Living in the UK, national payments are instant, with very few exceptions. And having lived in both Switzerland (where they use CHF), and Germany (Euros), I can say it's much the same across Europe.
International payments within Europe are fast too; a couple of days if you're changing currencies, and faster if both sides are in the Euro Zone.
Banks don't have to be slow. The only real issue I have is that the bank's exchange rates are criminal!
Exchange fees show up in a number of different places. I have a Capital One card that I got specifically for the advertised "no foreign exchange fees". In reality, it consistently charges me about 1% more than the official exchange rate at any given point. 1% doesn't seem like a terrible fee. I wish it would itemize it, though.
Many merchants will not bill the card in their local currency -- instead, because it's a US card, they refuse to bill it in anything other than USD. That means they end up making me pay extra to cover their exchange costs, which are always exorbitant, maybe 10 times as much. They appear to have something worked out with their local bank, where the bank accepts payment in USD and gives them payment in CNY or HKD. Here, the bank is teaming up with the merchant to screw the customer without even benefiting the merchant.
I recently ordered something from Amazon's Canada site, and they generously offered to let me have them bill me in USD -- they would cover currency exchange themselves. Left unstated was that they would charge, again, an order of magnitude more for the service than my card would. At least they gave me the option to say "no, bill me in CAD".
The best option I generally have for transacting in China is to pull cash from an ATM (paying Capital One's 1%ish fee), and pay cash even for very large purchases. It's quite possible that banks aren't where you're getting hit by exorbitant fees -- transact directly with a bank, and you should be able to get low fees.
Well, anything within the same bank is instant. There is a commonly used mechanism in business accounts called "Faster Payments" which tend to settle even across banks in the UK within 2h.
Very recently - as in, in the last 4-6 weeks - a system called "SMS" was rolled out. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with text messaging. It's a new cross-bank settlement mechanism which promises to settle the transfer in 20 minutes within UK.
The reality is that SMS transfers don't work reliably across all the banks. Our payments and customer service teams had a bad week after we enabled SMS payments. When a supposedly faster transfer takes 5-6 days and you have to chase the bank(s) about payment states, there's clearly a fault somewhere.
Transferwise is easy and are about 0.3% off interbank.
Interactive Brokers are a pain to set up but some tiny amount off like 0.02%
I've worked in this industry in the past. Historically yes, poor people have been overcharged. The way they dealt with it was to develop networks of people who they could pay to carry the money with them on trips back home and set up a pickup. It's crude, but it's a system that persists in India and Pakistan, especially for unskilled migrants in the Middle East who don't have access to local banking services. Not really a target market for bitcoin given the steep learning curve.
For computer-literate migrants who work in developed countries and are OK with using banks, paypal etc, the fees are pretty reasonable.
Get the feeling they'd have no problem making money with zero fees but that would suddenly make customers think twice about it.
Bitcoin has nothing special about it that would allow these countries to make payments between each other smoother. That is apart from sidestepping the existing regulatory framework.
It might have the beneficial side effect of competition, but that's not a virtue of Bitcoin as a concept. Perhaps the space is ripe for a new fintech startup that streamlines payments between these destinations.
That makes it great as a medium of common exchange... I can easily convert from Canadian Dollars to BTC in Canada, then convert from BTC to Pesos in the Philippines so long as there's enough liquidity on either end.
Both parties still have to act within their respective legal frameworks, but it sidesteps the need to add even more parties into the mix, each of which take their own fees. International wire transfers are a great example of how opaque, slow and costly that can be.
You can go customer -> Canadian Company -> Filipino company -> customer.
The traditional way would be customer -> Canadian Company -> Canadian bank -> Intermediary bank(s) -> Filipino bank -> Filipino company -> Customer
I'm simplifying somewhat... obviously banks are involved in any domestic fiat transfers, but they're not involved in international transmittal (which they usually charge quite a bit for).
At this point it's just yet another talking point for enthusiasts, enthusiasts who have no idea about real-world use-cases.
In Canada alone people send $23.3B/year back to their country of origin in the form of remittances (China, India, the Philippines, etc.). Historically they've been massively overcharged for the privilege of doing so because they're held captive to our oligopolistic banking system - sometimes upwards of 20% because they regularly send smaller amounts to minimize risk.