incorporation, articles of association, names of shareholders owning 25% of more of the business) to verify my identity
Day 2: Received a reminder e-mail asking that I send over scanned documents to verify my identity
Day 3: I sent over scanned documents
Day 4: Received notification that the account was activated
Day 5: I initiated a trade (CAD in Canada to GBP in the UK) with a locked in rate based on that day, chose “ACH/EFT” as the sending method, and paid the bill through my bank’s online interface
Day 8: Received a notification e-mail that the money was sent to the recipient
Day 11: Money was deposited into the destination account; no fees were deducted on either end

The time between sending and receiving money took 6 business days.