I did a swift transfer for 675,000 thb to the Halifax in the UK from the Thanachart bank yesterday and it arrived almost instantly....same day.

I was expecting it to take up to 5 working days as per the banks.

Is this now a normal occurence by Swift? Also I got Thanachart to convert to UK pounds before sending....assumed that Halifax was more likely to screw me on the exchange rate than Thanachart....but now wondering if this was the right thing to do?

SWIFT basically occurs as fast as the sending and receiving banks process the transfer...probably with the Sending bank having more of an influence. Based on what SWIFT transfer usually costs (pricey) it is suppose to arrive within approx 24 business hours. I expect converting the Thai baht to UK pounds at Thanachart was a smart move because the exchange rate given by home country banks for Thai baht is usually not that good since the Thai baht is not a widely used/traded/valued currency outside of Thailand.

We get regular large international payments processed in under an hour. The first few were a day but now all quick.

I find transfers out of Thailand are very fast, usually same day. Transfers in take sseveral days, doesn't take Einstein to figure western banks are taking arbitrage off the money, same as they do for clearing cheques etc so slowly. Add up the thousnads of times they do it and the dollars do add up, western banks can't help but screw you, but at least we have the comfort of seeing the CEOs multimillion dollar bonuses so it all for a good cause.

I do weekly transfers from my Dutch bank to my Thai bank account at SCB, if i do a urgent transfer its there within 24 hours. If i do a normal transfer it would take 4 working days! My friend which have the same bank in Holland but a different Thai bank, the K-Bank it will only take max 24 hours as well.

So is this just SCB delaying these international transfers?