Hello,
can someone help us, we search a way to transfer money between UK and Germany.
The problem is that we sell parts to UK (pro part ca. 100€), and when the buyers want to send the money they tell us that the must pay to 20 pounds of tax or some of that.
The question : Is there a way to send money cheaper to a german bank, or a way to have a bankaccount in UK (without come over), and than send the money in one time (2 x a mounth) to our german bankaccount.
We work this time with Int. bnak account number and SWIFT-BIC. from our german Kreissparkasse Ludwigsburg.

Sven, should be aware that the vast majority of the posters here are US bankers. We are (At least I am) unfaniliar with any tax related to funds transfers to or from the UK of the kind you mention.

My guess is that rather than a tax, the buyer's UK bank is charging a fee for the service of sending the wire transfer and converting the buyer's pounds to euros. Most financial insitutions are going to charge your buyers for this service, so I don't see how it can be avoided.

If you do business with the same customers frequently, You could have your buyers pay you via checque instead of a funds transfer. To ensure that you get paid, you would have the buyers execute a standby letter of credit drawn on their bank. If the checque the use to remit payments is not honoured, then you could invoke the letter of credit to ensure that you were paid.

It should be possible for your clients to issue you a standby letter drawn in euros. This would relieve you of the currency risk of receiving payment in pounds and converting the pounds to euros.

Your bank in Stuttgart should be able to help you with this process. Good luck - I hope this was helpful to you.

Sven,

I am a U.K. banker. If I understand correctly the payments are for circa EUR100.

Low value international payments (even within the EU where they are not within the Eurozone) are relatively expensive, however a GBP20.00 charge (this is not a tax) seems very high. For a ‘non-urgent’ ‘economy’ transfer my bank would charge GBP5.50, plus the –in this case- German correspondent bank’s charges (I’ve no idea what these typically are; you could ask your bankers). ‘Standard’ transfers are minimum GBP13.00.

I would strongly recommend against accepting payment by cheque as the bank charges are likely to be much higher and also it may take some time for your a/c to be credited while the cheque is being collected (it will depend if your bank is willing to ‘negotiate’ the cheques).

Finally, could you not accept payment by credit card?