Cheapest way to pay an invoice in EUR

Life Hacking
1

Hello everyone,

I need to pay an invoice in Italy for about 15,000 Euros.

What would be the most economical way to make this payment ?

Cash ? Where can get the best condition ?
Online payment ? I am using UBS / IB / Cantonal Bank Fribourg

I have not deposit in EUR.

Thanks

2

Make a Wise account.

Can transfer CHF to it for free and then can pay the invoice directly. Very cheap currency conversion for a 0.4% fee.

Probably also can convert CHF to EUR in IB and then transfer the € to Wise for even cheaper.

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3

You can pay eu bills using revolut too.

4

I don’t know the cheapest way, but it is not UBS. They will ask for about 20 CHF for the payment (not considering the exchange rate, etc.). Wise and Revolut will probably be better choices.

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5

Use Wise , as per their website, following are conditions

Fees -: 33.86 CHF
Amount needed in CHF -: 14228 CHF
Amount that would be converted -:14194 CHF
Amount receipt would get -: 15,000 EUR
Exchange rate -: 1.0568

I think everything else would take too much time. You can also do it via Revolut for free if you have 15 months (as about 1000 CHF per month is free to covert) . But I don’t think you have time to wait :slight_smile:

Going via IB just to exchange money would raise triggers as they don’t appreciate it. And then you also need to know what fee will be charged by receiving bank and IB to move Euro to that bank. Normally IB only let you transfer money to accounts where money was sent from. So this would also need some approvals.

P.S -: I am assuming you have clear information about reference code, IBAN etc. and also your recipient would be able to reconcile payments if it came from Wise.

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6

If it‘s a SEPA transfer (to an IBAN) shouldn’t it be a mere CHF 0.30 (excluding FX markup)?

7

I don’t know, really. Those are payments made by a UBS € account to Italy. I have to find out why these costs are there (it’s not my account yet; I will inherit part of it soon).

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8

Those are the bank’s fees for the transfers. So the account holder is paying around 20 francs to transfer around 1500 francs, not accounting for the currency exchange markups, which are likely another 10 francs or so.

The problem is that the account holder did not use SEPA transfers. UBS charges 0.30 francs per SEPA transfer, which is a lot less than the approx. 20 francs paid for the transfers shown.

But even accounting for SEPA transfers, using a service with low/no currency exchange markups (Wise, Revolut, etc.) would save you money. But if you don’t want the extra hassle and don’t mind losing 10 francs in currency exchange, make sure to at least use SEPA transfers to avoid the high transfer fees.

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9

Hello,

Excellent, thank you very much.

With UBS the SEPA transfert is only 30 cents
 But the currency exchange is not so good.

So I checked with
Wise : 14 255,43 CHF
UBS : 14433,00 CHF
BCF : 14442,75 CHF

Thanks for the savings :grin:

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10

But for the first order of 18.30€, it is written SEPA transfer, no? “1 fois e-banking SEPA”. Anyway, I’ll check that further once I have access to the account :slightly_smiling_face:

11

My guess is that at least part of the 18.60 francs is for the “1 fois Avis de dĂ©bit / crĂ©dit.”

The stated fee per account statement for a private account is 1 franc. This could be the cumulative fee for all statements ordered over a certain period (possibly a year).

In any case, the fee for a SEPA transfer ordered through online banking should be 0.30 francs per transfer. If the transfer is made from a savings account, there is an additional 5-franc surcharge.

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