If I want to make regular payments in Euros to French accounts, does any UK bank do a Euro account that doesnt charge £25 for an IBAN each time? OR Do I need to set up a French bank account on it’s own and just seed it now and then from a UK sterling account and take the £25 charge on the chin for each of those float transfers?

https://transferwise.com/

useful for one off’s perhaps, but I will need to set up some direct debits (prélèvement automatique)

If you make the transfer in euros they can’t charge you £25. The max they can charge you is limited by European law. It’s 2e.

Google “virement STP européen” which applies if you use an IBAN.

I get paid in £ over irregular periods as a Contractor. I have a monthly arrangement with Currency UK to transfer the £. I pay £ into their UK account then they pay into my Euro french account. Every now and agaain I get them to make additonal one off payments.

Cheers guys. Thanks to DrP on the Spanish banking thread I’ve sorted out a banque postale account which and I have attached a euro currency account to my Barclays current account. Between those and the transferwise link above I should be able to keep costs down. Cheers all.

for other readers you can not do automatic payment(prelevement automatique) of suppliers from a foreign account. This for cases where they make the demand and amounts vary. You might be able to do an automatic transfer for same amount where you are the sending party.

So going with the local account is the best you could do, not to sure if banque postale is the best choice. French banking is ridiculously expensive though. I have a french account btw and used to work for a french bank long ago.

yes, it came as a bit of a shock to have to pay €85 a year for a joint account with a visa debit card. As well as €0.65 per ATM withdrawl I think. We are lucky in the UK with our “Free Banking”. At least Online Banking is free.

But I know it will get sufficient use to make substantial savings over the alternatives.

currencyfair.com

best thing since sliced bread if you have to make payments abroad.

Well scratch all that. Banque Postale have been bloody-minded about various docs needed to open an account and have certified translations done etc. as opposed to annotated translations. Also difficulties with qualifying docs esp proof of income if it comes from dividends.

So binning that exercise.

Instead I see that there’s an arm of Credit Agricole that’s been set up to better deal with sorting out account opening with British documentation. https://www.britline.com/ They accept HMRC docs as well as Council Tax demands which makes life a whole lot easier.

By all accounts CA are also supposed to be marginally better than Banque Postale to bank with too.

anyone heard of them?

PS BTW I have just done my first transferwise transfer – testing making a payment from my GBP current account to my Euro account at Barclays to see if it all works OK. (I can of course move money directly from Barclays GBP current to my Barclays Euro, but they have lousy exchange rates)

@stoner – weird – I didn’t have to do any of that stuff 🙁

I imagine like most quasi public sector orgs it depends just how bureaucratic an arsehole you meet. Correspondence just goes into a big pot so you cant reason with the machine. Im not going to even start to try, that way lies huge frustration.

CA is the biggest retail bank in France. Slightly weird structure it is a co-op which is partially floated.

cheers mefty – sorry I meant has anyone heard of Britline?
(cant move for CA branches in France….)

If it’s any consolation, they do seem to be as crap as other French banks (I previously had accounts at BNP* and CL). As long as I don’t need them to do anything but pay the taxes and the electricity bill, it will be ok, but beyond that, fergeddaboudit.

(*) deserve a special place in Hell. When I joined, they failed to send me a PIN number, and then proposed to charge me for sending a replacement for the one I had “lost”. They also charged 50 cents a go for connecting to their (crap) internet site, rather than going to see the miserable and incompetent staff at their branch.

Britline is an operation of CA Normandy which will be one of the local banks in the group. I was surprised.

As long as I don’t need them to do anything but pay the taxes and the electricity bill, it will be ok, but beyond that, fergeddaboudit.

pretty much all I expect out of it for the next couple of years,. After that I might need something more dependable but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Ta, all.

I had an account with CA. Incompetence of the highest order. In one case they demanded a document to open a buisiness account that you can’t get unless you have the account open. Catch 22.

I gave up and went to LCL. A great bank with some good people until … they were taken over by CA. My local branch is now like the inside of a cashpoint machine with only two nervous looking people for clients to take their frustrations out on.

French banking is never free but the LCL fidelity programme means that if you do most of your spending by Carte Bleu the FNAC cards you get for the points are about equal to charges. This obvioulsy won’t apply to you, Stoner.

We have a French bank account and we have a French Paypal address and we send the money between the 2 accounts within 5 minutes of sending it from the UK.

They aren’t the best for the transfer rate but its dammed convenient and doesn’t cost the £25 Iban cost every time.

not a bad idea for quick transfers Pepper.
May well set up a french paypal account once I have a french account to link it to.
The most cost effective way though will be using transferwise and their three days transactions but great rates and zero costs to keep a float in a french account .

When I say they aren’t the best they’re only a percentage point or two off the best I can find and as good as the bank normally manage for us.

i have an euro / gbp acc with citibank.. costs £2 a month

I used to use a Citibank Dollar account for making payments to India – simply transfered in £ and used their online banking to pay out $.
Sure they did a Euro version also, but it was 6 years ago and things may have changed.

Worked really well.

edit: Yep still the same.

Double post

As sharkbait, costs nowt to have and there is a top fee of £2 if you make any transactions in a month..

We used it for our business for quite awhile but we were told that we couldn’t anymore so now have a HSBC business one which is crap in comparison.

Citibank will make their money when you transfer from your gbp acc to Euro and give you a less favourable rate… or just use online exchange sites..

The problem with currency accounts is that they are still UK accounts and you have to pay an IBAN (or similar) charge to move money into, say, France. Having a french account means you can seed it with UK funds occasionally (say using transferwise, no IBAN cost and money market mid rate) and pay bils etc with no extra charges.

I have a Barclays Euro account (UK) but its only really for back up.

I have UK and French HSBC Premier accounts. These have free account to account transfers. There are some qualifications need to open a Premier account but assuming this, you get free banking in both countries.

just a quick rebump to say just how brilliant transferwise is.

I just had to move a deposit to France from GBP to Euro.

Barclays would charge a £25 IBAN fee and then give me an exchange rate of 1:1.2035

Transferwise only charged £19.62 and gave me the mid market rate of 1:1.2754

On a €5,000 receipt transferwise are over €350 cheaper. Or 5.6%. Unbelievable.
Next month I have to move a substantially larger chunk and the difference on those numbers will be in the £’ooos.

I can really piss off Barclays now, by moving money from my Barclays current account, to my linked Barclays Euro account via Transferwise (and not just internally at Barclays) and save a bundle on holiday conversion costs!