How the magic works!
By Adam Hano, Co-Founder
Here at Birdwingo, we deeply believe in transparency, simplicity and common sense.
So, if you’re making a deposit, it makes sense that it arrives in your Birdwingo account as fast as technologically possible. During the years in making, we’ve strived to make this happen as seamlessly as possible. Here’s a sneak peek into how the magic happens!
⌛️ Instant Deposit Schema
Some banks are more technologically savvy than others. The savvy ones, who have invested in R&D and into a digital 21st century user experience, usually support what we call Instant Deposit Schema which is the complicated term for the bank saying “we can move money freakin’ seamlessly, in the blink of an eye”. If where you’re sending money from supports this, then the money drops in your account *instantly* within seconds.
If your bank doesn’t support this, then you’ll need to wait +1 business day for the money to arrive in Birdwingo. This is totally out of our control; we wish it wasn’t this way and we sympathize 🙂
🏦 Inter-bank Exchange Rates
If someone was after your money, this is where they’d make bank: the currency exchange rates. And you wouldn’t even know about it. One of the reasons that Revolut became widely popular was because they eliminated these sneaky and ridiculous fees which got charged when, say, you went to Budapest and wanted to withdraw Hungarian Forint from your home bank account which was in Euros.
So, what is this Interbank Foreign-Exchange (ForEx) Rate? It’s the rate (e.g. 1EUR = 1.05USD) that banks agree on every day to exchange currency with each other. Is there a way for anyone to exchange money in a lower rate than that? The answer is no. No. Period.
We do things properly. Remember? We said we’re common-sense. This is our promise: Any currency exchange that we do, is at this inter-bank foreign exchange rate. We worked really, really hard to make this available to you and well… not everyone works as hard as we do; so careful out there!
Note: ForEx markets are closed on the weekends. So, if there’s any currency conversion rate that we need to make over the weekend, we won’t do it; we can’t! Instead, we’ll wait until Monday when the ForEx market opens and we’ll execute the exchange then and there. Of course, by Monday the rate might be a tiny bit different than the one you saw during the weekend, but we’re just using the inter-bank exchange rate that’s available then; this is not up to us. If the USD tanks by Monday, we’re really sorry, but this is not on our hands. 
💰 Dear George Washington,
Have you been in the US? Have you ever touched a smelly, old $1 bill stuck between the cracks of the NYC subway’s floor? By now, you’ve probably realized that whatever currency you put into Birdwingo, we’ve flipped it into USD. Why on earth would we do that? Is it because we’re in love with the NYC subway?
First, let’s get one thing straight: you own your own stocks. That is, on the background we go into the (big and messy) process to open you an account, verify you’re not Al Capone’s cousin, pay a bunch of hefty intermediary license fees and go on hour-long calls with pricey lawyers on how to do all this fully legally. All this means that you own your own stock. Read the small letters out there, because others [ehm eToro], well… don’t let you actually own your own stocks(!). That’s pretty important, because you don’t care if one day Birdwingo for any reason goes bust; however if some of your other investment apps go bankrupt, then who knows… since you didn’t own any stocks in your name in the first place!
Now, that you know who owns what (and who doesn’t), why would you ever want to trade US stocks in Euros? Sure, you might be a bit more comfortable with the € symbol, but that’s just because you were born on the not-so-capitalist-side of the Atlantic. By going full-steam USD from the second you deposit, we’re able to show you how things really are: live prices, live portfolio value, live P&L, etc and you’re able to take action on the actual price, without bothering with the exchange rate at each instance.
Still freaked out about the $ sign? Well, in that case, learn more about the loyal subject, the rebel commander and the father of his country (IMDB 7.9/10).
