rightruccus

Need some help on what we might be doing wrong.

Before we left the UK, we transferred £10k through HIFX into our Oz account.
It was straightforward.
HIFX requested the £10k from my UK bank while we were on the phone and it was accepted by my bank, so HIFX got my money into their account immediately. Simple as i thought.

We were told during that transaction that when we moved to Oz, we'd need to contact the Sydney branch to deal in transfers. Fair enough.

I phoned Sydney today and done another £10k deal over the phone, expecting to conclude the deal in much the same way, but Sydney can't request the money from my UK account. I have 3 options to pay, which are via internet banking, telephone banking or by CHAPS transfer.

Okay i thought. I'll do it by internet banking. Nope. Limit is £2k/day. Hmmm...Okay, lets try telephone banking. Nope. Limit is £4999/day. Only other option is by CHAPS which my bank charges £24 per CHAPS transfer.
Downside is they need to send out the form, i need to fill it, then it needs to get sent back to my branch to authorise the payment to HIFX's account (which is in the UK!). I tried to get them to E-mail me the form and i'd fax it back, but they said they couldn't accept that. They had to have my actual signature on the form.

As you can see, this is going to take some time to do and if we want to change over the bulk of our money, i can see problems ahead.

I've now decided to send £2k/day over the next 5 days to complete my side of the transaction in time as waiting for forms will put me out the timescale.

The question is, how does everybody else transfer their money? We've got 6 figures to move. Surely there must be an easier way to do it than forms going back and forth. You'd have thought if you'd proved to your bank over the phone who you are (or even by internet banking and its' security), that would be enough to authorise payment, however much to move from one account to another.

Any help or experience appreciated

DEEDEE01

Hiya Hun,

You shouldn't have so much money then

Only joking, it must be damn annoying, we were told the same, but we will only have £4k to transfer so we are doing that straight away and thats done, no more money for us !

Donna.
x

rightruccus

Hee hee.
They say money's the root of all evil, well i'll tell ya, the banks are evil for makin' it difficult to get access to your money when you want it!

Knew i should have left it under me mattress....

hoveactually

This is exactly what happened to us, except that I had brought a CHAPS transfer form with me from the UK thinking that I would be able to fax it to the branch when I needed them to put the money through. We were unable to find a way round it and just had to post the CHAPS form back to the service centre on the day we did the forex deal and then sit with fingers crossed hoping that it didn't get lost in the system. We, too, were transferring the proceeds of the sale of our house so it was a very stressful time. Fortunately it all went through smoothly and in good time. I also sent a covering letter with the CHAPS transfer form explaining what was happening and included my telephone number so that they could contact me with any queries; a very nice young man telephoned me (late at night, waking me up!) and asked a host of questions to satisfy himself that the request was genuine.
Good luck.

MarkMC

I had the same trouble - when trying to buy a car in the last few weeks, I ended up paying for it on my uk debit card. $4000 a day over the week. Lost out a little bit, but saved a lot of hastle.

Just ring the UK HIFX office and tell them you are still in the UK and do the deal that way, just hope you do not get the delay I seem to have had with my last few calls home.

TillyG

We recently did a transfer with OzForex and they were fine about me not being able to transfer all the money to their account in one go - I was sending GBP 12000 but my internet banking had a limit of £10k per day so I just set up the other £2k to be sent the following working day.

I had "locked in" a rate with them so there wasn't a massive sense of urgency, just kind of "asap please" really.

mark213

yes there are two other ways...
1. setup telephone banking with them before you go - this has different limits to regular internet banking
2. ask someone to have power of attorney back in the uk over your account (like a friend/relative you trust).

I have my parents managing my uk account - until such a time that they come here. After that - think i'll just have to close it.

rightruccus

Our bank in the UK is sending out half a dozen forms for us in the future. I phoned them back to ask if they could E-mail the forms out and i'd fax it back to them, but they said no because they need to see an original signature (and not a faxed signature), so it has to be sent by Airmail or whatever other means.

No can do. When you try to trade in Australia, you have to go through the same registration process as we did in the UK. When we enquired of our problem, it became obvious that we weren't in the UK because your client number gives it away, plus the UK cannot access your contract if it was done in Oz.
As a tip for anyone else. In the UK, you can access how the contract is proceeding online, but Australia does not have that facility, therefore you can't see if the funds have reached HIFX's account and when tthe settlement is due into the receiving bank. The strange thing is though, that when you do a trade in Oz, you pay the funds into HIFX's UK account....

When we were on the phone to HIFX UK last night, we did ask the question though about trading with the UK branch, but they said because we were not in the country, we can't trade with them, it has to be in the country you're in.

When we phoned HIFX Sydney today, they were fine about it as well, as long as they were aware of the situation. With regard to ours, the limits on internet banking and telephone banking had only recently been reduced and is designed to protect customers from fraudsters accessing your account details. What i've found out subsequently is rather than paying the "limit" everyday 'til transaction is complete, we can pay more into HIFX account at any one time if we forward trade funds e.g. i can pay £2k/day or up to £5k if i forward trade it a day later. This is on internet banking only and to be honest i'd prefer to do it that way cause call centres as most of you will have experienced can be, well, frustrating shall we say.

Good point Mark. I might look into that, though we've just set up a trade at a fixed rate for the rest of our money. Hopefully it will hit the trigger point, if not, well....