[jasonkester]

I just tried this yesterday, but ran into a wall: To transfer USD to GBP, you need to get your bank to initiate an international wire transfer.

If I could remotely trigger a large international wire transfer from my bank, I wouldn't need a 3rd party service.

Living abroad, requests to transfer money are usually met with "just step into a branch and we'll take care of that". But my nearest branch is 2,000 miles away and I'm not planning to step anywhere near there in the next year or so.

The best I've gotten is "then just overnight us a notarized letter", which works, except for the part where Notaries are mostly a US invention so the few existing overseas ones will happily charge you $150 to put their stamp on the document. ... which the bank will then find some tiny flaw with (when the FedEx package trickles through their mailroom a week later) that can be corrected by simply overnighting a new notarized letter.

It's infuriating.

[hxc]

When I was with a smallish Credit Union (Langley Federal Credit Union) they would just have me write the note out, scan it and email it to them. Then I would call them about an hour later and it was authorized. They did charge a flat $12 fee.

[mseebach]

With all due respect, are you sure you're doing it right? The entire raison d'etre of Transferwise is cutting their bank-run international wire transfers out of the loop.

[jasonkester]

That's how they work everywhere except the US. For us, we have to do a BIC/IBAN transfer to an account in Estonia. (Just re-checked the instructions they mailed me yesterday to verify that's the case.)

If they had a US account you could do with ACH, life would be easy. But they don't.