I had a bike on order from Germany, which has now been cancelled but they need to refund me. I gave them the details of a Nationwide bank account and they said it’s not SEPA compatible so I’d be charged.

Does anyone know which bank account I could use instead? I have other current accounts (not because I’m loaded but because I’m cheeky and like to make a few quid moving the same money from one to the other): Halifax, Bank of Scotland, First Direct and Santander.

Thanks very much.

Tricky – in theory SEPA should be a EURO -> EURO transfer, so if you have a Euro account with any of those banks, use that. Some banks will transparently accept a SEPA payment to a GBP account and use the offered exchange rate to charge you (quite a bit, usually) for the privilege. As part of SEPA, SEPA payments are supposed to be priced at the same rate as domestic payments and for non-EUR countries some adopted that (Sweden for EUR->SEK) but the UK opted out…

Thanks very much for that information. It looks like I’ll just have to suck it up. I had used Transferwise when paying them to avoid bank charges.