Dont use transferwise or worldfirst. Both have very bad reputation of closing down accounts adn freezing money. Just google both you come up with frustrated customers from literally hours ago. . I had nightmare scenario when needed to pay 120,000 eur to a contractor in England. They blocked the account for 30 days and made company almost go flop. We were forced to open extra credit line not to go bankrupt. Transferwise is a new trick of old dog PayPal (most hated company in the world) founder Peter Thiel. Same tricks just a different company name. Lookup Transferwise twitter they have people complaining constantly.

For European currencies (I use GBP, EUR, DKK, SEK) I find Transferwise to transfer within 5 minutes.

That's reasonable, as banks in those places usually support very fast local transfers, and that's what Transferwise is doing. A bitcoin exchange could meet this speed, but won't be able to beat it.

Most cryptos are faster than any type of wire transfer except card payments.

I transferred some money on Thursday from one uk bank account to another at another institution. Took less time than to log on to the second bank to confirm it had gone through.

Very US-centric. Elsewhere in the world "wire transfers" - transferring money from one bank to another happens more or less instantly.

When I pay myself from my business account and it happens just about instantly. Max I've ever waited was like 15 minutes.

Using Transferwise, a friend from Australia paid me back in the UK and it went through in like 1 hour.

Isn't Transferwise basically just using their accounts in both banks to achieve that, and rebalancing them later (if necessary)? That's not really representative of the performance of the banking system, is it?

For the international part, yes, but still the Me > transferwise and transferwise > friend transfers are "wire transfers" and both of them happen fast enough for the whole transaction to be completed in just a few hours.

Not necessarily, in Europe.

Many electronic bank transfers are approximately instant.

Sure, if you don’t factor in the conversion to and from money that can be used to buy groceries and petrol.

Providing liquidity (placing a non-marketable limit order and waiting for it to get matched) doesn't necessarily save you the spread. Your order is more likely to execute if the price moves against you, so the adverse election hurts. Market microstructure is tricky...