Hi, just signed up for Bunq, I can’t see how to make a USD payment via SWIFT (Transferwise). Any attempt to make a USD payment assumes you are paying to a domestic US account and asks for a routing number. What if you are making a payment to a USD account in another country and have an IBAN/BIC code?
How to make a SWIFT USD payment?
DavidRookie- Edited
I have the same question, i need to pay into a Deutsche Bank account with a Dutch IBAN (NLxxDEUTxxxx), but in USD currency. How can i do this? I have used Revolut to do this, but would be great if bunq can also support this.
HedaWizard
I don’t think this is possibly. Not even with „ normal“ banks. How do you expect this to work? You have a „euro“ account. You cannot make a USD transfer with a euro account. This would only be possible IF you had a USD account at bunq. But you don’t. And neither do most of the normal banks have. So I see now way of getting this job done. At least not with bunq.
@Lexa-kom-Trikru#42242 Yes, you can do it with any ‘normal’ bank account. That is basically the point of SWIFT, to facilitate cross-border payments.
- DavidRookie
@Lexa-kom-Trikru#42242 Would this be a limitation of TransferWise, where it can only pay USD conversions into a domestic US bank account as opposed to an IBAN?
@nudge#42251 It looks like it may be. Seems transferwise do their own internal correspondent banking system and hence are trying to make a domestic payment out of their own local accounts. Which is great if you want to pay USD into the US, but I need to find a way to override it to make a payment to a USD account outside the US.
- HedaWizard
@Matthew-Olive-Turtle#42249 You can do swift payments but you can only make them in the currency your bank supports. If you have a euro account you are making euro transfers. It depends on which currency the receiving bank is concerting your money to. You cannot make a USD transfer with EUROS. Swift does not mean that you can decide in which currency you sent your money.
If I make a swift transfer to Russia which I am doing in a regular basis I sent Euros. If I sent to sberbank they automatically convert them into rubles. If I want the receiver to receive euros the receiver needs to have a euro account. If the receiver wants to have USD he needs a USD account. Then I can sent euros and they will be converted to USD by the receiving bank.
But there is no way that you can sent USD from a euro account. You have to either have a supporting bank that allows for multiply currency accounts or the receiving bank needs to convert the money.
Bunq does not offer USD accounts and neither do most of other banks. At least in Germany 98 % of the banks have euro only accounts.
This has nothing to do with swift.
- HedaWizard
@nudge#42251 Yes it’s limited. You can only transfer money in the countries official currency. You pay transferwise let’s say in euros and you make a transfer to the US. They don’t send your euros to the US. They have American bank accounts already filled with money. In this case US. They just moved the money inside of the country around. They don’t move it across borders. They are making national transfers not international transfers.
Because of that you cannot sent USD let’s say to Russia for example. If you sent money to Russia you pay the money to transferwise. They calculate how much your euros are in rubles. Then they transfer the rubles from a Russian account to a Russian account.
- DavidRookie
- Edited
@Lexa-kom-Trikru#42255 Thanks for the reply! I know for a fact the Deutsche Bank account (NLxxDEUTxxxx) I’m transferring to accepts USD, in fact the recipient explicitly states that I must send them USD. Not sure if it’s a UI or API limitation with the bunq/TransferWise integration, but I can log in to TransferWise directly and transfer from my EUR account to USD currency to a non-US account with an IBAN (ie I can select Netherlands and enter the Deutsche Bank BIC and IBAN, with an extra $2 SWIFT fee). So as a work around, I’ll transfer bunq -> TransferWise (EUR account), then convert and send to USD from there.
@Lexa-kom-Trikru#42255 I can make a payment to a USD account using SWIFT from my GBP account in the U.K. I guess my bank does the conversion before sending it. But I certainly don’t have a multi-currency account. I was hoping that Bunq could at least do this considering it is pretty much the entire point of Transferwise.
- HedaWizard
@Matthew-Olive-Turtle#42261 Now I understand you. Seems I misunderstood you. Of course you can make international transfers with swift. That’s the purpose of it. And pretty much any „normal“ bank supports swift transactions. You can sent in your currency - in your case British pounds - and your bank converts the pounds to dollars and makes the transaction.
But unfortunately bunq does not support swift as of right now. I got confused because you were talking about transferwise.
Bunq added transferwise to allow international non swap transfers. Because of the lack of swift transferwise was put in place.
- HedaWizard
@Lexa-kom-Trikru#42263 Bunqs transferwise Feature has nothing to do with swift. It’s a third party service.
@Lexa-kom-Trikru#42263 Right. I was hoping that Transferwise had a ‘fallback’ to use SWIFT it it was making a payment to a country it does not have an account in the required currency in.
- HedaWizard
@Matthew-Olive-Turtle#42266 Which country do you want to transfer the money to?
@Lexa-kom-Trikru#42268 A USD denominated account in Slovenia.
- HedaWizard
@Matthew-Olive-Turtle#42272 https://transferwise.com/gb/swift-codes/countries/slovenia
Check this link. If the bank you want to transfer money to is on this list you can go to transferwise.com and make a transfer. You need to register, create a contact first with all the information then you can sent money chose the before created contact and you are good to go.
@Lexa-kom-Trikru#42273 Ok, thanks. I was hoping to be able to do this directly in Bunq. Otherwise I don’t need Bunq and can just use my regular account.