As the title says, i’m trying to transfer 1 million NT to my Irish (Euro) bank account but when I went to my bank, they told me exchange rate will make me lose 8000NT (250EUR) and plus an 850NT charge from the bank.
In Europe, I used Transferwise a lot which is cheap, but it doesn’t work here. Does anybody know a cheaper alternative to sending NT to Euros? I plan to leave Taiwan soon.
In my experience regular international bank transfer is always cheaper than using things WesternUnion or any of the other transfer companies. International bank transfer is faster than it used to be now.
There might be a cheaper way using crypto but unless you know what you are doing it would be a big risk.
Which bank is it?
ESun Bank
I thought about crypto, but this is my life savings and i’m not so familiar with it, so I wouldn’t want to risk it
You go into the bank and ask them for their best rate for NTD: Eur for 1M NTD. They may give you a better rate. And maybe ask in the Bank of Taiwan too to compare?
Then get it exchanged into Eur and wire transfer to Ireland.
The wire transfer fees aren’t much compared to the value (20-40 USD max) and it’s the safest way to do it from Taiwan.
I believe there are other Foreign exchange transfer specialists out there but I’ve never used them and TAiwan is a bit antiquated and difficult with a lot of this stuff. I also trade crypto . but for bank to bank cash transfer and transparency moving funds from Taiwan to Ireland it’s best to use the regular banks.
Remember you want the safest way and best way not the cheapest way if this is your life savings!!!
Good luck and well done on getting some savings in the bank 
What do you mean by “lose” here? Are you just comparing it to the current mid-market rate from Google or whatever? That isn’t necessarily meaningful - no bank anywhere is going to give you the mid-market rate.
Taiwanese banks also generally seem pretty reasonable with exchange rates. Obviously you’re transferring quite a large amount, so the small margin adds up.
You’d probably want to keep an eye on how exchange rates are changing though.
Don’t understand this one either. Assume the exchange is also going to be TWD-USD-EUR so a couple of exchange rates to consider.
850 is hardly a big consideration given the security of a bank transfer although be aware the Irish side bank may also take a fee. Additionally check with your bank in Ireland whether a single transfer of that size will trigger a money laundering check where you may have to prove where the money came from, if memory serves me correctly the limit is quite low for international transactions.
In the unlikely event you have a HSBC account in Ireland you could open an account with them here and do a free transfer to the Irish account, I think 1KK will get you a free Premier account here and would also get you preferential exchange rates.
Yes, ‘loss’ was probably the wrong word. Just get it as close as possible to the exchange, similar to Transferwise.
This is something which also worries me, the money is in the same name as me, and I asked my bank who wouldn’t clarify if it would trigger a money laundering check or not. Maybe I can save my payslips from work in preparation.
Currently i have around 200EUR in my unused account for the past 3 years, so putting in 31k could be suspicious. But I have evidence to show that it’s all legal.
Is that how they do it? I thought they’d just convert directly TWD to EUR? (At least from the customer’s perspective - I suppose they could include USD as an intermediate currency somewhere on the back end, which would account for the slightly wider buy/sell spread on EUR etc. compared with the razor-thin spread on USD.)
I agree. I own companies in Europe and US as well as Taiwan. We get by far the best banking and exchange rates here. But the bank will of course always have a margin.
TransferWise is not free either, USD to EUR seems to be 0.41%. to RMB its over 1%.
This is what Mega Bank gives me at the moment - I assume your bank’s rate isn’t too far off?
You could also try calculating what the difference would be to convert TWD to USD in a multicurrency account, transferring that to a (Transfer)Wise USD balance, then converting to EUR on Wise and withdrawing to an Irish account (but I suspect you wouldn’t save much).
Local bank exchange rates will be not too bad and are mostly non-negotiable (you may get a slightly better rate if you have a business account, or are otherwise an important customer with lots of assets).
If you ask for EUR, I think it is directly changed from NTD to EUR. You pay 500-1000NTD as a transaction fee, though.
An efficient way to convert between USD and EUR for large amounts is to have an account with a broker that allows direct Forex trading (such as: IB).
Sorry this is probably not the best or safest way, but just for reference here is how we did it often with some co-workers:
Find someone who…
Then agree on an exchange rate and do TWD->TWD transfer in Taiwan and EUR->EUR Transfer in Europe
Probably #1 and #2 are not always easy to find. In our case it was easy, since some co-workers got paid EUR in Europe and needed TWD in TW, while others gor paid TWD in TW and needed EUR in Europe…
That’s actually the original concept behind TransferWise, just on a larger, automated scale. Their rates/fees seem to have crept up over the last few years, though.
Transferwise works in Taiwan, it just doesn’t support NTD as a currency. Big difference!
I think you probably don’t have many alternatives to use a local bank to exchange into EUR and then send these either to your bank account or to a Transferwise account. Of course, you will lose a bit in fees (yes, banks are businesses at the end of the day which want to earn money!) - but with that amount, you should be able to keep fees below 0.5%. Which is less than the usual fluctuations of the exchange rate on a typical day…
Cheapest way imo is to use BTC as an intermediary currency. Good exchanges will let you buy and sell as a “maker” with no or very little fee. I’m usually moving money the opposite direction, it’s far faster. Buy BTC, send BTC, sell for your currency of choice, transfer to your bank. Can do this at night and have money in my bank the next day. Costs about 100nt. Your results may vary depending on if you have access to an exchange with low fees. For myself, I’ll never go back to legacy transactions.
I think this would world for only small amounts of BTC though? If I tried to buy 1 million NT of bitcoin (Assuming my bank has no problem with this), then if sell that Bitcoin for Euros, my Irish bank account will definitely flag this large amount?
Yeah, but what about the volatility of the BTC price? Today, it dropped almost 10% in a matter of hours. Not sure how you’ll buy, transfer and sell the BTC within seconds to avoid any potential loss due to that. Also BTC transfers aren’t free either.
Quite a risk to take in order to save maybe NT$500 for a real SWIFT transfer…
I’ll be honest here… just go and do a SWIFT transfer.
I’m wondering why you’re fretting over a 8000nt fee transferring a million NT. Yea it’s not an insignificant amount of money but we’re talking 1 million here. Currency exchange will always have fees, that’s just how it’s going to be. When you are talking a million NT the variability is going to be really high even if it’s a 1 cent difference NTD/Euro rate.
I mean that amount of money is going to have a lot of paperwork attached to it, like money laundering reporting and all that, as they obviously have to make sure it’s legal source of money and not proceeds from criminal acts…
Given all that, it would be stupid to try and save a few hundred NT over this.
Actually with this much money you really should be talking to an accountant over how to transfer or deal with them, not ask some random guys on a forum.
By the way when I first started doing translation work I had about 3000 euros incoming wire transfer, and right when the transfer was made EUR to NTD went down at least 2 NT… you know because of Greece and all that (when NTD/EUR was about 48 or so and it went down to like 45), so I ended up having like over 10,000NT less money to work with.
Shit like this just happens. Deal with it.
