No one can get fiat in unless they are in one of the states where they are licensed as a money transmitter.
...or lives in the SEPA Zone.
A deposit is credited within hours, max. 1 day usually. Maybe you can fax checks in the US?
not exactly, wire from one bank to another in sepa zone can take up to three days too, if it the transfer is inside one country, country to country transfers can take longer.
sepa transfers should be made on the next day, unless
-you wire close to, or at closing hours of the bank, then the bank is allowed to initiate the transfer only the next day, resulting in a 2 day transfer
-you wire friday night (or before a bank holiday), wire goes through monday or tuesday
-you wire with a bank that adds one or more "extra-day", thats not legal anymore, but a lot of banks do it.
btw sepa is nothing really new, everything works as before here in europe, sepa is just a harmonization done by the eu:
-every bank account in europe now has a "bic" and "iban" number, before that it was just any account number and any number to identifiy the bank and for that one had to give the bank name and the recipients full name and adress to allow proper identification of accounts; now its a fixed scheme: the iban number is the bank account number, it starts with a country identifier, i.e. DE..... for a german bank account, the bic number is the bank identifier and onlay needed if one transfers eu-nation to another eu-nation.
-costs of trans-europe transfer have a max now (which is MUCH lower, than what banks used to take). BUT there are SEPA countries, that are no EU-members and so they are not bound to the max cost-regulation, haha, Switzerland for example...
-there is a max duration for transfers now, but please show me one bank that was punished for not complying..
-some other things not directly related to wire transfers have been regulated, see
http://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/content.cfm?page=sepa_vision_and_goals (site run by some eu agency).
