I did a short contract with an entity in the US and am trying to figure out how they can pay me. I have a business and a Canadian business account.
Is there a recommended low risk/effort service I should use? I am in Ontario if that matters.
I did a short contract with an entity in the US and am trying to figure out how they can pay me. I have a business and a Canadian business account.
Is there a recommended low risk/effort service I should use? I am in Ontario if that matters.
Edit: everything I said below is for my own personal use, not a business. I don’t know if it’s all applicable to a business.
I think many of the big (Canadian) banks will let you open a US dollar account with them. I have one with CIBC. I am able to wire money to it from my actual US bank account that I opened when I was working in the US. I’m not sure if a US company could use it for direct deposit, though.
Be warned though, if you want to use them to convert the US dollars to Canadian dollars, CIBC offered me an absolutely brutal exchange rate, a few percent higher than the market rate. They told me to wire my money first and then they could get a “premium” exchange rate, but it still wasn’t very good.
An option that might be good is Wise (formerly called “TransferWise”). Their fee is a lot better than the banks (and they clearly show how much they’re charging above the market rate). They even let you open accounts for different currencies, so that might be another option for receiving the money from the US employer. I used them to convert smaller amounts of money (when I first moved and needed rent/spending money)
(note: I’m not a financial advisor or anything like that, this not advice)
For actually converting from USD to CAD, I used “Norbert’s Gambit” when converting a few years of savings all at once. I used QTrade. It has a fixed fee associated with it (cost of each wire transfer and buying and selling the ETFs) and it can take a while (edit: ~weeks) for each step to go through. But it’s nice in that the cost is flat, so for large amounts it’s negligible. I can go into that in more detail if anyone is interested.
Thanks! For me, it’s too low frequency transaction-wise to do a full international business account. Fees aren’t worth it. Definitely worth considering for a real business. This is just a side thing.