SWIFT transfer

kurzam

I did two SWIFT transfers to my family abroad from my UK building society. The money never got to the recipients, although all details were correct. Upon contacting my building society I was told the money is with intermediary bank (another British Bank) and they need more compliance information. I supplied these but still money continued to be held by this intermediary bank. After 1 month asked for my money to be recalled. This my building society claim they did on 2nd September 2015. But the money continued to be held by this intermediary bank. My building society tells me there is no time limit on SWIFT transfer recalls. In theory I canb e waiting forever. This is a large sum of money and is intended for my families upkeep as they live abroad. Does any one has had similar problems and can advice me of my options. I have raised an internal complaint but everything is taking too long.

Comping_King

My only advice is that this is in the wrong forum

Ballard

Unless there are genuine money laundering concerns this does seem to be very poor service. I would ask to see all of the correspondence between the two banks to try to get to the bottom of it. Presuming that the building society is on Swift (it would be unlikely that they aren't) you could ask for the MT199 (free format) messages exchanged.

jonesMUFCforever

Which country were you sending the monies too?

grumbler

Complain to FOS

OR

Send the BS a letter giving them, say, 10 days to return your money and threatening them by legal actions via Small Claims Court otherwise.

Next time consider using some currency broker instead:
fxcompared.com
mycurrencytransfer.com

nyermen

You need to push forward with a complaint etc, I think the FOS will expect you to have gone through the BS's complaints procedure first.
The building society will be on swift, but as you've noted, are using an intermediary bank. So they've likely issued an MT103 (or 101 in some cases) to the intermediary, and also an MT202 to the destination bank directly. By now, it's possible the destination bank has returned the 202 as they've not received anything from the intermediary to reconcile.

The intermediary will be one of the big ones (eg. HSBC), and so should have a standard compliance procedure which appears to have failed in this case. I note that until the intermediary releases it to the bank in the foreign country, it's likely that your building society's "account" with the correspondent hasn't been debited, so the building society may technically still have your money as well.

As Ballard notes, there may be communication between them, in which case there'll be some 199 free format communication (or possibly 195/196 query & responses), in any case, I'm not clear if they would be part of a subject access request.

Peter

Ballard

Some good points by nyermen although I would point out that the MT103/MT202 option is only if the bs has test keys with the foreign bank. If not then they will have only sent an MT103 to their correspondent. If there are keys then the MT202 goes to their correspondent and the MT103 to the foreign bank.

The correspondent has reportedly held up the transaction but it's not clear whether that's the BS's correspondent or that of the foreign bank.

Ballard

I was wondering whether all building societies are on Swift and a quick Google search shows that there are some which aren't. I picked a few at random and Teachers Building Society & Norwich & Peterborough Building Society aren't (according to https://www.bankswiftifsccodes.com at least).

I thought that they'd almost all be on Swift so I was surprised that two out of the four I tried aren't.

ManAtHome

The societies not on the list may well transfer through another bank - TSB aren't there, but they do international transfer via Lloyds.

jonesMUFCforever

I would still like to know which countries the OP sent the monies to - this could be relevent.

Jonni_2

You'd be best off to contact and go through a foreign exchange broker / provider although different providers have strengths in certain areas / countries / currencies.

They may also be able to give you some advice on your current transaction which hasn't gone through correctly.

If you could provide the receiving currency (eg: EUR) then I could point you in the right direction. Hope this helps! Rgds.