Although I am pleased to see more and more banks allowing you to hold more than one currency and account number (Ex: Revolut and TransferWise), I have yet to see or hear about someone doing the same for phone numbers; including text and calls.
Excluding Skype, is there an app where you can call/text from different numbers from different countries? For an international citizen with friends around the globe, this would be perfect. I realise that you have FaceTime, Facebook Messenger and Skype, but not everbody uses these platform.
I have Google Voice which gives me an American number, but it would be nice with a service who gives you any number from any country you want, as well. Lets say you have friends in Italy.
I have yet to find someone who is completely off the internet and only uses mobile/landline for calls. Viber, Whatsapp, FB messenger, Telegram, LINE, Discord, SLACK. They got to be somewhere. And that should be enough to call them for free. If all bank accounts became virtual account numbers on the internet like Crypto addresses, you would not need banks either. That’s where audio/video calling is now. You do not have any need for “international calling” packages, because a lot of people can call for free using apps.
EDIT: Also you are comparing Transferwise Borderless accounts with having multiple phone numbers. However, you need Borderless accounts because banks operate differently in different countries, unlike audio/video calls. If all banks had the same standard (they do have IBAN, but they do not have the same laws/rules), then you would not need borderless accounts. You would have one account that was multi-currency. That would allow you pay in any currency of your choice by insta-converting. Or even better, one currency across the world, so on conversion needed. Borderless accounts currently allow you to do insta-conversion, but it’s not free. So what I am trying to say, is that audio/video calling is ahead of banks in terms of being truly “borderless”. One phone number can be used to reach anyone from anywhere across the world as long as you have internet. Hopefully one day you can have one bank account or crypto address where you could store multi currency/multi crypto and could be accessed from anywhere as long as you have internet. That’s where banking needs to go, to be truly borderless.
I’ve thought about this and might launch such a product but the main blocker is that how much would you pay for this and how big is the market for such a feature?
It’s definitely a cool proof of concept to be able to get multiple, possibly foreign numbers on a single SIM but for day to day use I’m not sure many people would be interested in this, and sadly it needs to be popular to be cheap/free thanks to economies of scale. On a small scale it becomes quite expensive.
There are apps that do this (with varying degrees of success), one of them is “OnOff App” (no affiliation, in fact I wouldn’t actually recommend it as I’ve had a bad experience and they don’t seem to bother about GDPR requests), but as mentioned before, due to the lack of economies of scale their offerings are extremely expensive given the rudimentary functionality they deliver.