UK - How to receive payments in euros
"See my comment below about the official exchange rate. There is no ""official"" exchange rate to apply as far as I'm aware.   However the bank is already applying the same exchange rate you can   find in the forex markets. They are simply applying a spread (meaning   they will add some amount to the exchange rate whichever way you are   exchanging currency). You will almost certainly not find a bank that   doesn't apply a spread. Of course, their spread might be large, so   that's why it is good to compare rates. By the way, 5 GBP/month seems   reasonable for a foreign currency (or any) acct. The transaction fees   might be cheaper in a different ""package"" so check. You should consider trying PayPal. Their spread is quite small - and publicly disclosed - and their per-transaction fees are very low. Of course, this is not a bank account. But you can easily connect it to your bank account and transfer the money between accounts quickly. They also offer free foreign currency accounts that you can basically open and close in a click. Transfers are instantaneous. I am based in Germany but I haven't had a problem with clients from various English-speaking countries using PayPal. They actually seem to prefer it in many instances." "I am not sure about transferwise and how they work, but generally when I had to transfer money across countries, I ended up using a foreign currency/transfer company who needed the destination account details i.e. a GBP account in the UK in your case, and money from the source account. Basically that means your father would need to open an EUR account, probably in an EU country (is this an option?) but may be in the UK is fine too depending on transfer fees. And a GBP account in the UK, perhaps see if there is a better business account than HSBC around, I have used them as well as Santander before. The only FX transaction done in this straightforward set up is the one performed by the specialised company (there are a few) - and their spread (difference between interbank i.e. ""official"" and your price) is likely to be around 1.0 - 1.5%. The other expenses are transfer fees to the FX company account, say a flat fee of $25 for the SWIFT payment. The full amount less the spread above then goes to your UK GBP account. There are still the running costs of both EUR and GBP accounts of course, but here the advice would be just to shop around for offers/free banking periods etc. Point being, given the saving in FX conversion, it might still be a better overall deal than just letting HSBC deal with it all."
I did this for a few years and the best way I found was via http://xe.com/ It uses a bank transfer from your UK bank to xe.com (no fees from bank or xe). On the Canadian side, they use EFT (Electronic Fund Transfer, no fees from bank or xe.com) They have very competitive exchange rates. To make a transfer, you log in to xe and arrange your transfer. This locks in the rate and tells you how many GBP you need to transfer in. Then, transfer your money from the UK bank into xe using the details they provide. Two or three days later the money shows up in your Canadian acount. There's a bit of paperwork they need to set it up but it's not very hard. After it's set up, everything else is online. Enjoy! Typically, you can chose in the transfer if you want to transfer in target currency or in source currency. If you chose source currency, the receiving bank (for you, in India) does the conversion, and charges the fees. If you chose target currency, the sending bank does the conversion and charges the fees. The advantage is that they offer to generate a defined amount in the target currency, so you can pay a bill exactly. Either way, one of the two banks is going to charge you. It absolutely depends on the banks which fee is higher. From personal experience, between Europe and the US, either direction mostly the receiving bank is cheaper ('incoming fees' are set lower than 'outgoing'). I can't say for India; you need to check with your bank. how could I transfer the money from UK There are multiple ways, walk into your Bank and ask them to wire transfer to the Bank Account in India. You would need the SWIFT BIC of Bank in India, Account Number, etc. Quite a few Banks [State bank of India, HDFC, ICICI etc] also offer remittance service. Visit their website for more details. does it cost the tax and how much Assuming your status is NRI [Non Resident], there is no tax implications of this in India. There is (at least) one service that allows you to convert USD, GBP and EUR at the interbank spot rate, and make purchases using a prepaid MasterCard in many more currencies (also at the interbank rate). They currently don't charge any fees (as of September 2015). You could use your US prepaid card to fund your account with Revolut and then spend them in your local currency (HRK?) without fees (you can check the current USD/HRK rate with their currency calculator); you can also withdraw to non-EUR SEPA-enabled bank accounts, but then your bank would charge you for the necessary currency conversion (both by fees and their exchange rate). If you have a bank account in EUR, you could alternatively convert your USD balance to EUR and then withdraw that to your EUR bank account. If your US prepaid card has a corresponding bank account which can be used for ACH direct debit or domestic wire transfers (ask the issuer if you are unsure), TransferWise or a similar service might also be an option; they allow you to fund a transaction using one of those methods and then credit an account in Deutsche Bank states here (couldn't find it in english) that SEPA transfers (all transfers in EUR to EU states that have EUR) are free. So you could just transfer the money. Your custom daily transfer limit (by default 1000€ for online banking transfers) applies. You can change the limit online or by going to one of their branches. You would then transfer your money over the course of several days. You need the SWIFT and BIC code of your new account. This is not allowed, and there is a name for it: IBAN discrimination. Searching for that term will give you some pointers what to do about it. The EU regulation that prohibits this is 260/2012, article 9, paragraph 2: A payee accepting a credit transfer or using a direct debit to collect funds from a payer holding a payment account located within the Union shall not specify the Member State in which that payment account is to be located, provided that the payment account is reachable in accordance with Article 3. You can report this at the relevant national authorities. In the Netherlands, this is De Nederlandsche Bank, which has a special e-mail address for this: meldpuntIBANdiscriminatie@dnb.nl I can't comment about your tax liability in Greece. You will have to pay tax on interest in the UK. If you are earning massive amounts of interest, unlikely with the current interest policies from Merv, then you might be bumped up a tier. The receiving bank may ask for proof of the source of the funds, particularly if it is a fair chunk of change. Keep it simple, there is a good comparison site where you plug in how much money you want to send, and it tells you what all the major providers will end up giving you in Euros on the other end. Lots of the 'free' services give you a shit exchange rate. GBP->EUR is very competitive so when you go with non-banks you can pay very little (down to 0.1% in exchange rate differences). https://www.fxcompared.com/ is one such site. I plugged in sending 10,000 GBP to Spain, and TorFX came out best with you (at this moment in time) receiving 12,547 euros. You could use paypal to transfer money. You can pay with paypal and your UK contact could transfer the money to his bank account through paypal. I just received money this way from the US and paid 9 EUR for this. Receiving the funds is as quickly as clicking a button on the paypal site. Transfering it (without costs) took 1-3 days). It is by far the easiest way. If you are uncomfortable using paypal, the other option would be through your own bank account, where you would transfer using IBAN/SWIFT. The SWIFT bank account is usually the IBAN code plus a branch code. Often it is difficult to find the branch code, in that case you can use the IBAN+XXX. In the latter things might be delayed, but I actually haven't noticed the delay yet, since international transfer always seem to take between 1 and 10 days. The international transfering of money costs, except if it is within the EU region. The way to transfer money through Internet banking differs, from bank to bank. They keywords you need to look for are: SEPA, SWIFT, IBAN or international transfer. If I understand your question, you're misunderstanding the buy/sell spread, and at least in this instance seem to be in an unfortunate situation where the spread is quite large. The Polish Zloty - GBP ideal exchange rate is around 5.612:1.  Thus, when actually exchanging currency, you should expect to pay a bit more than 5.612 Zloty (Zloties?) to get one Pound sterling, and you should expect to get a bit less than 5.612 Zloty in exchange for one Pound sterling.  That's because you're giving the bank its cut, both for operations and so that it has a reason to hold onto some Zloty (that it can't lend out).  It sounds like Barclay's has a large spread - 5.211 Buy, 5.867 Sell.  I would guess British banks don't need all that many Zloty, so you have a higher spread than you would for USD or EUR. Other currency exchange companies or banks, particularly those who are in the primary business of converting money, may have a smaller spread and be more willing to do it inexpensively for you.  Also, it looks like the Polish banks are willing to do it at a better rate (certainly they're giving you more Zloty for one Pound sterling, so it seems likely the other way would be better as well, though since they're a Polish bank it's certainly easier for them to give you Zloty, so this may be less true).  Barclay's is certainly giving you a better deal on Pounds for a Zloty than they are Zloty for a Pound (in terms of how far off their spread is from the ideal). "Any clearing/ legal experts out there?  Is this possible- and if so, is it that big of a deal? Here are my thoughts:  1. The EU is right to request euros to be cleared on ""home soil"" for sovereignty reasons since 2/3s of euro currency is cleared in London.  2. Moving euro clearing back to the eurozone... would just mirror US regulations.  Whats the big deal?" Is there not some central service that tracks current currency rates that banks can use to get currency data? Sure.  But this doesn't matter.  All the central service can tell you is how much the rate was historically.  But the banks/PayPal don't care about the historical value.  They want to know the price that they'll pay when they get around to switching, not the last price before the switch.  Beyond that, there is a transaction cost to switching.  They have to pay the clearinghouse for managing the transaction.   The banks can choose to act as a clearinghouse, but that increases their risk.  If the bank has a large balance of US dollars but dollars are falling, then they end up eating that cost.  They'll only take that risk if they think that they'll make more money that way.  And in the end, they may have to go on the currency market anyway.  If a European bank runs out of US dollars, they have to buy them on the open market.  Or a US bank might run out of Euros.  Or Yen.  Etc.   Another problem is that many of the currency transactions are small, but the overhead is fixed.  If the bank has to pay $5 for every currency transaction, they won't even break even charging 3% on a $100 transaction.  So they delay the actual transaction so that they can make more than one at a time.  But then they have the risk that the currency value might change in the meantime.  If they credit you with $97 in your account ($100 minus the 3% fee) but the price actually drops from $100 to $99, they're out the $1.   They could do it the other way as well.  You ask for a $100 transaction.  They perform a $1000 transaction, of which they give you $97.  Now they have $898 ($1000 minus the $5 they paid for the transaction plus the $3 they charged you for the transaction).  If there's a 1% drop, they're out $10.98 ($8.98 in currency loss plus a net $2 in fees).   This is why banks have money market accounts.  So they have someone to manage these problems working twenty-four hours a day.  But then they have to pay interest on those accounts, further eating into their profits.  Along with paying a staff to monitor the currency markets and things that may affect them. The company says it's out of their control - it isn't. All they have to do is to INSTRUCT HSBC to send a certain amount of GBP, and then HSBC MUST send GBP.  Obviously the bank doesn't like that because they make money through the conversion. That's not your problem. When told to send GBP, they must send GBP.  Depending on what your relationship with that company is, you lost money because they didn't send the GBP. At the very least, they sent you four percent less in Euros than they should have sent you. So send them a bill for the difference. It's unfortunate that your bank charged for the conversion Euro to GBP, but fact is that less than the agreed amount arrived at your bank, and that's the responsibility of the sender. It really depends on the amount of money - I currently have to pay my mortgage in the UK from the US until my house there is sold and my wife sends money from her (US) Paypal account to my UK Paypal account. As personal payments these don't attract the sort of fees you see for ebay payments et al. Compared to the fee-o-rama that a wire transfer turns into (I tried once from BofA to HSBC UK), it is noticeably cheaper for the amount of money we're sending. That said, a lot of the currency transfer services have support for monthly payments and you might get a decent exchange rate and fewer (or no) fees that way. The website http://currencyfair.com/ provides a service which gives you both a decent exchange rate (about 1% off from mid-market rate) and a moderately low fee for the transfer: 4 USD for outgoing ACH in the US, 10 USD for same-day US wire. For the reverse (sending money from the US to EU) the fees are: 3 EUR for an ACH, 8 EUR for a same-day EUR wire. It has been online for quite a while, so I assume its legit, but I'd do a transfer for a smaller sum first, to see if there are any problems, and then a second transfer for the whole sum.