Complaint against conversion charge for transfer between two UK USD accounts

tbird0062

We have current accounts and currency accounts (USD and EUR) with Barclays and Lloyds. Recently we transferred USD and EUR from Barclays to Lloyds. To keep it simple, we were assuming that the currency amounts would be transferred in currency without conversion into GBP, so we only asked to move monies from Bacrlays USD to Lloyds USD account and from Barclays EUR to LLoyds EUR account. We didn't ask explicitely how the transfer would work technically and the employee from Barclays didn't say anything. He only asked us to check the details on the payment instructions and that was it.

Only when we received statements from Lloyds we saw what happened. For example, 10.000 USD was taken from the Barclays account, but only 9.500 USD reached the Lloyds account. We went to Barclays and launched a formal complaint against the losses which we occured due to the transfer. Barclays explained that they could only do the transfer via CHAPS payment because there are two UK accounts on both sides of the transfer. Therefore they would have hand to convert the USD into GBP. There line of defence is that we signed the payment instructions. However, when we complained about the Barclays employee not explaining to us that CHAPS could lead to losses for the transfer (and consequently  we might not have done them in the first instance), they indicated that they might look into compensation some of the losses. However they made it clear that they would not cover the whole loss. We should complain against Lloyds for the fx rates which they used to convert the GBP amount back to USD.

We called Lloyds. They explained, that Barclays had converted the GBP back into USD and that they have received only USD. They also explained, if we would do the transfer the other way round, we would have the choice of using either CHAPS (with conversion into GBP) or international payment (without currency conversion). In the latter case we would occur fees but no loss due to cunrrency conversion.

We are now unsure to find out, what really happened. Did Bacrlays convert twice and cash in the whole profit of the money transfer via currency conversion? Or did Lloyds also do some conversion, but won't admit it. And second question is, would have there also been on side Barclays the choice of two methods for money transfer. As part of the formal complain, we will later receive a call from Barclays and I would like to prepare myself for the call with the help of this forum (more for the purpose of fact finding).

Any gudiance appreciated