International Payments - IBAN, BIC, SEPA, SWIFT, etc

In the meantime please, please, please don’t generate an IBAN and send us international transfers. We technically don’t accept these and have no way to trace them if they don’t arrive with us.

I know I must sound like a stuck record on this but we keep having issues related to this and they do take a significant amount of time to resolve, generally involve large sums of money and are generally stressful for all involved!

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Hey I want to send some Euros to a SEPA account. Can I do this through monzo? I have GBP only in my account. how will this work?

At the moment, you can’t do this. I use Transferwise. They are cheap and swift. You can pay Transferwise from your Monzo account.

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I really hope Monzo isn’t planning just a TransferWise integration to handle international payments. TransferWise only works for payments to and from 45 countries. What’s the problem with Swift integration?

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agreed, and perhaps be radical and be the first UK bank to connect to other systems like SOFORT for payments to Benelux countries (useful for internet purchases).

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HI there. I need an IBAN for my direct debit to keep my French phone when I am in France. Is there a workaround as I see the IBAN hasn’t been sorted yet?

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Hi Michelle - if they allow bank transfer payment you could do this via TransferWise :slightly_smiling_face:

There is no IBAN support at present, but the bad news is that even if Monzo had an IBAN it would be a British IBAN beginning with GB which wouldn’t work for most (all?) French service providers which have French IBANs hardcoded in their legacy systems.

Until Monzo introduce IBAN, you could use Monese. They have EUR and GBP accounts, accept SEPA Direct Debits as well as BACS Direct Debits, and can send and receive Faster Payments (FPS) and SEPA Credit Transfers (SCT).

I am sure when Monzo IBAN are imminent we will get a sneak peak on this community!

The main problem here is whether those IBANs are French or not. All French providers will refuse to work with anything but an IBAN beginning with FR as their legacy rust wasn’t built with the idea of foreign IBANs in mind.

That is illegal. The Law now prohibits IBAN discrimination in the Eurozone, any IBAN from the SEPA must be accepted.

I do not know the reporting system in France but in Netherlands and Germany the regulators and their national payment industries have robust reporting systems including helpdesks with phone and email.

Unlike merchant card scheme agreements which are just a contractual agreement the rules prohibiting IBAN discrimination are found in EU regulations and thereby Law within the member states.

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must be accepted

Good luck getting a huge legacy company to comply with that. You might have more ground to stand on if you’ve already got debt towards the company and they’re not accepting your payments, but in this case they wouldn’t even allow you to open an account, so technically you haven’t incurred any damages due to this discrimination, and it might be hard to get that to a court.

Legally IBAN discrimination is an infringement of Article 9(2) of the SEPA Regulation (Regulation (EU) No 260/2012) “…shall not specify the Member State in which that payment account is to be located”

BNP Paribas provide this link:

the legislation forbidding IBAN discrimination is available on the following page: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ%3AL%3A2012%3A094%3A0022%3A0037%3Afr%3APDF

On this page https://metabubble.net/iban-discrimination-hall-of-shame/iban-discrimination/ a guy has started to compile a Hall of Shame listing companies breaking the Law by refusing non-domestic IBAN. Feel free to add businesses to that list.

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My company’s payroll peeps had no problem setting up my salary to go into my monzo account. We are a medium size company, and my salary transfer was seamless. Only down side was the size of the payment was a bit on the small side.

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I setup a Transferwise account as mentioned, but they’re the same:

Payment types not yet accepted International Wire / SWIFT (but we’re working on it)

No support for IBAN to receive payments from the USA

But they support domestic US wire transfers, so could you have the person/organisation paying you make a wire transfer to TransferWise? They will then exchange and deposit it in your Monzo account. That’s my understanding at least.

Ohhhhh, of course I never thought about it like that. Use Transferwise as an American Bank account, get Amazon to pay into that, and then transfer to Monzo!

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Hi,
I am based in France and would like to know how can i make bank transfers to my French account into my monzo account?
It asks me for Bic/Swift/Iban numbers/codes!!!

Thanks in advance.

Transferwise?

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