Started using Revolut some time ago for personal use and while traveling on business and I love it.
Now a problem arose with my Maltese bank account (BOV) where they started refusinng transfers to Revolut. Do you guys know if they can actually do that or could I refer them to legistelation or something.
The banks reasoning is that services such as this are outside their policy.
Unfortunately I cannot draw salary and other funds directly to Revolut due to my company’s policy either.
I am afraid I wont be able to quote a legislative source as my expertise in this area is limited too, but as I presume you are trying to wire funds from your Maltese Euro account at Bank of Valletta to your Euro account with Revolut, right? In this case this is a regular SEPA transaction and your bank should not have any grounds to prevent you from doing so but ought to be legally bound to fulfil this transaction.
If they refuse you probably only have two options though, one is to complain to the responsible authorities pointing out that Bank of Valletta is in violation of the SEPA agreement. The other - most likely more promising - one is to change banks. Unfortunately these days cancelling a service is very often the only way to show your discontent.
I noticed that Juliopp posted an applicable link in the meantime as well though.
so this might be the same issue that I have, trying to get a transfer from Italy done into my revolut account… the error message that I receive is that the BIC/SWIFT code isn’t correct. Support from Revolut has told me that I should be contacting my bank in Italy and tell them the SWIFT code that needs updating.
None has told me that it might be that Italian banks are refusing to pay there as you quoted… I would suggest to contact support of revolut from the app and see what they say.
Its difficult to tell with absolute certainty, but it probably is two different issues. Yours appears to be the BIC issue, where Revolut introduced a new BIC which hasnt fully propagated to all banks yet and was the reason for a lot of failed transfers. @Saxi’s issue appears to be more of a general type where the Bank of Valletta seems to refuse to honour SEPA transfers to Revolut’s account for no reasons.
I will also ask if the BIC code can be the issue to be sure.
The issue could just be the compliance teams ignorance, the compliance person I was in touch with had no idea what digital banking alternatives like revolut, paypal or skrill were and when I explained in writing they replied that:
“Payments to Revolut would not be entertained by BOV, since it does not fall within the acceptance policy of the Bank.”
I wasn’t able to solve the issue unfortunately with any of the ideas on the thread.
The bank replied towards the SEPA payment legislation:
"What you are quoting here is payment accessibility via IBAN, however each Bank also reserves the right to stop any payments whose nature is not within its ’ internal acceptance policy.’
As such, presently, BOV is unable to transfer funds to entities dealing in crypto currency exchange. "
In the EU, banks or payment providers usually can’t deny transfers to IBANs provided by fully authorized and regulated payment providers. You as a customer have full autonomy to choose any bank you like. In theory. The whole idea of “passporting” banking licenses throughout the EU is that if one bank is regulated by a UK authority, all other EU member states can be sure that they are dealing with a legit institution.
When we look at how Revolut implemented crypto, they do not allow external access to wallets. All incoming and outgoing money is recorded properly and fully compliant with money laundering and KYC regulations. Because they did it that way, crypto fans complain about not having “real” access to their coins. They went a long way to make their crypto offer bullet proof for regulators.
So I have some reservations here about BOV’s arguments. And I am not sure if they would hold up if financial authorities would look into it.
Hmmm. I received a third party transfer from a BOV account holder some 3 weeks ago without a problem. So I wonder if this is a new policy formulated since then?
A bit late I am afraid but according to How to complain | European Banking Authority the responsible authority would be Malta Financial Services Authority at consumerinfo@mfsa.com.mt.
