If you receive money through SWIFT transfer into a foreign currency account in the same currency, it's likely that you still won't get the exact same amount sent to you.
This is due to the involvement of the middleman bank in SWIFT transfer. In the worst case, there can be more than one middleman bank. Each middleman bank will take a cut of the amount transferred. This process is not transparent and you will not be informed of it unless you ask the bank for a breakdown of fees after getting your payment.

If your purpose is to convert the foreign currencies into RM when the exchange rate is favorable to you, you might want to consider Borderless Account offered by Transferwise(TW).

Transferwise Borderless Account


With the Borderless account, it is as if you have a local bank account in the US, UK, EU and Australia, in your own name, to receive local payment. The payment received will be kept in the original currencies, i.e. USD, GBP, EUR and AUD. You can convert them into RM anytime you want and initialize the transfer into your RM account. TW will send RM to you through their company bank account with CIMB. The amount received is exactly as expected.

However, I would not advise you to keep your foreign currencies with TW for too long. TW is after all not a bank.

This post has been edited by hyperzz: Mar 7 2018, 04:15 AM

From my experience:

For GBP:
The sender's name will appear as "your name TW". For example, your name is John Doe, the sender's name will appear as "John Doe TW". Brokerage account might not accept this transfer.

For EUR:
The sender's name will appear exactly as your own name in the SEPA transfer. This method is acceptable for transfer to brokerage account in your own name.

For USD:
It seems that the sender's name appears as your own name. I noticed this from a TW transfer into my US bank account.
However, when I tried to send a TW transfer to top up my Interactive Broker (IB) account, the transfer was rejected. Possibly the ACH transfer was sent in a different bank account number but still in my own name, just my guess.

In addition, for GBP/EUR/USD/SGD, you can add a short message/text which will be sent along with the money transfer. However, no short message/text cannot be added for HKD/CNY transfer. For currencies where no message/text can be added, they offer to send the message via email to the recipient.

This post has been edited by hyperzz: Jun 28 2018, 02:47 PM

CORRECTED

For all outgoing transfers from TW, the sending account number is most likely different from your Borderless account number but your name will appear as the sender.

In case of withdrawal from IB, the EUR IBAN works fine. The GBP account number won't work as IB requires an IBAN.
The USD account number might work for ACH withdrawal but I never tried it as I already have an US bank account linked to IB.

This post has been edited by hyperzz: Jun 28 2018, 04:21 AM

It's reasonable to doubt TW as this is a relatively new company. You can always consult Mr Google to find out more about the background of TW and who are the big names or venture capital that back TW.

I think TW won't go burst anytime soon. In fact, the high street banks are feeling the heat from fintech, especially in Europe and the US.

ACH transfer is either free or low cost but it takes longer time, usually 1 to 2 days.

TW could be a bit cautious when you receive your first few payments. Malaysia's reputation does not help, no thanks to the 1MDB scandals. But as you use TW regularly without any high-risk transactions (i.e. incoming transfer from crypto exchange), things should go smoothly for your account. It takes time to build trust.

This post has been edited by hyperzz: Jul 5 2018, 04:50 AM

Agreed. I am certain that 90% of the time TW's exchange rate is better than any banks in the world, for transfer in small amount (< $10K). Only some competing fintech startups would offer slightly better exchange rate. But they can't go too much lower. The bottom line is the interbank exchange as seen in Google.

Watch out for Revolut which is currently not available to Malaysia yet but they are expanding and competing head-to-head with TW.

This post has been edited by hyperzz: Jul 6 2018, 04:16 AM

That is true, due to restrictions by Bank Negara, TW only allows incoming transfer converted into RM. But TW when paired with an oversea bank account where there's freedom of fund movement, is a very useful remittance tool.

Still, TW is good for those who has oversea income.

I don't want to make any judgement as I don't know what happened between you and TW. So far I haven't experienced any major issues with them. Their response could be a bit slow as they are expanding rapidly into many countries but they are understaffed to handle customer inquiry from different time zones.

At the moment, only Revolut can compete with TW on the same service level but unfortunately Revolut is not available to Malaysia yet. Other companies like Skrill and Neteller which are popular with FX trader might work if your customers would use them. If you search through Google, you can find even more options but these are usually not as reputable as TW. You can use Trustpilot to read customer reviews about a website.

For TW, you can provide your GBP/EUR/USD/AUD Borderless account number to your oversea employer and ask them to pay your salary by the way of local bank transfer in the UK/EU/US/AUS. Not a cent will be lost in the transfer.
The fund received will be kept in GBP/EUR/USD/AUD and you can convert them into MYR for transferring into your Malaysian bank account anytime.
In this way, you can do the conversion when the rate is favorable to you.

This post has been edited by hyperzz: Jul 9 2018, 07:53 PM

@jack2, you can post your case at Trustpilot with your real name and case details if you want to force TW to respond.
As you scroll through the reviews, you can see that TW actually responds to negative reviews.

To be fair to TW, the email that was sent is apparently impolite, no offence intended.

For your deactivated account, can you still withdraw your fund?

This post has been edited by hyperzz: Jul 10 2018, 09:00 PM

I believe this is true. This seems to happen sometimes. I'm not defending TW for this one.

This one is very serious.
I would encourage you to post your full account at Trustpilot with at least a bit of information for them to identify your case. Trustpilot has worldwide readership and TW will be forced to respond. Very interested to see TW's response myself.

I did not experienced this myself but apparently some users do.
There was a time with SGD transfer, TW warned me beforehand that the transfer will take longer than usual, due to a glitch in their system.

This post has been edited by hyperzz: Jul 11 2018, 12:42 AM

While what you said is generally accepted true, no challenge to that, I would like to share the story of the founder of Ikea:

Ingvar Kamprad



There is no one-size-fit-all method to find success, everyone has to figure out which way work best for himself/herself.