kensalriser
pfm Member
Who's your bank, the Bank of 20th Century?
Payment from abroad…advice please.
- Thread starter Take5
- Start date
Bananahead
pfm Member
Indeed. And maybe you should use a better bank - I haven't been to a bank counter for about 12 years. I can send to anywhere with ebanking if I know the IBAN (not that I do because of the fees).
Clydesdale now Virgin been with them for about 35 years can't really change now anyway sending money or receiving money from abroad is super easy you don't need a bank to do that these days.
I rarely every go into the bank now either which is preferable.
Clydesdale now Virgin.
A few years ago I bought a 50mm Sumicron from a dealer in The Netherlands, the lens was about £570 the bank charged me £50 to send the guy his dosh.
Bananahead
pfm Member
Ouch
PaulMB
pfm Member
Sometimes for international payments you also need something called (I think) a BIC or Swift code (which is, in fact, part of the IBAN, but they want it separately....)
An amazing lens though, it was brand new, the serial number dated it to 1968 can’t remember the month and day now probably sometime in July.
James
Lord of the Erg\o/s
I think it is far riskier handing over your credit card details in an online shopping scenario than giving your bank account number to a stranger, local or overseas. There is zero risk that the other party can access your account in any way unless you also send them your online banking credentials (e.g. customer number, PIN, verification details etc.)
canonman
pfm Member
BIC is Bank Identifier Code
Bob McC
Living the life of Riley
Clarkson famously found that to be untrue.
robs
should know how this works by no
Revolut.
You could just open up a free online account (I think it is pretty much instantly, you'll need to provide ID etc of course) and their exchange rates are basically spot rates with no fees, so any 'charges' would probably be as low as you could get.
I opened up a business account with them, and was much impressed...so then opened a personal account for eBay/garmin pay/samsung pay etc - so only keep a few ££ in there on the basis of 'riskier' transactions.
You could just open up a free online account (I think it is pretty much instantly, you'll need to provide ID etc of course) and their exchange rates are basically spot rates with no fees, so any 'charges' would probably be as low as you could get.
I opened up a business account with them, and was much impressed...so then opened a personal account for eBay/garmin pay/samsung pay etc - so only keep a few ££ in there on the basis of 'riskier' transactions.
I have a Revolut account for when I was working and living abroad and all the follow up sorting out of payments etc.
The reason that I continued to use Wise was that the IBAN for all the Revolut accounts that I could set up was a UK one (22 letters and numbers), albeit in the required currency.
So Revolut was a good place for me to do currency conversions if I needed to (very cheaply), but no good if the sender could not use a UK IBAN (different countries can have a different number of characters (up to 34) in the IBAN).
James
Lord of the Erg\o/s
The idiot gave more than the basic bank account number away.
Bob McC
Living the life of Riley
Only the sort code which is on any cheque.
mansr
Objectionist
BIC/Swift plus account number is the old system that should work everywhere. IBAN combines it all into a single alphanumeric string, and it's the preferred identifier where supported, which is most modern countries. The USA is not a modern country. Singapore probably is.
If you do need to provide a BIC and yours has 8 letters/numbers, the sender may need to pad it with XXX at the end. I found this out the annoying way.