International Money Transfer Issue - Loss in Currency Conversion

baldur on 15/10/2017 - 08:35
Last edited 15/10/2017 - 11:17 by 1 other user

Hi people,
I made a five digit international money transfer last week. I work with nab. I used a swift code in my transaction. My friend's account's currency is Australian dollar and I sent Australian dollar too. But the issue is money was converted to the local currency which I never requested and due to their bloody rate I lost 600 dollars. My friend says in his bank statement it says an eft transaction from another local bank. So is it possible NAB sent it to the wrong bank and then they converted the money and send it to my friend's bank account?

What should I do now? Messaged NAB about this and im going to the branch midweek too, but what do you think the problem is in this case?

Related Stores

National Australia Bank Group (NAB)

• 

  whooah1979 on 15/10/2017 - 08:47

  +4

  My friend says in his bank statement it says an eft transaction from another local bank.

  it looks like this is how your friend's country process imt. your friend may have to get of their backside and ask their bank.

  https://www.nab.com.au/personal/help-and-guidance/terms-and-…

  2.3 Other financial service providers involved in connection with the processing of an international transfer instruction may perform further currency conversions to facilitate the processing of that instruction without reference to the beneficiary of the international transfer, the applicant or NAB.

  • 

    baldur on 15/10/2017 - 09:18

    Thank you. Seems like I have nothing to do.

• 

  toniyellow on 15/10/2017 - 10:01

  +1

  If you need to transfer again in the future try one of these, much better rates than the big banks

  https://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/ofx.com
  https://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/currencyfair.com
  https://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/transferwise.com

  • 

    mick123 on 15/10/2017 - 10:30

    +1

    Yes, but the OP sent AUD for beneficiary to receive AUD.

    OP, in future, if sending AUD and you do not want converted, then you may need to put in reference/message "Please do not convert currency". NAB may have converted to your friend's country currency and then the beneficiary bank, noting your friend's account is AUD, converted it back, so you may have got hit with 2 poor exchange rate hits.

    • 

      baldur on 15/10/2017 - 10:40

      I sent 12800 aud and lost 600 dollars. You may be right.

• 

  peterpeterpumpkin on 15/10/2017 - 11:47

  +1

  Ouch!! As others have stated, I think there was a miscommunication somewhere since $600 is huge for an incoming same currency transfer of $12800. What was the destination country? There are (even) Paypal destinations that have cross border fees of only 0.5%!

  For whatever reason, a lot of the specialised foreign transfer companies don't let you do same currency transfers, and when they do it's restricted to "business accounts".

  For whatever other reason, Australia, NZ and Singapore are among the few wealthy countries that still can't open a Transferwise "Borderless" account (https://transferwise.com/help/article/2833110/borderless-acc…), which does allow receiving AUD pseudo-locally. Your foreign residing friend might have access though. The main benefit of this account is that your friend doesn't make other people mess around with SWIFT, can convert at Transferwise rates at anytime and only pays on average around AUD $1 equivalent to withdraw to his local bank.

  • 

    KaTst3R on 15/10/2017 - 13:25

    +1

    Could be anti money laundering restrictions? Singapore has really tightened up banking money flow in recent years.

• 

  baldur on 15/10/2017 - 11:49

  Turkey. I was going to try transferwise but it was some sort of urgent and I thought direct bank transfer would have been faster.

  • 

    peterpeterpumpkin on 15/10/2017 - 12:44

    +1

    Ah OK. I think most of us here interpreted your story differently. The money was sent to a multi-currency Turkish Bank account but you're saying the money arrived in the normal Turkish Lira sub-account (i.e. converted) instead. In that case both you and your friend can enquire with your banks separately.

    Assuming the transfer was urgent, then my understanding is your friend was in fact planning to convert to Lira all along anyway? In that case he would have been held at the mercy of his bank's exchange rate anyway.

    In effect, you ended up paying Western Union exchange rates (~5%), which would have been instant (but you may be limited to $5000 a transfer). If appropriate to the situation, you could always setup the transferwise or other company's account and only transfer the urgent amounts now. Transferwise has fixed fees (1% or so to Turkey) so may not be the cheapest at the larger amounts you're transferring. You can compare on monito.com.

    And Paypal was forced to pull out of Turkey last year when the government demanded they keep their servers in Turkey. But if your friend was planning to convert the currency anyway it wouldn't be a great idea to rely on Paypal for currency conversions…

    • 

      baldur on 15/10/2017 - 12:55

      Yep. I sent the funds as in Australian dollar currency to an Australian dollar account in a Turkish bank. He opened an Australian dollar bank account so that our money wouldn't be converted. But I don't know why somehow it was converted which I wasn't warned before or something.

      • 

        peterpeterpumpkin on 15/10/2017 - 13:24

        +1

        In that case it's definitely something to speak to the banks about.

        Your currency was converted somewhere along the line so your 5% EFT loss is typical (without needing to account for double conversions, hidden fees etc).

• 

  chickenchipsgravy on 15/10/2017 - 12:11

  +1

  i suspect the funds were sent AUD, recipient bank converted to USD, converting USD to local currency, Lira and then Lira into AUD - clipping the ticket the entire way at your expense. this is fairly typical of non genuine domiciled currency accounts.

  • 

    baldur on 15/10/2017 - 12:13

    Recipient received the money as Turkish lira. So I think it was converted once. Who do you think converted it? I mean I'm sure I sent it as aud.

    • 

      dcep on 15/10/2017 - 14:18

      +1

      you said your friend opened aud account ?

      how does aud account receive lira ?

      • 

        baldur on 15/10/2017 - 14:26

        I think it went into a sub account then like mentioned above, I asked him and I'll update this according to his answer.

      • 

        baldur on 15/10/2017 - 22:09

        he got the money in his turkish lira account.

    • 

      retiredfeline on 15/10/2017 - 14:28

      +1

      Sometime ago when I was still using bank transfer I had two choices on the remittance form, convert to target currency here, or there. Obviously you should not take the former. But you have an additional wrinkle in that according to you, recipient has an AUD account, so you might have had to give additional instructions.

• 

  Ocker on 15/10/2017 - 15:34

  +1

  The routing of international payments can be quite complicated, involving several legs with the potential for a bank in the chain to charge their own fees.

  S.W.I.F.T. is the international payments system used by banks, and the SWIFT code is the receiving banks unique identifier code. Note the receiving bank of the funds may not be the intended ultimate recipient bank, rather the bank where the recipient bank has an account to receive international funds.

  The starting point to work out why you got charged fees would be to know what SWIFT code you used.

• 

  baldur on 16/10/2017 - 12:20

  got this message below:

  Dear Customer,
  In order to resolve this issue our intermediary bank requires funds to be
  returned to them so they can arrange to re-effect this payment to your
  quoted
  beneficiary account in the original currency.
  We have today arranged to send a message to our intermediary to recall and
  re-effect this payment to resolve this matter. In addition we generally
  find
  that if you are able to advise your beneficiary to reject and return these
  funds it will likely expedite the process.
  We apologise for the inconvenience this issue has caused you and hope that
  we
  can resolve this matter as soon as possible.
  If you require anything further please feel free to communicate to us via
  this
  channel.
  Kind Regards,
  NAB International Payment Investigations