International Money Transfers- Who to go to if it goes wrong?

thor

My sister used Barclays to send some money overseas to the account of a relative. This was nearly a month ago and the cash has still not arrived so she queried this with Barclays and was given a reference number and told to query it with the foreign bank. As far as Barclays was concerned they had done their bit and it was up to my sister to find out what the foreign(non-barclays) bank was doing. She has not managed to get hold of them yet but I was wondering what would happen if this bank denied all knowledge of the payment to them? What should her next step be? Is there a mechanism that can be employed to find out where the money is? It must be somewhere and I can't imaging that this scenario is not so uncommon that there is nothing she could do, particularly as she paid 20 quid for the service from Barclays and it has not been successfully executed.

Extant

Depends where it went to, basically. With some banks, the most we can do to trace it is making sure it arrived at the bank. Sometimes we can't do much more after that, as it's then that bank's responsibility to bounce it back if the details are wrong, the account is closed, etc.

I don't have intranet access at the minute because I can't get my laptop to dial in to the Barclays VPN thing, so I can't get it for you, but you could ask the branch to get you the number for Payment Services London, which processes all the BIPs and CHAPs. If they've looked and they're unable to confirm anything more than receipt at the other end, they might be able to direct you to a contact in the other bank etc.

thor

Well she called the foreign bank and they denied getting any kind of transaction(as we feared). Barclays have however assured us that if this happened they will return the money to her so we will see what happens next week.