RKS_in_Calgary

Hi, I’m really hoping someone can help us. We moved back to the uk from Canada this summer and are buying a house here with the deposit bring the proceeds of our house sale in Canada which is currently sitting in our TD bank account. We are trying to find a way to send the money back here. TD tells us we are limited to transferring very low amounts each month due to international money laundering regulations. XE Monet transfer company day they can only pre-authorize transfer of $30000 per month. We need to bring a few hundred thousand but don’t seem to be able to find a way to do this. Banks here won’t accept a personal check in Canadian dollars and money transfer company’s don’t seem to be able to held. Does anyone have any ideas please and thank you. We don’t want to do anything illegal but it’s looking like we will have to pull out of the house purchase if we cannot revolve this very soon.

thanks in advance

MidAtlantic

Talk to torfx: https://www.torfx.com/
Unlike many of the currency on-line transfer companies they are easy to talk to and extremely helpful.
I do not believe there are restrictions on how much you can transfer from Canada to the UK.

Elnino05

blokeandbird

xe.com offer a decent service, give them a try.

MidAtlantic

The OP says that xe.com would only authorize 30,000 per month.

Recent experience has been that xe.com rates/fees are no longer competitive.

ianandhelena

What about OFX?

https://www.ofx.com/en-au/faqs/what-...-can-transfer/

spouse of scouse

Another vote for OFX. I've used them for around 10 years, including one large transaction of $AU500,000, which was the proceeds from the sale of our house in Oz.

If it hasn't changed, the application process was quite easy. Fill in an online form accompanied by some scanned ID, then someone from OFX calls you to verify. An email's sent once your account has been set up.

I check fx rates before I send money and OFX consistently gave really good rates. The only issue I encountered with the large transfer was sending my funds to the OFX account, my bank only allows me to transfer up to $100,000 per day. Got around that by transferring that amount each day for 5 days.

An important point, if you're transferring large amounts, call the broker desk. You'll invariably be able to negotiate a more favourable rate than the 'spot rate' that's offered when you do the transaction online.

RKS_in_Calgary

Thank you alll for your responses. We are familiar with money transfer companies having used them to move money to Canada when we moved our there, the issue was with TD Canada trust and the Canadian money laundering laws.in order to get total sum of the money transferred to a money transfer company (Xe.com, torfx or similar) eventually came down to two options. 1. Close the Canadian bank account (in which case TD would mail us a check for the full balance. Unfortunately as we don’t have a multi currency account in the uk, we would not able to cash this check (plus it meant trusting a check for a large sum of money to the mail) or 2. fly to Canada, go into our bank, and the bank would then wire transfer the amount we wanted to move to the money transfer company. We wanted to avoid these options but there didn’t seem to be another way to move the total amount in one go. So hubby flew to Canada in Saturday to spen a short time in the bank yesterday arranging the wire transfer. Frustrating but we got the money.

RKS_in_Calgary

Should mention, to get to the two options i mentioned above, hubby spent two days on the phone to money transfer companies and our bank in Canada, plus our uk bank. It’s been a bit of a painful (and costly) learning curve

MidAtlantic

Too late for the OP now, but for anyone else who comes to this thread one solution may have been the Transferwise Borderless Account.

Novocastrian

Unless there've been changes to the "Canadian money-laundering laws" in the last few years, the person(s) you talked to at TD are just plain wrong. All you need is proof of the source of the funds, i.e. the house sale documents to transfer the funds to your UK bank (provide the UK IBAN as mentioned). The same applies to Transferwise and the other FX companies.

RKS_in_Calgary

We spoke to multiple people, both at our branch (via phone) and via phone banking service and all gave us the same answer so perhaps things have changed (or TD is stricter than other banks?). We also spoke to a friend of ours who works in TD investments section and he confirmed the same advice. Apparently the issue is because we are not there in person. My husband had no problem moving the entire amount we wanted to move when he went to the branch in person (after flying back specially). Even the money transfer companies said they couldnt do a pre-authorise direct deposit where they request the money rather than us initiatting the transfer, for more than $25-30K (around that amount, I forget the exact amount) every month.

ah well, we now have the money so are sort, plus hubby got a nice trip back

Novocastrian

Looking back I see you said that upthread, but it failed to register with me. Apologies.

Mike Gas

Would like to hear other peoples recent experiences on moving large amounts of money to fx companies from Canadian bank accounts as we are sitting with are life savings still in Canada,and not sure if we will need UK pound or Euro and timing.

Mrchuffie1

Hello, We are currently thinking of moving back to the UK. Last week we asked our credit union about limits on sending amounts back and they said there were none and would only charge $40 / wired transfer. I think that banks are not as accommodating about these things. As others have said try talking to someone else there. Our experience in trying to find things out about moving back has taught us that it's always worthwhile asking someone else as some people just don't know what they're doing.e.g we were told that we couldn't receive our RRIF payments in the UK. We continued to question this and found out this statement was utterly false.