whilst things are more competitive these days with money transfers a fair chunk is taken out, usually a percentage, by a US intermediary to facilitate the transfer...then there's usually a "receiving fee" that the local bank slug you with, either flat fee or percentage...Kachang wrote:Why not open a local account and transfer 10k at a time @ 0.1-0.2% ? After that local withdrawals are free. 0.7% for a single transfer seems just stealing your money, especially since they'll hardly give more than that on a year's saving
ps. just on the question of ATM's and exchange rates i'm guessing that when they're talking about the wholesale rate that it's not the same thing as the inter bank rate because if it was why would you bother buying foreign currency from a bank?....i presume it's a visa/mastercard rate which is probably fractionally better than the retail rate...