You Can Now Receive 40+ Currencies via SWIFT using Monzo 🌎

Monzo Chat News & Updates
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Receive 40+ Currencies via SWIFT using Monzo :earth_americas:

Hey everyone,

I’m Kai, an Analyst in our International Payments Squad. We’re focused on improving our international payments and cross currency services at Monzo.

Early in 2023 Monzo launched inbound Euros over SEPA (Single Euro Payment Area), allowing you to receive Euro payments over SEPA using your Monzo account IBAN.

We’re really excited to now share that we support receiving international SWIFT payments in 40+ currencies for all customers, including businesses. If you can’t spot this in your app, make sure you’ve got the newest version of the Monzo app.

The details:

You can use your Monzo account IBAN to receive payments internationally over SWIFT, these can be sent in GBP or our other accepted currencies

You can find your IBAN on the Manage account screen of your Monzo app, next to your other account details like sort code and account number.

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We’ll convert any funds we receive in accepted currencies into GBP for you, we’ll charge a 1% conversion fee, with a fee cap of £1,000 per transaction. We won’t charge you any fees for payments received in GBP.

For example if you receive a payment in US Dollars worth £100, we’d take £1 and you’d get £99. If you were to receive a payment in a non GBP currency worth over £100,000 the fee won’t be any higher than £1,000.

The fee only applies if we’re converting currency for you, if we’re receiving a payment for you in GBP, we won’t charge you any conversion fees or transaction fees, we’ll give you exactly what we’ve received.

We suggest checking with the sender to see whether the exchange rate we give would work out cheaper to determine whether your payment should be converted by the sender and sent in GBP or the local currency of the region it’s being sent from.

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The exchange rate we give will be the live market rate

This is the true market rate for currency exchange without any markup and is typically the rate you will see online when searching for an exchange rate.

The exchange rate for your payment will be determined on the date and time we receive your funds and we will always show you the rate you’ve received on your transaction.

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We’re actively working on improving and introducing new international payments and cross currency products for our customers and I’m keen to hear any feedback on what you’d like to see next.

Let me know if you have any questions, and I’d be happy to answer them for you!

Kai

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At last! Great news.

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Was wondering when the post was gonna come out! Saw the notification banner on the app this morning. Keep up the good work

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This is really cool to see.

Would be amazing if you could match Wise 0.5% fee on USD to GBP :eyes:

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I got notified about this in app and by email yesterday. I hadn’t appreciated it was new because I’d forgotten that the previous iteration was just SEPA.

So thanks for posting this. Great news

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Great news! Could we please have INR as a currency as well?

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Thought I’d give this a go and NOPE!

Seeing as you have boots on the ground in the US, I’d love for your next move to be to give us a local account number so the banks can’t take us for a ride like this. Wise works for me for now, but it would be great if you could tackle this.

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Hey @pnadkarni

We pushed really hard to see whether it would be possible for us to offer INR as an available currency we could receive and convert for customers, unfortunately this isn’t possible to offer in the UK.

Due to regulatory restrictions, INR isn’t a currency that can be sent offshore, when banks in India send outbound payments to the UK, they always convert them into another currency in India before sending them out.

We can still receive payments from India, but these have to be in our accepted currencies. We’ve already seen many customers receive payments from India this week :india: :tada:

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Hey @RichardL

We’re absolutely looking to explore how we can enable receiving via local details for different regions. We understand that some banks can levy high fees against sending a payment via SWIFT (and some also for receiving) so would like to solve this problem where we can.

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With the greatest respect, it looks like you gave it a go and it would have worked perfectly. The problem is, you don’t want to send a SWIFT payment, you want to send a local bank transfer to avoid paying the fees for an international SWIFT payment

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That’s not actually an option with this service, the only way to send a local transfer is with a local account number, which I can and do regularly do via Wise. SWIFT is not supported.

Sending via SWIFT is only possible internationally which straight away attracts a 25USD fee from the sending bank.

This is obviously not Monzo’s fault and my use-case is just one in thousands but this here is positive to hear, so really appreciate you sharing that @Kai_Smith

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Yes that’s exactly what I mean. You responded to a post about the launch of SWIFT payments with ‘thought I’d give this a go and NOPE’, but you weren’t actually wanting to make a SWIFT payment.

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I’m really lost as to what the point you’re trying to get across here is? The payment I tried to make literally was a SWIFT payment? The screenshot is the payment confirmation screen after dropping in the BIC and IBAN.

Is it not useful to provide feedback that because of the way the system operates charges like this are possible?

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To be honest I’m a bit confused. If you already know that the SWIFT payments this announcement is about are different to local bank payments, and that SWIFT payments are not the feature you want then I’m not sure exactly what you were ‘giving a go’ :sweat_smile: But alas, we seem to have the same understanding of how it all works.

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@Kai_Smith , Any updates if it will support Malaysian currency ( Malaysia Ringgit) . A bit disappointed when I was looking for it and it’s not there .

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Hey @rasasu
Sorry for the disappointment, I’ve picked up on that this week to see whether we can support receiving MYR in the near future.

If possible we will, hopefully I can give you an update on this next week :crossed_fingers:

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Looking forward for a positive answer . Thanks :pray:t4:

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My understanding of SWIFT is pretty basic so bear with me but it would be really nice to be able to see the SWIFT status or notification of an incoming swift payment in advance.

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How long do IBAN transfers typically take to appear in your Monzo account?

Update:
I tried to use the Monzo IBAN details to transfer money from my AliExpress affiliate (which is in US dollars). It seemed to work ok initially, but today I had it come up on the AliExpress portal saying that it had ‘returned’. I have no idea why it failed, as I copied the details from within the app and pasted them in, so as to not type them in wrong.

Due to this I have now had to pay processing fee twice and just transferred it to my old HSBC Account instead. This was the only thing stopping me from fully switching over to Monzo, but I guess I’ll have to keep my HSBC Account for this now. I’m really not happy about having to pay the processing fee ($15) twice, due to it failing to go into my Monzo Account and being returned.

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