SteveDonovan

Does anyone have any advice on the best way to transfer Pounds to Dollars. I have a US acct and will be transfering a sum for my property deposit. Do I just transfer in to my US acct hoping they give me a fair rate or is there another method or organisation that could improve on the large bank rate? Any advice much appreciated.

Pulaski

If it's more than £10,000 ask, no, insist that your bank give you a wholesale/ market rate and they should come up with something much closer to the mid-market rate. It'll be an improvement if you have £10,000 - £25,000, but above that you should get a very competitive rate.

whatever

Pulaski?
Let me understand this..... if the average exchange rate is... let's say £1.00 = $1.64.... how much better a rate could you expect if you were to change up/transfer £75,000+?... roughly speaking?

kazzuk

I changed up £25,000+ on Thursday and got 1.606. The realtime rate at the time was 1.612

I use the Co-op Bank in the UK

Pulaski

Today's mid rate on the BBC's web site is about $1.61/£1, and the BBC shows the tourist rate as about $1.55/£.

For a sum of £75,000 you should be able to expect to get a rate of around $1.59 or more, like Kazzuk did.

In your example of a mid rate of $1.64 that would be about $1.62

g1ant

I've been changing £ to $ in my Citibank accounts for the last few weeks. Citibank use a rate that is 1.5 cents below the rate shown by the BBC which I guess equates to around 1%. I can live with that.

The thing that is pissing me off is the amount of time that UK banks take to clear cheques. I paid £20k (all cheques from UK building societies) into Citibank last Tuesday. The funds won't clear until tomorrow. 8 days!!! Someone is taking the piss.

Alex.

whatever

Jeeeeze what's their reason for taking so long???

Pulaski

It's the same if not worse in the US. .... except for cashiers' checks.

.... The reason - the time that it takes to forward the piece of paper to the clearing center, process it, pass the charge to the bank where the paying account is held, confirm that there are funds available, and then transfer the funds back through the clearing system. Much of this runs on daily batch processes, so every step takes a day.

kubwasana

Two friends of mine separated. Each had their account in the same branch of the bank in North London. Nevertheless it still took an astounding seven working days for his maintenance order to reach her account behind the same counter! When you imagine the tens of thousands of people paying maintenance or making other payments, exchanging currencies and so on, the interest these banks must make each year on that money which is "floating" in nobody's account (but the banks') must be staggering.

Pulaski

OK, that's inexcusable.

I'd guess that it was one of the old "big four" banks; and I had a similar experience with a cash deposit taking several days to hit the account it was paid into! That was several years ago athough and I don't know if it still takes that long.

By contrast I know that transfers between most accounts at Halifax occur real time - I can make a transfer and it will show up in the other account immediately.

Peter Newton

You're absolutely right - in fact the banks do add a day or two after processing is complete while they hold on to your money and use it as working capital. Unfortunately this is one way they subsiside free banking (in addition to paying little/no interest on credit balances).

I rememember NatWest got in trouble with the regulators a few years ago for holding onto peoples money for too long.

g1ant

Within the same bank ie LloydsTSB to LloydsTSB they do but moving funds from Lloyds to Citibank takes 4 days. Even though Lloyds and Citibank share the same computers and clearing facilities.

It's a con.

And I just waited 8 days for my money to clear and the rate ahs gone down 1cent. But multiply that by 21000 and I'm $210 down on the deal.