So true. After the first failed attempt, we talked to the same Fidelity rep that put in the transfer order for us and he literally said, āWe send the funds straight to Bison bankā. We had to educate him about correspondent & intermediary banks. 
Then he probably looked at some other screens while we were talking to him and he agreed that we were right.
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The problem is that Bison isnāt on SWIFT directly. The money has to be routed through CGD. Fidelity routed the funds to the wrong correspondent bank on SWIFT (CGA rather than CGD), the money got lost in limbo for 2 weeks, and eventually got returned to sender minus a big whack of storage and handling fees.
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Right, but if you are doing as a domestic wire, SWIFT is not required. SWIFT is only used for international wires. There is a difference in how the wires are processed domestic vs intl.
In my example, you send domestically and the intermediary bank just handles everything transparently on the backend.
Sure, but Bison is an international wire, even if itās $ ā $. It has to relay through CGD as the correspondent bank. There is no provision to wire money to Bison via domestic wire.
Ok. I understand the issue now.
Lol ā¦ I think Chase messed it up even with the instructions. I see this in the transaction description
CONSUMER INTERNATIONAL WIRE DEBIT A/C: CAIXA CENTRAL-CAIXA CENTRAL DE 1099 LISBOA PORTUGAL PTā¦
The issue being āitās all just a charlie-foxtrotā 
Iām looking to transfer funds soon for my investment.
Bison has been oddly reticent about providing anything other than an IBAN.
My brokerage, vanguard, demands a SWIFT for the destination and for the US correspondent bank, among other things.
Anyone have this problem?
At the moment, transferwise (even with the 200k USD per-tx limit) seems like my best option as they quote .4% fees (roughly). If I can use a wire direct to Bison, thatāll get me to .2% effective fee on the USD->EUR conversion, which would be nice.
Would love to hear if anyone else uses vanguard to transfer to bison
You have an account with Bison and they wonāt tell you the Swift/BIC?
When you open an account with Bison, they give you a document that literally has nothing on it except your name, your IBAN, and the BIC. Also, Swift / BIC Codes are public:
Specifically they donāt seem to understand the correspondent bank bit. Perhaps they donāt have one and thus vanguard canāt send them money, but that seems unusual to say the least
CGD isnāt a us bank though, still not quite what I need I donāt think
Bison uses CGD, and CGD uses Citi in the US. So that is what makes it much more complex to send a wire to Bison. There are effectively two ācorrespondentā banks.
So while I have not been able to send wires successfully yet, I tried to use Citi as correspondent (for those US banks that even let you specify a correspondent bank) and then set CGD to be the beneficiary bank, and Bison bank to the beneficiary, and in beneficiary notes used a for further credit to (my IBAN and name). However, none of those wires have reached yet - so take all this for what that tells you
UPDATE: I did end up getting ALL of the wires to show upā¦ See this post for details on exact information I used to get the wires to work from Chase, HSBC and Vanguard. It did take my sending Nuno all the information for each of the wires, and his operations team doing followup for over a week for them to show up though.
Thanks Jim, thatās very informative.
Have you managed to send anything? Sounds like Transferwise might be my best bet at this point unfortunately
I ended up sending via IBKR - see my other post on steps to do so - TransferWise also works very well - just quite a bit more expensive.
Hi. I am trying to take advantage of the current exchange rates. I just opened Schwab account because I was getting a big hit on the transfer from my current bank. I just talked to Schwab and they said that the funds are wired from the investment account and could not be wired from the bank account. Has anyone had any problems with SEF for the transfer from the investment account instead of a bank account?
I performed my transfers from my Schwab investment account beginning in late 2020 and did not have any issues or questions.
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I transferred from my Schwab brokerage account in 2021 and 2022 and that worked just fine.
Wise just announced that they no longer charge negative interest for large EUR balances, as have several other banks and fintechs done lately. IBKR has reduced their negative interest to -0.302% p.a. for IBKR Pro accounts, but I hope they will eliminate it soon.
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Fantastic news