I would like to understand how the bank transfer system works in Revolut.
I have an EUR account (I believe), even tough the IBAN is GBXX…
So if I wanted to transfer certain ammount of PLN to a PLN account, how would this work internally?
I would transfer X EUR ammount, which is being converted to GBP? Is some tax/fee being applied here?
And later on, those GPB would be transferred to PLN bank which would also had to do another tax/fee to convert from GBP to PLN?
Isn’t there any way to transfer any currency ammount to destination bank and Revolut to charge a fee instead of all this tax/conversion all around? Like it is in Transferwise for example?
It depends where you transfer it to. If you transfer it to your GBP account it will be converted.
If you want to exchange euro to zloty, you should first transfer the euro amount to your local(!) euro account (assuming you transfer it from a SEPA country) and then exchange it Revolut-internally to PLN.
Transfer from Revolut to a PLN bank account, through Select Payment method > Out > Bank Transfer
So I should convert EUR to PLN in the app and then proceed to the bank transfer through that method and the selected ammount won’t have any charges/fees? That is, the amount input will be the same received in the account?
So you already have the funds in Revolut? In euro I presume.
There is somewhere a thread specific to Poland I believe. You might find more information there. As this is going to be SWIFT transfer I could easily imagine there are going to be some fees.
That’s what I am trying to figure it out, to see what is the best approach for this kind of transfer, since fees should not be applied since it’s a SEPA transfer.
I converted euro to zloty inside the app and then transferred from zloty to zloty. There were no fees. While it may not be technically SEPA it processed exactly like any SEPA transfer
I was not referring to Revolut. They never charge, I was referring to intermediary banks.
What do you mean by local? AFAIK Revolut would not have any local branch in Poland, so the transfer would come from the UK via SWIFT - which includes potential SWIFT fees.
You don’t need a branch in the country for the transfer to be local. I received said transfer as a “local” transfer.
For that to happen Revolut or most probably Lloyd’s has a partner bank in Poland.
SWIFT is only used when you’re trying to transfer money between banks who don’t have any agreement, that’s why it goes through intermediary banks finding successive matches between banks that have an agreement between them until the money finally reaches the destination.
It’s pretty safe to assume that a UK bank will have an agreement with at least one polish bank, making the transfer local.
If there are no intermediaries, there are obviously no intermediary fees either. But as we dont even know who the recipient’s bank is we certainly cant predict the route. Hence there is the possiblity of a SWIFT fee.
As far as assumptions are concerned, it would be also pretty safe to assume a UK bank will have agreements with Switzerland - and just look at the Swiss thread ;).
I agree you cannot say 100%, however Switzerland seems to be a special case. Banking in Switzerland is very expensive and even at a bank to bank level, Swiss banks probably want inordinate amounts of money for any kind of relationship.
I don’t know how it is in other countries, but Portuguese banks have a list of foreign banks with whom they have some kind of relationship and they also specify what you can do without costs or with reduced costs. Stuff like transfers to X bank are free or using ATMs from Y bank is free. It would be good if revolut had something like that
Well, all banks will charge you if they can remotely find a fee to charge and thats not exclusive to Swiss banks, the others arent any better in this regard. Swiss bank are actually not that expensive if you take the average income into account. I was referring to inter-bank fees though. Like with UK banks (or any other), if there is a direct relationship there is a chance they dont charge you, otherwise it is whatever the intermediaries charge.
My point, however, was this is not a SEPA transfer (and they sometimes come with fees) and hence might involve a fee. In your case Lloyds might have had a direct line to your bank, that is not necessarily true for all PLN transactions and hence one should be aware of that.
My point is only that you shouldn’t go overboard with the possibility of fees. It’s not like with swiss banks where you may have some pretty high fees and it doesn’t matter the standard of living there if in this situation were the ones paying the fees.
To Poland if there are fees they’ll be minimal as even if you have to go through intermediary banks it won’t take more than one interconnection so it’s not realistic to talk of fees like there will be a dozen intermediary banks each one charging their fee
You dont necessarily have high fees with Swiss banks, as with Poland it will depend on the routing.
Please go back to my original response and you will notice that I never mentioned anything about dozen intermediary banks. Even from the US you’ll hardly have dozen intermediaries. My point was - as I already stated - the transaction might be for free or might not be for free. The OP should be simply aware of that as he obviously had different expectations.
If anything this points to an issue revolut should work on. It’s not acceptable that when you make a transfer you don’t know how much it will cost.
Portuguese banks have a set fee they’ll charge for a swift transfer and that’s it. I assume if the transfer ends up costing the bank less they’ll keep the money, if it cost more they absorb the cost.
It would be much better if revolut did like every bank here in Portugal and most countries (as I understand in the UK it may be different) and set a fixed fee, something like 3 Euros just as an example and everyone pays that. Instead of the lottery of it possibly being free or costing 10 Euros, sometimes more.
In banking trust is extremely important and revolut doesn’t seem to understand that
Well, in a SHA context that is impossible to do. They’d need to switch to OUR and charge an arbitrarily high fee.
Within Portugal or internationally? It sounds like they force an OUR onto transactions and charge a flat fee which covers the usual costs. That might be higher than what the actual transaction costs.
I partially agree but mostly because of their support issue. As far as transfer options are concerned they can still only act within official banking parameters.
Within Portugal transfers arent SWIFT, so I’m of course talking internationally. You don’t usually get to choose SHA or OUR, so probably yes, they are sending the transfer as OUR.
As for them charging an arbitrarily higher fee, I don’t see why you’d say that. They have the data from previous months and years, so they have a pricing model that for sure covers their costs. While they’ll definitely win some, they’ll also lose some, evening things out, so it wouldn’t be arbitrarily.
Portuguese laws are usually very picky about having to disclose the price of everything before the transaction is made, so probably banks are required to have a set fee.
And there’s actually a nice way revolut could implement it, just call it fee insurance and you can do the transfer as it currently is done and be subject to whatever it ends up costing or you pay said insurance and you know you won’t have to pay anything else.
There are a lot of situations where you need to know the money you send is the money that is received
