And a wire, which is as close to sepa as I think you can get, costs 10s of $ each time.
Basically, the international business problem is real. The Argentina case is mostly lack of a domestic stable currency though. These are legit use cases, fast and cheap transactions aren't.
If you actually offered those US businesses with instant, verifiable transfers that cost nearly nothing, do you actually think they wouldn't move to that?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area
I don't know if I'd call that a "unified economic zone" without some qualifications.
https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/about-sepa/sepa-timel...
Crypto here would similarly make very little sense.
And occasionally, they will withdraw that service for arbitrary and capricious reasons
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=44685011
Crypto stablecoins running on blockchain rails provide an alternative to that network.
You are underestimating how toxic the Argentinian government was.
We did do that with capital controls, the problem is that it was illegal, and the Argentinian IRS is very active trying to tear you a new one. Argentina has long become a bimonetary economy, dealing with ARS for everyday transactions, but saving in USD and pricing assets in USD (real state for example).
To give an example where this would have helped, my parents in Argentina needed to send money to my brother in Europe. The government had made that illegal with capital controls, so I had to transfer him money through wise from a 3rd country and when at some point later I visited they gave me the cash.
People underestimate how annoying and distopic governments can be if given the chance.
I suspect that banks cannot solve this because it would be illegal for them to do so.
If many banks could send and receive money from across the world money laundering would become way way easier (in this sense the lack of privacy in many blockchains can be seen as a strength) and it is how offshore fiscal paradises work
do you mean "electronic funds transfer"? because "wiring" is an old school thing that uses Telex machines and and gets processed by people and I would doubt it carries no fee. (It's probably been modernised so that people handle virtual slips of paper, but it very much carries the feel of an "order on a slip of paper" type of transaction and is far from instantaneous.)
I'm genuinely asking, I only know about the US systems where electronic funds transfer is known as ACH which is an automated clearing house, and wiring is called wiring. From the US, I can wire to European banks. I can't ACH.
In Europe you can wire money across borders for free, you just need to know the account number. Arrives in seconds at 0 cost.
I feel like a lot of the fintech in the US is purely a result of a lack of regulation.
For the example of Argentina, the real reason that business is using crypto is because their currency is unreliable. It might be a good fit there but trading in dollars would've fixed that too.