That is correct. There have always been intermediary bank charges when sending out a wire from Lloyds. That is not anything new. Whether there is a fee for that or not depends on where you are sending the money. If you are sending GBP to another UK bank, there is no need for an intermediary bank because it goes through the UK banking system. If you are sending euros to another euro account, there is no need for one either because that goes through the European banking system. Even when sending US dollars from Lloyds to a bank in the United States, an intermediary bank is not always required, depending on the receiving bank. In this case, I assume you are referring to sending GBP to Thailand. I have not tried that myself, but an intermediary bank would normally be required because the payment is being sent to a bank that does not operate in the same currency as the sending bank. If this service used to be fully free and Lloyds now routes these transfers through Standard Chartered, which charges an intermediary bank transfer fee, then there is probably not much you can do about it. The only possible way to avoid the intermediary bank charge would be to send the GBP to a Wise account first, convert it to Thai baht within Wise, and then send it from Wise to your Thai baht account in Thailand. That removes the intermediary bank from the process, leaving only Wise’s relatively small transfer fee for the local transfer to your Thai bank.
