how to send money from the UK ?

[worriedmum]

Is it best to send funds in stirling pounds or RMB from UK bank account to Chinese (BOC) bank account? Is it true that BOC will allow you to hold funds in stirling pounds, and if so, what is involved (including time wise) in exchanging to RMB?

[xianhua]

This is something that I am looking into at the moment as I'm fed up of paying Western Union's high charges. I understand that you can hold funds in Sterling. I understand there is a charge of 15 pounds for sending money in RMB. I would give your nearest branch a call to find out how to make the transfer:

http://www.bocukltd.co.uk/contact-boc.html

I'd also be interested in hearing from anyone, who does this regularly.

[imron]

Does the person you are sending to have a UK bank card with them? If so, deposit funds in their UK account and they will be immediately available for withdrawal from a local ATM. I've found this to be the cheapest, fastest, most hassle-free way.

[roddy]

Contacting the BOC in the UK probably won't be much use unless you actually have an account there to make the transfer from.

As I understand it:

You can have the money sent in RMB or GBP (edit - I think. I've got a bell ringing telling me I'm wrong though). If it's sent in RMB you get the exchange rate on the day, as determined by the UK bank. If you send it in GBP it lands in the receiving account as GBP, and you can change it on demand into RMB, at the rate of the day. Chinese bank accounts generally can have more than one currency in them. However, it won't be visible when you check your account via ATM, so you'll need to go to the bank counter and ask if it's there - and again when you want to convert any so you can take it out in RMB.

Whether you change it all at once, or bit by bit, depends on when you need it and what you expect exchange rates to do.

Bear in mind that Chinese banks are very fussy about the names on the accounts matching up. Even if the account number is clearly correct, they can send payments back due to, eg, the money having been sent to John Smith, and the account being in the name of Smith John. Find out exactly what the name is on your son's Chinese account and put that on the form.

Using a UK ATM card is convenient, but depending on your bank you could be paying a significant loading fee on the exchange rate, and / or overseas withdrawal fees.

[imron]

but depending on your bank you could be paying a significant loading fee on the exchange rate, and / or overseas withdrawal fees.

However there are also fees etc for transferring money which in my experience are always more expensive than the overseas withdrawal fee.

[worriedmum]

Thank you for your responses and advices. In order to pay the uni fees and accom all in one lump sum, the BOC account in Beijing was opened in order to make use of their bank card (union pay). Otherwise using the ATM with UK debit card, as an when required is probably adequate. At Nationwide (UK) the exchange rate from stirling to RMB is not as good as at BOC so I'm thinking of sending as stirling pound. Just wondered how much of a hassle it will be to receive in pounds and then change to RMB. I'm assuming that you can't make any payment with the union pay card, if the funds are not exchanged to RMB in the account?

[worriedmum]

Following Xianhwa's advice I called BOC London branch this morning and found out that in order to receive funds in RMB the beneficiary needs to have Chinese ID card number. Foreign nationals won't have that, therefore the only way is to send in stirling pound and then exchange to RMB at the BOC in China, as per Roddy's information. Thank you everyone!

[BFC_Peter]

We transfer money from UK to China quite regularly and while many of our payments are business to business, I don't think personal payments are much different. It's safer if you don't mix business and personal accounts as the money may well get returned (we've blagged it a couple of times!).

First of all, don't send money from Bank of China! - they charge 75.00gbp and all the other banks charge from around 12.00gbp to 21.00gbp for the standard transfer. There's usually a standard service (4 days?) and an express service which is a little more expensive (2 days).

I echo Roddy's point about getting the name right - we've had a couple of payments returned because the name was incomplete. if this happens, they will just ask you what you want to change and send the money again but of course it all takes longer.

Most banks have a cut-off for these types of payments of around 3pm/3:30pm. Sometimes you can do these payments at the counter, other times you have to speak to someone on reception (when they've been busy they've sometimes said we have to make an appointment). Leave a phone number in case there is a problem so they can contact you quickly.

HSBC have the best service we've used as you can do everything online and they charge around 15.00gbp (this service has a 10,000gbp limit).

You need a payee name, an account number (around 20 digits), receiving bank name and receiving bank swift code (around 11 alpha characters e.g. ICBKCNBJZJP). Payee address and receiving bank address may also be requested but I don't think they really need these.

You tell them how much you want to send and what currency to send it in.

I don't recall that we've ever been able to send RMB (maybe it depends on the receiving account? I think it's also because the banks don't 'trade' in RMB), so we either send pounds sterling or dollars (rmb is fixed to dollar). It depends on what's happening with the exchange rate as to which is best - at the moment it's quite stable so one time you may be lucky and the next time you may be unlucky. The past 12-18 months has seen the pound lose a lot (getting almost 16rmb to less than 9.something) but it's regained a bit recently. When it was dropping we changed to dollars immediately to avoid losing money if it dropped further. As it is now improving slowly then it's ok to send as sterling and let them change at their convenience.

There are also options on charges (pay UK charges or pay UK and china charges) - I don't know what charges are paid over there as we always opt to pay our own charges only.

They'll ask you why you are sending the money - if you take a significant amount of cash they'll ask you where you got the money and may ask you to come in for an interview to discuss it further (as they did recently for a Chinese student I know who sent 4,000gbp).

[xianhua]

Where did the 75 charge info come from? I read this as meaning it would cost 15 pounds:

http://www.bocukltd.co.uk/pricing-table.html

I may have misunderstood something though.

[BFC_Peter]

The link you gave says 'Personal Internet Banking Charges' - they introduced online access quite recently but it was only available to personal customers in the UK (don't know about now as we moved to HSBC 9 months ago) so this 15.00gbp charge is for personal accounts (probably using the internet service - don't know if it's different if you go to the counter to do the transfer?).

Also, they apply a limit of 2000gbp per transaction.

We paid 75.00gbp for business transactions and we had to use the counter service - our payments were anything from 10000gbp to 35000gbp so it doesn't seem much different now.

[giraffe]

Anybody using PayPal for sending money to China? I need to send payments (from Canada) to my online tutor in Beijing and Paypal seems like it would be a good option. I'm not sure if there are any hidden snags though.

[BFC_Peter]

We've used it recently a couple of times to send money to a supplier in China - he actually has a Hong Kong account (maybe easier to have a business account in HK than China).

If the payments are personal then they don't make a charge (one of our payments did require a nominal fee?).

The money is withdrawn to a bank account as here - in the UK if you withdraw less than 500gbp then there's a charge for it.

We are planning to use it more in future as the money will get there faster and I was told the exchange rate was comparable.