Down under or Thai? Aussie mum trades Oz for Land of Smiles

[bermondburi]

So I sent some money via TorFx the other day. Had the confirmation from then that the money has gone, everything cleared at the UK end. 

 

Before I sent the money, I had to speak to the broker about something, and he told me that Thai banks are famous for not releasing the funds promptly, and if that happened he would send me a copy of the bank transaction, SWIFT Copy. 

 

He also said if there's any problems, just show them this, and they will probably deny everything, not admit the money is there, but then the funds miraculously appear the next day. 

 

So far this is exactly what has happened. My wife went in today with the SWIFT Copy, but I don't really believe that the clerk would understand it anyway, and they deny having the money. 

 

All information is correct, because you can see from the SWIFT Copy. I believe that the money is in the Bangkok office holding account and they haven't released it yet. 

 

Anyone else with any experiences?

 

I'm expecting the money to appear tomorrow, but we'll see. 

[dabhand]

Which Thai bank?

[bermondburi]

It's Kasikorn. When my wife went in, they put her on the phone to people at the head office, who all denied the money was there. 

 

Having seen from the SWIFT copy that all the information is correct, I can only presume that they have to deny, because otherwise they're admitting culpability. 

 

They've told her to send an e-mail with a copy of the SWIFT Copy, which I'm now going to do. 

[dabhand]

Sounds like it is a problem with the Thai bank. Good luck with chasing it through.

 

Not always the case. My account is with SCB and a number of years back I had an issue with a transfer from Natwest. I contacted their Bangkok call centre and found out that Natwest had missed a digit from my SCB account number. SCB told me they had sent a chaser to Natwest asking for correct details but no response. I then contacted Natwest and they gave me the runaround and then eventually advised that they had responded to SCB. Well, a couple of days later I found they had now added an extra digit to my account number!! So I then chased them up again. Meantime my wife was getting rather agitated over the delayed transfer.

Anyway, eventually came through but was totally cheesed off with the Natwest attitude and their incorrect blaming of the Thai bank for the delay. Never used them again for transfers.

[bermondburi]

So it's now all resolved. 

 

Quite comical really. Literally within about 5 minutes of me sending an e-mail to Kasikorn, showing the SWIFT Copy, going through it step by step, to show all the information, my wife gets a phone call from a woman at the head office to say that the money was now in her account!

 

Fancy that!

 

I don't want to be totally negative about Thailand here, and I'm fairly sure this is probably common practice from banks all over the world, but it is just so Thai.

 

Deny, deny, and deny so no face is lost. And only when the truth is completely obvious do anything about it. 

 

Needless to say a lot of people have had an earful from my wife today. And the funny thing is that this was just a test run for a much larger amount next week, so she'll probably have to do it all again!

 

Banks though, when you think about all the transfers that happen daily, if they just keep the money for one day extra they're making a fortune, and how many people keep a close track of the time for transfer. 

 

As my wife said, "amazing Thailand!"

[KhunBENQ]

2 hours ago, bermondburi said:

So it's now all resolved.

Years ago I had something similar at Bangkok Bank.

I can't remember the details but I had to notify/show up before the money was in my account.

It was a somewhat higher amount (some 3.x million Baht).

[eisfeld]

For amounts over 50k USD, the banks have a reporting requirement and usually have to either ask you (phone call) or you need to fill out some form. BKK Bank will for example make a call from their treasury department and you can also take the opportunity to ask them to raise the exchange rate a bit which they'll usually do. SWIFT transfers from overseas usually take 1-2 days in my experience. Once the bank called you, the funds normally show up in your account within an hour.

[Pib]

Although some people report their SWIFT transfers posting to their Thai bank accounts within hours a lot of can depend on timing.  Like if someone in Australia SWIFTs some money in the morning which is only a couple hours difference in time zone from Thailand, that SWIFT is arriving during Thai bank business hours, it usually gets eye-balled quick by a Thai bank human and gets posted to your account. 

 

But if you are sending say from the US/EU where you have some big time zones difference....the money may arrive during the Thai bank night-non business hours, and then it's not until sometime during the daylight business hours that the Thai bank human does that final eye-ball check and posts the funds to your account.

 

And of course you always have the cases of the sending bank/money transfer indicating (telling you) they have "actually" sent the money but really they have not launched it yet...instead they are waiting for certain transmission times they have during their business hours.  They try to make you thing the Thai bank has rec'd the money but they haven't yet....in fact, it still may be still at the sending bank/company or at an intermediary/correspondent point.

 

 

[eisfeld]

45 minutes ago, Pib said:

in fact, it still may be still at the sending bank/company or at an intermediary/correspondent point.

This is also something that people most often don't know. In many cases, banks are not directly connected to each other but need to pass the funds through correspondent banks in the middle. This also can take time and might route the money through unrelated countries on the other side of the world (like New York). I am not sure though how it works with SWIFT, are banks always directly connected to SWIFT?.

 

BTW in my earlier post I quoted $50k as the reporting threshold. I think that was wrong, I think it might be 2M THB (obviously the limit is denoted in Thai Baht). But I know that for transfors over $50k for example, BKK Bank will call you to "confirm" the transaction first and ask for a purpose.

 

As you correcty stated, banks also have certain hours during which transfers are processed and when you mix that with timezones, it can easily cause one day of delay just because of that.