Money changes hands every day, and sometimes things can go wrong. Instead of losing your patience navigating the waters of bank transfers, work with your private financial partner to get your money back quickly. Understanding how to wire money and how it might go awry will help you save time and money.
In this article, the team at Global Currency will walk you through the basics of a wire transfer and what can go wrong in that process. We’ll also go over the advantages of working with a private financial partner, compared to a bank. If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch with our team. We’re happy to help.
What Is a Wire Transfer?
A wire transfer is a transfer of funds between two different banks or financial institutions. Wire transfers are done through the SWIFT network of financial communication. SWIFT stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. It’s a global cooperative that was founded in Belgium in 1973 and provides an international standard for financial messaging services.
When you transfer funds via wire, your money is often transferred between various intermediary institutions to get from your bank to its desired destination. Typically, your funds will have to pass through 1 – 3 other banks, depending on where you’re sending it. The SWIFT network allows these various banks to talk to one another and communicate about your transfer.
Unfortunately, as you’ll learn in the rest of the article, the process of communicating between banks can be time-consuming — and people will occasionally get their wires crossed. Let’s find out how that can happen.
What Might Go Wrong in an International Wire Transfer?
Wire transfers don’t “bounce” as cheques sometimes do, because banks verify the transfer funds before approving an international money transfer. While it eliminates most potential problems, a few things can still happen throughout the process:
- You can supply a wrong or inaccurate account number.
- A money transfer may be rejected.
- The payment may be delayed.
- A clerk may have skipped a step during manual processing.
There are various reasons that may prevent a wire transfer from arriving on time. Most of these issues will just cause delays in your wire transfer. For example, many countries have begun to increase their rules and regulations around anti-fraud and money laundering. You don’t need to worry about this — these rules are in place to keep your money safe — but this is one factor that can cause the process to take longer than it typically would in the past.
Knowing the origin of the problem will help you solve it more quickly — if you work with a trusted and accountable company.
Banks will solve the problem for you eventually, but we can get your money back faster and more efficiently. Here’s how we do it:
How Bank Wire Transfers Work
Banks will put a tracing service on all money transfers, so they can see where it went and what happened. This goes through each bank that participates, letting them communicate with each other about the status of the payment.
Some banks will issue a Federal Reference number that is associated with your specific transfer. You can use this reference number to track the progress of your funds and see whether they’ve arrived or not. You may have to pay an additional amount for this service.
While this ‘tracking’ is important, it does not result in instant information. If your transfer has not arrived or been deposited, the investigation process through the banking system can take several weeks to resolve, as it depends on the recipient of the inquiry to voluntarily respond with information.
Another drawback to the investigation process is the cost. Banks perform their due diligence in tracing funds, but this can require additional fees as they coordinate with each other to find the original sum — and these fees are collected from the sender without consultation. Tracing a payment will come out of your pocket instead of theirs.
How Can You Recover Money From Bank Wires Gone Wrong?
You may not be able to avoid paying the bank that extra fee for tracing the electronic money transfer, since you will need their services to retrieve the original sum. However, you can get your money back far earlier than by letting them complete the process on their own.
While you may want to wait a few days to see if the problem resolves itself, you don’t want to wait too long. If you require urgent funds for a business transaction, a travel emergency, or an overseas move, you don’t want to have to wait weeks for that issue to be resolved. If you need to get your money back quickly, our team can help.
Wire Money with a Transparent Company
Instead of waiting for weeks, you can partner with the team at Global Currency to ensure that you get your money back sooner. Much sooner.
At Global Currency, we have a proven track record of getting your money back within an average of 1-4 days if a wire transfer fails, is rejected, or goes missing. We still depend on banks to return funds, making them necessary participants whenever you send money. But, as a private financial enterprise, we are committed to helping you and are happy to pressure them into following through more quickly on every international bank transfer.
You won’t be left trying to solve a bank’s mistake by yourself when you should be focusing on your business or other things. Instead, you can rely on our trusted team to navigate the recovery process for you and use our experience to cut down on time and headaches. As an added bonus, we won’t charge you for the investigative work that we do.
Finding a company that you can trust to handle your wire transfers can help you feel secure sending money abroad. We have performed this service for our customers with great success, and it’s just a part of bringing warmth to a cold-cash industry. Ask us about our past experiences solving wire transfer problems for our clients!
