€54.31 missing from BOI after failed international transfer

bohermean

The issue in question occurred when I recently made an international transfer using the Bank of Ireland 365 online platform from my current account in Ireland to a current account I hold with RBC in Canada.

The transfer of €300 never reached my account in Canada and the funds were returned with €54.31 less than I had sent.

After trying to pin the blame on the beneficiary bank (my own bank where I hold an account, which rightly claimed they never received the funds), the response from the Customer Services department has been that an intermediary bank, Bank of America, was used to complete the transfer but they were unable to process it due to incorrect details being provided. As such the charges of €54.31 relates to the failed transaction fees levied by Bank of America on BOI, then passed on to me without any documentation to support their claim.

While I can accept that I may have entered the incorrect details, I disagree that I should have to pay the charges as I feel it should be the responsibility to BOI to inform me as their customer if the details I provided are incorrect before releasing them to an intermediary bank. I work in IT myself and know that such formatting requirements are basic stuff.

More than the money itself, the salt in the wound is the constant lies and time-wasting by BOI customer service, which has repeatedly provided false information, communicated with a lack of transparency and hung up on my on a number of occasions while I politely inquired who was taking responsibility for the missing funds.

Their constant mantra has been "we did not charge you", however they were the last party to officially handle my funds.

To date, their most helpful suggestion has been to "phone up Bank of America" without providing any proof that Bank of America was involved or providing a reference number or contact details.

Is there any way to recuperate these charges?

Jim2007

Before I even read the contents of your post, I knew exactly what had happened. Why? because it very often happens when sending a transfer to North America. Their banking system is not remotely as close to the European banking system when it comes to international transfers, there are always intermediary banks involved and if anything goes wrong they will almost definitely take a slice of the transfer.

As for IT, you need to understand that we cannot in anyway validate the details of the target account you want to send the money to as in would violate client confidentiality and need to allow us to access the client list of another bank. This is never going to happen no matter what the technology. Otherwise people would start going on fishing trips of the client lists.

For these reasons, you will find that the C&T of your bank, makes you responsible for ensuring the details are correct and that you are liable for any intermediary charges suffered in processing your transaction.

So unless you can get either BOA or your bank to refund the fees as a good will exercise, I'd say you are on a looser.

Mezzotint

Small interbank transfers within the US and international transfers to/from the US are incredibly expensive and very cumbersome and the processing is still relatively stone age, in my experience of them, compared to European system. It's like a trip back to the 1980s. There's a lot to be said for the simplicity, transparency and cost of SEPA. There's even check digits in IBAN numbers to automatically error check.

Check that Bank of Ireland were definitely provided with the correct and all of the necessarily information to process a transaction.

1. Recipient's full name and address (as per the account).
2. Routing number.
3. Account number (these vary in length too which causes issues sometimes)
4. Type of account (to verify that it's actually capable of accepting incoming payments)
5. SWIFT code if it exists.

I remember the nightmare of trying to get a payment processed to my own old checking account in the US to close it. Because there was hardly anything in it, and the bank charged an incoming payment fee, they keep rejecting the incoming payment!

In the end, I actually had to get a US$ bank draft / cashiers check in Ireland and literally post it to them by registered mail along with instructions to close the account and donate the spare change to charity, which they did.

The US tends to operate in its own bubble and anything 'overseas' seems to confuse things but aspects of the US banking system are extremely archaic and fond of gouging transaction fees on anything like this. I wouldn't be the biggest fan of Bank of Ireland, but it's just that this is one of those areas that genuinely may be beyond their control.

Check the details that were provided to BOI and make sure that the receiving account is definitely good to go, and if those two are correct, you should push it with BOI and they should push it with their intermediaries if that's where the problem is. Whoever made the error is the party who should be absorbing the cost.

My only advice on sending any future transfer to the USA is to avoid the banks and use an online service that can pay directly into a US account. The infrastructure for interbank payments in the US is still in the days of 'wire transfers' and teletype from what I can see of it. That or, send a US$ cheque - they still like those.

BTW, I'm not saying that US banks are all downsides. They've good tech in other areas and tend to be good on service, but they're just awful about interbank stuff compared to Europe in general.

If you are using the international payments systems provide as much supplementary info as you possibly can e.g. address of branch, type of account etc etc in the notes fields. It all helps if they've some manual intervention needed.

BhoyRayzor

from experience if the name on the account and beneficiary are not exactly the same it will be returned by the receiving bank, the difference then would be the change in the exchange rate and related fees.

Jim2007

BhoyRayzor wrote: »

from experience if the name on the account and beneficiary are not exactly the same it will be returned by the receiving bank, the difference then would be the change in the exchange rate and related fees.

You could have everything exactly correct and still get hit, it all depends on the intermediary banks in the US environment. Unlike here such transfers are not common and so there is not much pressure on them to be cheap about it.

NSAman

That is why you need to use transferwise or some such service. I never use banks for international transfers any more, costs are higher and especially in the States the banking system is archaic! ... still wondering why Bank of America was used as the intermediary.

tuxy

Jim2007 wrote: »

Before I even read the contents of your post, I knew exactly what had happened. Why? because it very often happens when sending a transfer to North America.

Do they have any kind of road map in place to bring their banks up to the standard of other developed countries? And if not why not, is it because of a high level of corruption?

I took chip and pin for granted until I visited the states, apparently it's actually a very high level of security that Europeans take for granted.