Topic: Why we need Bitcoins for international transactions - page 2. (Read 8756 times)

Mark

Is there a us branch or subsidiary of Sumitomo Bank that can be used to deposit USD to your account without the fees?

Thanks.

Hi,

The intermediate bank depends on your own bank, not the receiving bank. Also there should be no conversion fees, unless your bank messes up something. The only fee that should appear in a perfect world (ie. for example when sending from a major US bank) is our reception fee of ¥1000.

HSBC officially stated that they do not want to see anything related close or far to bitcoin, and kicked out. We asked if it'd be possible to get back in and got politely told that it wouldn't happen anytime soon.


Mark

I have sent international transfers into Gox through both your HSBC and Sumitomo bank accounts, and I have found that Sumotimo/Sumitomo's intermediate bank almost always takes a very large cut in processing and conversion fees - between 4% - 10%. I am sure I am not the only person this has happened to. By comparison, HSBC have always been extremely cheap (less than 1%).

MagicalTux can you please get your HSBC account reinstated, it would save a lot of bitcoiners a lot of money. I would much rather my money go towards supporting the bitcoin price than supporting Sumitomo's bottom line.

I have used one bank here in Aust to send funds to you many times with no problems but choose another bank because of their no fee policy on accounts but twice I have used them to send funds to Gox and both times it went from Aud>USD>JPY>USD, all up that was nearly $2000 short with all the changing.

They would not admit it was their mistake and after I told them the intermediates name that I got from you their tune changed but not to enough admit it. Although they say they will pay me only if I can get a letter from the bank who did it, my next step is to take it to the Ombudsman who should rule in my favour after many emails from the bank which they pretty much screwed up because of jumping me from one department to another and not keeping their story straight.

I guess that's why I use bitinstant or just go through dwolla and stomach the wait.

Reading the thread about the story of a man who deposited a fake check and ended getting his bank going from all nice to all not-nice.

Let me tell you another one (about 1% of people who do international wires to us actually experience that).

A man walks into a bank and asks for a wire transfer from his USD account to MtGox Co. Ltd. in Japan. He fills a form to send 1000 USD, and the bank teller inputs it faithfully. Later that day (or the next day), the bank's processing center processes the wire transfer and sends 1000 USD to the intermediate bank they are in contract with which claims being in contract with the receiving bank.

So far everything is fine.

Now, at the intermediate bank, the process is usually fully automated. It sees an incoming 1000 USD wire going to Japan. "Hey, in Japan they only have JPY, and my local intermediary in Japan can process this wire as a domestic transfer for only USD 10. Let's convert the amount to JPY, and take 3000 JPY fee for the whole process!"

Little did the intermediate bank knows that the target bank account is not in JPY but is actually a multi-currency account where customer funds are deposited based on their settings.

So:

• Sending bank took their 10~30 USD fee for sending the transfer
• Intermediate bank converted the 1000 USD into 75930 JPY
• Intermediate bank took 3000 JPY (38.33 USD) for their good services, leaving the amount as 72930 JPY
  
• Our bank received 72930 JPY, took 1000 JPY handling fees, resulting in amount being 71930 JPY
• Based on customer setting, we converted amount back to USD, resulting in 71930 JPY = 895.93 USD

In the end, that's 104.07 USD that went into useless currency exchange and intermediate fees.

Think about it, the intermediate bank, for its automated process of relaying funds (sometimes it's not fully automated, but rarely nowaday) and publishing a couple of SWIFT messages (cost is below 0.3 cent a message, much lower for large banks) took 38.33 USD in exchange of trying to be helpful by converting funds from USD to JPY at an overpriced rate (usually 3~5% higher than spread) because it thought the receiving bank account would be in JPY.
That's the kind of racket the current banking system allows.

We usually try to ask our customer to complain with their bank when this kind of thing happens, as we have no impact on what happens before our bank receives the funds. Usually that's an action taken by the intermediate bank (but not always - and sometimes can be because the sending bank chose the wrong intermediary) - I suspect to offset exchanges going in the other direction (so both exchanges cancel each other, and the bank is only left with more profit).

Recently, however, we received the following message by wire from an intermediate bank I won't mention, probably the result of long hours of complaining by one of our customers, showing that banks sometimes will do something about their errors (second time we receive this kind of message in more than one year):

We replied to the bank and eagerly wait for them to send the missing funds...