How to send money between friends, across borders

You can video-call a friend on another continent in two seconds. Sending them forty dollars still starts with a question: which app do you use? The answer depends on their country, and it is rarely yours.

Why is sending money between friends still hard?

Because the fast rails are national. Brazil has Pix, run by the central bank: instant, free for individuals, and useless without a Brazilian account. Canada has Interac e-Transfer, tied to a Canadian bank account. The United States has Zelle, between US bank accounts only. Europe is rolling out Wero, a phone-number wallet backed by a group of European banks. Each one is excellent inside its borders. Cross one, and it goes quiet.

Even inside Europe, “instant” is recent and bounded. Since 9 October 2025, banks in the euro area must let you send an instant euro transfer that lands within ten seconds, day or night. Real progress. It still needs an IBAN, it still runs in euros, and it stops at the edge of the euro area.

What does a transfer between friends really cost?

More than it looks, and the smaller the amount, the worse. Every quarter the World Bank prices the same errand, sending 200 dollars across a border. In the third quarter of 2025 the world average was 6.36% of the amount; through a bank, 14.99%. The UN target is 3%. A friend’s share of a dinner is not 200 dollars, it is 40, and fixed fees bite hardest on small amounts. Then add the exchange-rate margin, which rarely shows up as a line item, and the one to three business days a wire takes to land.

What are the options today?

• Same country, same rail. Use it. Pix, Interac, Zelle or Wero between two people who both have it is the best case: seconds, and usually free.
• Bank wire. Works everywhere, slowly and with a fee on each side plus an FX margin. Fine for rent, painful for a dinner.
• Remittance and neobank apps. Cheaper and faster than a wire, but still one sender, one receiver, one transfer at a time, and both people need an account on the same service.
• A dollar-backed digital coin, wallet to wallet. A stablecoin such as USDC moves from one wallet to another in seconds, in any country, for a network fee counted in cents. You read the amount in your currency, your friend reads it in theirs. The coin does the crossing.

What changes when it is a group, not one friend?

The number of transfers. A weekend with five people ends in a small web of “you owe me, I owe her”. Any expense app will net that down to one balance per person. That is the easy part. The hard part is the last step: five people, three rails, and the money has to actually move, at once, without one person fronting it and chasing the other four. That difference has a name, settlement versus tracking, and it is where most apps stop.

This is the problem Spliz was built around. The group logs what it spent, everyone signs once, and every balance clears in a single transaction in USDC on Base: an atomic settlement, all of it lands or none of it does. Nobody fronts the money. It stays in each person’s own wallet until they sign, because Spliz is non-custodial, then goes straight to the others. The network fee is covered. The only cost is 0.1% of what moves, ten cents minimum, shown before anyone signs; keeping track of the group costs nothing. See how it plays out on a group trip or without a bank transfer.

The short version

• Fast payment rails are national; two friends in two countries rarely share one.
• A cross-border transfer averaged 6.36% of the amount in Q3 2025, more at a bank; small amounts pay the most.
• A dollar-backed coin between wallets crosses borders in seconds; for a group, one signature can settle every balance at once.

The money was never slow. The borders between apps were.

Sources

• World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, Issue 54 (Q3 2025), global average cost of sending 200 dollars and cost by provider type.
• European Central Bank, Instant Payments Regulation, ten-second euro instant transfers, deadlines of 9 January and 9 October 2025.
• Banco Central do Brasil, Pix, how the Brazilian instant payment scheme works.
• Interac, Interac e-Transfer, Canadian account requirement.
• Zelle, FAQ, US bank account requirement.
• Wero, the European Payments Initiative wallet.