Any way to pay less receiving money from abroad?

grumbler

sgt_bilko wrote: »

Is it a little bit more or considerably more?

As said above, some banks, including Halifax, charge a flat fee for incoming international transfers. Nationwide doesn't.

In your case it's £7. I have no idea where jonesMUFCforever got his "between £5 and £12".
http://www.halifax.co.uk/onlinebankinghelp/international-payments/

The exchange rate can vary a little too, but it's difficult to predict as it's not published.

jonesMUFCforever

grumbler wrote: »

As said above, some banks, including Halifax, charge a flat fee for incoming international transfers. Nationwide doesn't.

In your case it'a £7. I have no idea where jonesMUFCforever got his "between £5 and £12".
http://www.halifax.co.uk/onlinebankinghelp/international-payments/

The exchange rate can vary a little too, but it's difficult to predict as it's not published.

In my maths class £7 is definitely between £5 and £12!

grumbler

Well, for <£100 they charge £2

mapk

When transferring from an overseas account to a UK bank account, I need to indicate whether commission is charged to the party receiving funds or shared by both parties. There may be further charges incurred if an intermediary bank is involved.

I have generally found the former to be cheaper although, from my experience, there seems to be little consistency or transparency in charges applied. This seems likely to be due more to the policies of the bank of origin and intermediary bank than UK banks which I have used to receive funds.

My question: which UK bank provides the cheapest service to receive funds?

eDicky

mapk wrote: »

When transferring from an overseas account to a UK bank account, I need to indicate whether commission is charged to the party receiving funds or shared by both parties. There may be further charges incurred if an intermediary bank is involved.

I have generally found the former to be cheaper although, from my experience, there seems to be little consistency or transparency in charges applied. This seems likely to be due more to the policies of the bank of origin and intermediary bank than UK banks which I have used to receive funds.

My question: which UK bank provides the cheapest service to receive funds?

I don't know the answer to your question offhand, but if you use a broker such as TransferWise or CurrencyFair instead of transferring bank-to-bank, you can cut out all bank charges. The UK bank receives the funds from the broker as a BACS or FP free transfer. Depending on the country of the overseas account, there is probably such a solution, best exchange rate and nominal charge by the broker.

sgt_bilko_2

Just a quick update on this in case it helps others in the future. After some digging it turned out the heavy costs were entirely down the Halifax who are basically applying a horrible exchange rate on top of the basic fee for receiving the money and last month this cost me almost £300...

Halifax don't do dollar accounts so they have basically forced me to look elsewhere and I've just opened a standard current account with First Direct who will then open me a dollar account. Barclays or HSBC would have also been an option.

After that I will basically send the dollars to an exchange broker so they come back to the main account as pounds and save a hefty amount of money over the period of a year.

All off this is a bit of a hassle and I wouldn't bother if it was just one payment but with regular amounts coming in I can't just sit back and allow the Halifax to raid my income like this.

grumbler

sgt_bilko wrote: »

After that I will basically send the dollars to an exchange broker

Well, it's not as 'basic' as you think:

£10 to a HSBC account
£25 to a non-HSBC account

www1.firstdirect.com/1/2/Foreignpayments

I guess the $ account is not free too.
And don't think that it will be cheaper even if the broker is in UK.

sgt_bilko_2

I know about that and it's not great but still an awful lot less overall than I am losing with the Halifax when money is deposited into my account. It costs me nothing to open or keep a dollar account.

grumbler

A free $ account in UK is something unusual nowadays. Any link or more information?

sgt_bilko_2

I did it all over the phone because I had a few questions for them, so I don't have a link I can point you to, though they will be sending me more information in the post shortly. If you phone the main number you speak to the main call staff who generally know very little about currency accounts but they can transfer you to the foreign section.

Like all these things time will tell how it works in practice but the foreign section didn't treat me like I was making some sort of crazy request and said they had lots of clients with currency accounts who then exchange money into pounds through services like transferwise.