Payment by wire transfer from UK to EU?

[para1949]

Hi!
I am starting a company that mainly deals with other companies but occasionally will have individuals as customers (and as a small company all customers are valuable) from countries within the european union (we are located in Sweden). Now we are planning what kind of payment options that are suitable, and from our perspective a wire transfer to our account (in advance) is preffered as this is simple and relatively fast. However I've heard that bank transfers from the UK are abnormally prices with banks requiring anything from 10 to 30 pounds per transfer. Is this true? In sweden all transfers to other EU member states are totally free of charge so I was a little bit surprised to hear this information. If we are talking about large orders this is not a major problem however if the total sum lies around 75 pounds it is quite a large extra amount to pay. Also I have one final question, is it possible to do these kind of international payment through standard online banking in the UK?

Thank you!

 

[wolfluecker]

I bet the charges are prohibitive for such small amounts. I haven't done a transfer to the EU for ages, but it used to be a fixed fee of around £15. As an ex-pat German in the UK I marvelled at that European court ruling some time ago which told banks not to charge more than 1.50 Euros (or whatever it is) for transfers inside the EU. UK excluded, of course.

And no, at least from my two online banking implementations (Barclays/Co-operative Bank) I can't do international transfers. There's no facility to enter an IBAN number or anything.

Hey, it's an island after all.

 

[SpeedyExpressCouriers]

A friend was being charged £30 from Barclays to transfer money to China but that was about 6 months ago, don't know if that has changed because he has stopped trading.

Somebody from the EU sent us £126 a couple of days ago and Barclays charged £6 to accept the payment.

If you set up a bank account here (UK) the bank may charge you a fee for transfering the money abroad but you will have to check that with the bank.

 

[KM-Tiger]

Somebody from the EU sent us £126 a couple of days ago and Barclays charged £6 to accept the payment.

Not sure how it works in other EU countries, but in UK you can choose to meet the recipients charges or not. HSBC let you do it online, even with the UK BIB now, but it's not free.

Interesting to see that our Swedish colleague, can do this with no charges. Typical of rip-off UK that we pay through the nose, Perhaps it is good for us, like all that tax we pay!

For small transactions, isn't Credit Card the way to go?

 

[dagr]

Bank transfers to/from UK (and quite a few other countries) are a pain because of the high relative costs, although the overhead becomes less of a problem the bigger the amount.

As suggested above, credit card is a possibility (although they will still take a whack for international transactions, it's just a bit less obvious), or maybe set up an Internet payment account (like Paypal) in the UK.

 

[para1949]

Thanks for your replies! A great help.
And yes, credit cards is something we have taken into consideration however a merchant account is rather expensive as we probably only will have a few transactions each month (and most swedish banks that offer merchant accounts then have a fixed monthly fee plus percentage of each transaction). PayPal is of course an alternative but we have heard a lot of horror stories about them (which you probably shouldnt listen to too much but anyway) and we can't afford to have our income locked at their bank for any period of time at all. Does anybody have experience with Moneybookers.com? They seem to have very low fees and are supposedly regulated by british authorities but I have also heard that they are considered less "serious" due to the fact that they often are involved in profits from on-line gambling.

But I guess that if standard IBAN transfers really cost 10 pounds or more we really have to offer some alternative, and maybe then PayPal or Moneybookers are our best bet.

Again, thanks!

 

[Arhiann]

Try either:

http://www.afex.com

or

http://www.ruesch.com/

Afex is a flat fee of £5.00 per transfer, and there are no intermediary fees for the recipient to pay. They don't cover some of the more exotic currencies though, but EUR will be fine.

Ruesch were flat fee of £10 last time I used them, but can cover the exotics. No intermediary fee either.

I don't use the onine services they provide, but you can pay online. All I do is send an email to make the transfer and generally it's there within two days. China can take longer though. Far easier than filling out the paperwork the bank provide.

 

[SuffolkDesigns]

Interesting to see that our Swedish colleague, can do this with no charges. Typical of rip-off UK that we pay through the nose, Perhaps it is good for us, like all that tax we pay!

I think most European banks don't charge for transfers within the EU, or if they do it is very little. I pay a standard transfer fee for transferring money to the UK and each transfer costs me about 25p

 

[Erlen]

For info, the EU rule is that within the Euro zone, the cost of money transfer (but also getting money from the cash machine) must not be higher than the domestic fees. The results is that I can for example get 100Euros from a cash machine in Finland and I will not pay a single extra Euro cent, because it is free to do so in France where my bank account is located.

 

I have clients in the Netherlands who pay by BACS transfer. The cost is usually around £6 or £7 and I expect my clients to pay the cost of transfer. If they opt to pay by PayPal, which I also offer, I calculate the cost of the fee and tack it on to their invoice.

 

[Christiane]

Try either:

afex.com

or

ruesch.co

Afex is a flat fee of £5.00 per transfer, and there are no intermediary fees for the recipient to pay. They don't cover some of the more exotic currencies though, but EUR will be fine.

Ruesch were flat fee of £10 last time I used them, but can cover the exotics. No intermediary fee either.

I don't use the onine services they provide, but you can pay online. All I do is send an email to make the transfer and generally it's there within two days. China can take longer though. Far easier than filling out the paperwork the bank provide.

When I saw this post yesterday, I thought ''great''! Abbey want to charge me £25 for wire transfers. Unfortunately, Afex requires regular transfers with minimum £10,000 / month. As for Reusch, it's £50k a year! Sounds like Abbey will get my £25 after all....