Thanks Jim
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@luzudizi , did you end up investing with MFG Consultants? Keen to hear any feedback. Thanks!
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@td22, a friend of mine has had not very positive feedback from MFG Consultants so far: they went silent on him after initial payment was made, making no tangible progress after several months. I do not have all the details, but you might want to evaluate other options discussed on this site.
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We have seen suspicious activity in the past whenever they were mentioned on the forum, such as positive reviews by interconnected shill accounts. The names of the accounts were the same as several of their positive Google reviews, too.
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Thank you for sharing. This is very important for the forum users.
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This is good to know, thank you Hanna. Has anyone else have any experience with MFG Consultants?
@remo it’s better to avoid discussing this company in public on the forum, given the above-mentioned moderation issues we kept facing whenever they were mentioned. It takes time and effort to try to discern which pieces of feedback are legit and which are not. We’d rather spend our energy elsewhere.
Let’s get back on topic for this thread… Converting money with Interactive Brokers!
I would really really appreciate any feedback you have on them (MFG consultants) or if you could ask your friends if they ever heard back from them……It’s really important for me to know
Has anyone sent money using this approach recently from the US? Is this path still feasible? TY!
Bumping this again since I’m thinking about this too. Has anyone been able to transfer directly from IBKR to Optimize? Or will I need to set up an account with Bison so I can first wire EUR in before IBKR will let me wire money out to the account?
Edit: found the relevant documentation in Withdraw Funds to a Third Party . “We will generally not approve the following types of third-party withdrawals: Private investments”. So it looks like using IBKR would require setting up an intermediate Bison/BCP account in my name to receive the funds.
@april I’m in the process of wiring from IBKR to Optimize myself and running into a couple of unexpected issues. First is that IBKR is requesting a correspondent bank for the international wire but Optimize insists one is not necessary. The second issue is that I’m being told I cannot wire EUR - only USD - because of my legal residence being the US. Did you come across this issue?
I believe Optimize is wrong regarding the correspondent bank though I didn’t look into which one is appropriate (one Reddit thread suggests Bank of NY Mellon is a reasonable choice). Calling MilleniumBCP is probably the only way to be safe.
I didn’t see any errors regarding wiring EUR when I tried doing a dry-run, but you may have gotten further into the funnel than I did. Once I saw their claim that they wouldn’t approve my wire destination I gave up. Optimize claims a 0.1% conversion fee if you wire them USD. It’s 5x IBKR’s fee but it feels a million times safer, so wiring directly from my US bank is what I’m doing instead.
Whether you need to provide a correspondent bank is also a matter of viewpoint of the sending institution. I have needed to input corresponding bank information for wires to a certain account of mine offshore when sending from one bank, but another bank simply accepted the IBAN of the target account and fired away with no help whatsoever. Possibly of course said bank simply has better databases of who’s who and who’s where, which is understandable given who they are. I actually keep an account there primarily because they are so, so useful for wire transfers.
IBKR will happily send EUR. I do it all the time - to bank accounts owned by me.
Frankly, April is right. they do not want to do this transaction for you. IBKR is very, very risk averse - very specifically about being seen as or used as a bank. Fidelity has an entity with a banking license so can afford to do things like this. Schwab has an entity with a banking license. IBKR does not.
NG is full of people reporting challenges with using IBKR in this way.
You don’t need to open an account at Bison to do this if you don’t want to. You can probably do it from your US bank account, most US banks can figure it out in one form or another. Or you can work with XE or Wise or whoever.
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