Receiving money in the UK from Poland in foreign currency via bank transfer

Does anyone know how it works if I receive money from Poland in to a UK bank account?

Say they send it in zlotys, I am assuming there would be some foreign transaction fee and currency conversion fee my bank would charge? Or at least I thought so.

After giving the bank a call, I have been told that the side who is sending it is charged, not me. I don't think it makes much difference, as I still lose out, because if they are sending, for example, 100 zl, whatever they get charged at their end just gets taken off the 100 zl they would send me - so I receive less.

Does anyone know what sort of rates are charged for this [on average] and who exactly is charging them?

It really depends on so many factors, but at least with ING in Poland, there's three options - either you can pass all the charges to the receiver, you can split the charges (as in I pay for sending it, and you pay for receiving it), or the sender can pay all the charges.

You can also use Transfer wise, which sets the fees out clearly - I'd recommend using it if you want to have certainty over what it will cost and how much will arrive in your account. Generally speaking though, if you want to do a bank transfer, then I'd recommend the person in Poland converts it to GBP, deposits it in their bank, then transfers it with a GBP-GBP transaction instead, which should only have a small fee attached to it.

Thanks


I can't do this though. It's a company paying for a service, and they only pay in zlotys, so I won't be able to get them to convert it first.

Transfer wise might be an option though - I'll have a look at that.

Ahh, that's a problem. If it's a transfer from złoty to pounds, it's going to attract a quite large fee - I checked my own bank, and it's 40zł to make a transfer to the UK.

OK, I think this is your best bet - open this (it's free) - transfers - and ask them to make a SEPA transfer (przelew europejski) - it should cost them no more than 5zł to do it. Give them the Euro account details, and their bank will transfer the cash in Euro to your transfers account. From there, you can convert it into GBP, and then withdraw it in GBP to your own British account.

It's a little bit complicated, but much cheaper than doing it with a straight Poland-UK bank transfer.

Could I not just get them to do a normal transfer in to GBP, rather than in Euros first? According to the website, they would be charging 5zl. So if they send 100 zl for instance, which according to the currency converter, is £20.90, via this website, I would get 19.85 after the 5zl fee is paid to them.

You could, but I think the difference is that a GBP transfer will cost much more than a SEPA Euro transfer - so for instance, with ING, I can transfer Euro to a bank account in the EU for 5zł, but a GBP transfer to a bank account in the EU would cost 40zł.

But when I go on the Transfer front page and type in the amount to be transferred in zlotys, and say I want it transferred in to GBP, it says it will take 5 zloty from me during the transaction.

I thought the whole idea with Transfer was that you avoid banks and their fees?

I think they're offering some stability with the fees in this sense, but I don't know - I only use SEPA transfers in Euro. 5zł is the SEPA fee I guess, so they're probably just passing that on to you.

Welcome to lesson #1 on why the Euro makes sense ;)

@WielkiPolak

It is. The fees that Transfer charges are generally much lower than the fees that banks charge.