If you are a crypto user, or even if you are thinking of becoming one, you will probably be familiar with the problem of funding an account. Buying bitcoin or any cryptocurrency is easy enough in some ways, but before you do that, you need to get dollars or whatever you are going to use into an account from which you can execute the transaction. That is sometimes much harder than you anticipate and, to be honest, often harder than it needs to be.
Part of the problem is that a lot of crypto projects are based outside of the US, the UK, or other major developed countries. That means many of the money transfer options that you typically use are unavailable to you or will raise red flags with your bank when you try to execute a transaction. Even those projects that are based in the recognized developed world, though, often offer only limited fiat onboarding options, and/or have KYC procedures that are slow and unwieldy.
Easy ACH Set Up
The SmartFi portal doesn’t have those problems. Our KYC process is one of the easiest and fastest around and, as a US company, we are able to offer convenient ways to fun fund your account, including using an Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfer. ACH transfers which, as you might have guessed from the name, are done through a clearing house, have one big advantage and one disadvantage when compared to what are known as “wire transfers”, which are done directly between banks. The advantage is cost, the disadvantage, time.
Free Fiat Transfers
Typically, an ACH transfer is free, whereas a wire transfer involves a fee levied by your bank. That fee is usually per transaction and in the $10-30 range, which is not particularly significant in very large transfers, but for most of us it is a barrier to funding an account via a wire transfer. Think about it. If you transfer, say $500 and pay a $30 fee, that puts you down 6% before you even buy anything! The disadvantage of ACH is that transfers take around three working days to clear, whereas wire transfers are usually instantaneous. That may matter to some extent to traders looking to take advantage of a specific price point, but for those looking to build a crypto portfolio over time, not so much.
For those looking to do that, and there are some good reasons that most people should take that approach, ACH is a much better funding method than wire, and even more suitable than others that SmartFi will soon offer, such as Apple Pay or Visa and Mastercard payments. That is because, in the SmartFi portal at least, you can set up recurring ACH payments, where the same amount is transferred each month, on the same day of the month. That is the easiest way to set yourself up for dollar cost averaging, the strategy that many people who have been successful in crypto in the past have used to good effect.
So, if funding your crypto account from a fiat bank account is giving you a headache, you should really sign up at SmartFi, where ACH transfers are available, and where every effort has been made to allow you to use them to your advantage. And, even if you are already a SmartFi community member but have used other funding methods in the past, take a look at how ACH transfers work and why they work so well for so many people, and consider using ACH next time you transfer funds.
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Author: Martin Tillier
Martin has around forty years of market experience and, in addition to his role as Head of Research at SmartFi, is a daily contributor of market analysis and opinion to Nasdaq.com. He first became interested in crypto 2014, when he started writing regularly on the subject. He is from England but now lives in Connecticut, USA with his wife, his dogs, and his three kids’ college tuition bills.
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