payments from german bank to Lloyds bank

Womble1994

I am expecting money into my Sterling Lloyds account from a German bank.  I gave the company i did the work for an invoice in Euros so they have paid Euros.

They made the payment on 30th April and we are now at 8th May and I am still waiting for the money to come into my account.   Is this normal ?  Lloyds say that the German bank converts it to STG so its them that's holding it up, however the German bank seem to think its Lloyds fault ?  Anyone know who i should be chasing ?  Thanks

Brie

converts it to STG*?  What's that?  Shouldn't it be converted from EUR to GBP?  

Normally the German bank should be able to trace the transaction possibly through conversion and to the time it left their system and went to Lloyds.  There should be a transaction reference number which they can provide.  Lloyds would be able to see this coming into their system and should be able to trace it from there. 

Very likely there was some confusion on the conversion from EUR to GBP - principally on who was doing this - so the money has gone into a suspense account somewhere.  My guess would be with Lloyds as they would have no control on the money coming in and so don't know where to look for it or how much they are actually looking for in which currency.  

*Unless someone is saying STG when they mean sterling which of course is GBP.  Which makes me think that whomever you talked to at Lloyds doesn't know a thing about foreign exchange.

friolento

Too late now but if you expect a similar transaction in future, you could consider a Wise account. You client can pay into your Wise EUR account, and you can change into Pounds yourself. It is fast, and you are likely to get a much better deal, too

As to your payment into Lloyds, you’ll just have to wait until they find it…assuming the payment was sent to the correct account 

Hoenir

If there's an intermediary bank(s) involved  transfers are far from instanteous. 

Ballard

Hoenir said:

If there's an intermediary bank(s) involved  transfers are far from instanteous. 

I’d say that this depends on the circumstances. We see posts detailing delays but people have no reason to post that a transfer went well so this evidence is skewed. There must be tens of millions of cross border payments daily and I suspect that the vast majority are credited the same day.

Swift payments can go serial or parallel. If it’s serial (sending MT103 to correspondent) then that might introduce a delay but parallel (send MT202 to correspondent and MT103 to beneficiary bank) is more likely to be same day. 

lon_don

The payment crossed 2 bank holidays, 1/5 (Labour Day closed for EUR clearing, as well as Germany), 6/5 (closed for GBP clearing). 8/5 is only T+4bd from 30/4.