Help! We collected money for the disaster in Turkey, when I wanted to transfer the money to the Turkish EURO account, I received the money back. After asking support, I was asked to create a local currency account. Now all the money on it is in Turkish liras. When I now try to transfer it to the Turkish lira account of the aid organization, I get the following message: "Cannot make a payment to a sub-account with a different currency." Can someone help me ASAP, I want the money to get to where it is desperately needed quickly.
Cannot make a payment to a sub-account with a different currency.
JakobProdigy
@Fevzi-Azure-Leopard#275762 Hey Fevzi, bunq is a Dutch bank. The Netherlands are part of SEPA, the Single Euro Payments Area, and you can send money from Euro sub-accounts to all other SEPA countries through bank transfer.
There are some non-EU countries that are part of SEPA like the UK, Switzerland, or the EEA-countries Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. However, Turkey is not part of SEPA. Therefore bunq does not natively support transfering money to Turkish bank accounts, even if they are denominated in Euro.
As you have already found out, a local currency account in Turkish lira does not help you, because this kind of sub-account is restricted to Lira payments. What you need is the ability to send a Euro payment through SWIFT instead of as a SEPA bank transfer. While bunq cannot do that, there is another company that is commonly recommended here that offers this service: Wise. Have a look at their help page here and this page about the fees. Keep in mind using the SWIFT network will lead to comparably high payment fees, but for a Euro bank account at a Turkish bank I don't think you have many other options.
In order to use Wise, you need an account with them. You can open a new Wise account by using the Wise integration into the bunq app, or you can just use their own website/app, there are no substantial differences. Using the Wise integration to send Euro via SWIFT inside the bunq app is quite straightforward: Click on "Pay", enter the amount, then go to "Enter IBAN" screen and start to enter any IBAN starting with TR. Then a prompt will pop up offering you to use Wise:
By continuing through the flow in the app, you will be able to complete your transaction with Wise. Last but not least: Of course you're also free to choose any other third-party to facilitate the transfer for you. If you don't like Wise or there's any other reason why you aren't able to use them, there are other financial service providers out there that provide similar services.