Paying Sterling (£) cheque into Irish Bank Account

DailyClicker

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is the right forum but my mum has received a cheque for around £17,000.

I was wondering what the best way would be to get this into her Irish Bank account with the best conversation rate/lowest fees.

1) Send the cheque to her and let her give it direct to the Irish Bank?
2) Pay it into her UK account and do a bank transfer
3) Use a specialist company that deal with foreign transactions (no experience of these)
4) Pay it into UK and take out the cash, and travel to Ireland with the cash to pay it in

These are just some of the ideas I came up with, hopefully someone has done something like this before.

Thanks

noh

Pay it into her UK bank account and then use a money exchange service such as Transferwise or Currencyfair

DailyClicker

noh wrote: »

Pay it into her UK bank account and then use a money exchange service such as Transferwise or Currencyfair

Thank you, are these companies 100% safe, as it's obviously a huge sum of money.

Is it worth waiting for the Euro rate to increase, or has it been quite stable recently?

benjus

No FX brokers are 100% safe... if you want that you'll have to do a direct bank transfer. It's worth calling the banks though and trying to negotiate a better rate than the one you would get by default if you just sent the transfer without telling them.

catokelly

Hi DailyClicker,

I think option 3 is your best bet

1) Send the cheque to her and let her give it direct to the Irish Bank?
If you send the cheque directly to the Irish bank the Irish bank would convert it to Sterling using unfavourable tourist exchange rates and fees also it may take weeks/months to clear.

2) Pay it into her UK account and do a bank transfer
If you pay the chq into her UK account and get the bank to transfer the funds to Ireland, the banks offer the worst rates on the high street for international money transfers, on £17k you would potentially lose €100s, if not at least €1000 Euro!

3) Use a specialist company that deal with foreign transactions (no experience of these)
You will get the best possible Sterling to Euro rate by using an international money transfer specialist as they base the rates on the live market rates. Basically once you are registered with them, you would transfer the Sterling to their account, they would then let you know the current Euro rate and once you have booked a rate they would usually transfer the funds to the Irish account as a same day transfer.

Choose a well established FSA authorised FX Broker as this means your money is protected. With most transfer companies, as soon as the Sterling hits their account, the Euros are transferred as an urgent transfer, so your money is in their account for a minimal time (unless you wait for the Euro to hit a certain rate etc...

4) Pay it into UK and take out the cash, and travel to Ireland with the cash to pay it in
If you are stopped at customs with such a large amount of cash, there may be lots of interogation and questions! Also from a safety point of view, I wouldnt recommend you to carry so much cash.

Hope this helps

Biggles

You really need to ask the questions of the firms concerned (1, 2 & 3, anyway, I agree you should forget 4).

Banks don't use anything so poor as tourist rates for these conversions and you might be pleasantly surprised if you ask - but they are all different, so nobody can tell you the rate in advance.