Transferring large inheritance from EU to UK - transferwise? or who?

brewser666 · 1 July 2014 at 4:24PM

A relative left 20 million Euros in a will and I'm looking at how to get the best rate in order to exchange this to my UK account. Clearly this is a lot of money and for every 0.1% deduction in fees off the interbank rate, I can look to retain an extra £20,000 or so once the money has actually reached my account. Inheritance tax etc has already been paid in the original country.

Should I be using transferwise? They seem to have the most media exposure etc which is comforting in terms of trust. Obviously I'm really nervous about releasing such a large amount of money into a single account! I have spoken to their support team and they were willing to give a 0.1% discount off their usual 0.5% fee since the transfer is so big.

I was shopping around in a few other places and FCexchange and Currencyfair were both willing to do the exchange for 0.2%! However, FXexchange wanted a 10% deposit and I don't have 2 million Euros lying around unfortunately )-: I went back to transferwise and they budged a little further down to 0.35%.

Are there any other companies who would be willing to perform such as a large transfer?

Anything else I should be aware of? Can I trust CurrencyFair?

grumbler · 1 July 2014 at 4:46PM

It's not uncommon for the the interbank rate to change by 0.5% and more during a day, so you can easily lose (or win) more than than fractions or % while looking for the best deal.