OT-ish: how to wire money to US Bank?

You should be able to do a direct bank transfer. You will need to ask your bank what they need, but often it will be the recipient's details and their account details plus a IBAN number for the destination bank to identify it.

It will be a SWIFT transfer as opposed to BACS.

Your normal bank should be able to handle it. But check the charges, for a small sum they are likely to be disproportionate to the amount involved.

You could try Western Union.

A payment on a credit card would be much easier/cheaper/safer.

Ues a service like XeTrade

Never use your bank for this - they'll rip you off with both fees and exchange rate, and possibly the recipient will end up paying bank charges too (even if you say you'll pay charges, sometimes their bank takes them anyway when it sees an international payment)

Use a transfer service like:

Theo

If there's a PayPal account linked to the US bank account it should be a simple matter of passing monies from one PayPal account to another, ending up in the US bank account.

I transferred a substantial sum to my son in the USA to help with a house deposit.

HSBC charged me £5. The recipient account (that of a firm of attorneys dealing with the purchase) didn't charge anything.

They probably robbed you on the exchange rate though, unless your funds were already in a USD account. Most banks charge 3% exchange rate load over interbank, money transfer places like Wise charge about 0.5%.

People focus on the fees (which are minimal in this kind of case), but 2.5% of $100K would be $2.5k. A very nice little earner for them.

Theo

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

I have gone with Wise (was a toss-up between that and XE.com - I use their exchange rate converter but never though of their other services, silly me).

It took a while to get my documents validated, but the low level transfer seems to be going through.

Cheers J^n

(*) my passport photo was shown as being reversed, when viewed via my webcam. I couldn't work out if that was a firefox issue, or an OS one, or perhaps a Wise one?! Anyway, they seem to have accepted it...

That's how webcam previews work. People expect them to work like a mirror, ie you tilt your head left and the your head in the preview window tilts to the left of the display. If it showed the true image the camera is seeing then it would be confusing because people are used to mirrors - to get your passport in shot you'd have to move it opposite to the way you'd do in a mirror.

The website/person at the other end sees the non-reversed image. If you ever screen share with someone where you can also see your picture on their screen, your preview will be reversed while their view of your face is not reversed.

Theo