I recently found myself needing to send an traditional international bank transfer.
The payment was simple enough a transfer from the United Kingdom to the UAE. The sort of transaction the legacy financial system has perfected over decades.
I made the request for the transfer on the 21st of May.
As of the 27th of May, I am still waiting for the funds to arrive.
We are constantly told this system is the backbone of the world economy, yet it can take more than a week to complete a basic international transfer.
Most international bank transfers are routed through the SWIFT network Trillions upon trillions of dollars move through it every single day.
Although I submitted the transfer request on the 21st, the payment was not actually authorised until the following Wednesday. Why? Because the bank did not complete it on Friday, and they don’t work weekends.
To make matters worse, when I initially made the request, the bank showed me a confirmation screen suggesting the transaction had been completed. But nothing appeared on my account ledger. There was no visible pending transaction, no transparent processing state, no confirmation tracker, and no indication of where the funds actually were.
Coming from years of using blockchain transactions it reminds me how spoilt I’ve become.
With cryptocurrencies like Causevest Coin or Bitcoin I see everything:
• A visible pending transaction
• Confirmation counts
• Estimated settlement times
• A transparent ledger
• Clear proof the transaction exists
With the bank transfer, there was nothing.
Because there was no visible ledger update and no real clarity, I assumed there had been an error.
So I submitted the request again.
In the end, I accidentally created multiple transactions because the system gave so little feedback and visibility that I genuinely could not tell whether the payment had gone through or not.
Thankfully, the transfers were to my own accounts, but the entire situation was caused purely by poor infrastructure and a lack of transparency in a Billion dollar bank on a Trillion dollar network.
Eventually, around the 26th and 27th of May, the money was finally debited from my account.
That means it took roughly two to three business days just for the funds to leave my account.
Now I am being told I may have to wait up to another five business days for the money to actually arrive.
Keep in mind, I needed these funds last week.
Potentially, from the transaction on the 21st of May I might not recive my funds until the 1st of June, I could be waiting almost two full weeks.
Recently, I completed a payment from America to the UAE using the Causevest blockchain. The transaction was almost instant and took a few seconds to complete and confirm.
When you consider that the Causevest Blockchain created for causes support handles a whole host of other transaction types as well it is even more impressive.
That level of clarity is something many people in crypto have now become completely accustomed to. In fact, I think many of us have started taking it for granted.
Today, after years of using peer-to-peer blockchain infrastructure, even waiting 30 minutes for a transaction can feel unusually slow.
This is not unique to Causevest either.
Whether it is BTC, ETH, stablecoin networks, or other blockchain ecosystems, the direction is clear: blockchain infrastructure is rapidly making traditional cross-border banking look outdated.
Ironically, even SWIFT itself now publicly talks about building “instant and frictionless” cross-border transactions because the pressure from modern payment infrastructure is becoming impossible to ignore. (Swift)
Given the choice, if I could have simply transferred value wallet-to-wallet using blockchain infrastructure instead of relying on the banking system, I would have done it instantly.
Instead, as of writing this, I am still waiting for my money to arrive.
