Hi all! I am new here, and I wonder if the wonderful community here has any amazing takes on ways to transfer fund to Portugal bank account?
Wise and bank rates seem quite expensive these days. Or Does Bison Bank take USD transfer and offer foreign exchange?
A couple threads out there, if you’re in the US, this thread is the most relevant
I did IBKR, and they weren’t exactly thrilled to have me only use them for forex, but they didn’t close my account or anything (and then I ended up using them for other stuff, so go figure)
In my opinion IBKR has a rabid compliance department. They offer forex but I believe they intend it for internal arbitrage and hedging, so if you use it to transfer foreign currency to other accounts you may own they get quite uptight about it. I think they don’t want to deal with the compliance burden imposed by the US government so they will potentially threaten to close your account.
thank you!
Is there any way to use USDC or USDT and convert it to Euros there?
You can buy EURC or EURT stablecoins.
However, as far as I can tell even the Portuguese version of Coinbase, for example, requires you to trade in USD. Maybe there is a European equivalent of Coinbase to convert the EURC stablecoin to euros. I don’t know of it.
I used my cash management account at Fidelity to transfer funds for the investment and found they were very helpful. I have heard Schwab was also helpful. etrade, which I attempted to use, was not so helpful however.
Thanks for sharing. How did it work? Transferred usd to directly from cash management account to PT bank? Or converted and then transferred?
I still used Wise. If you use their Wise Balance feature (like a bank account with them) it will save you on fees.
It’s not a loaded question, but are you totally ok transferring more than a couple of $k on Wise? Every time I tried it went into some compliance check status so I quickly abandoned the attempts. Even with official banks with physical offices and named human CEOs it is often difficult to trace and recover your own money. What with fintechs with AI a the helm?
Fidelity wired the money from a cash management account. In looking at my transaction, it looks like I wired USD.
I transfer my funds from Santander Bank in the US in dollars to my Bison Account in Portugal in Euros. Bison Bank exchanges the dollars to euros at a reasonable rate upon receipt of the dollars and Santander charges me 40 dollars per wire transfer. Santander offers to exchange dollars to euros for free (?) before transfer but I find their exchange rate is significantly higher (several points higher than Bison) in the end costing much more.