Receiving international payments: fees and how to read what landed

Your client says they’ve paid. The invoice says 4,000. Your account says 3,963.

37 short. No letter, no explanation, just a smaller number. Before you email the client in a temper, find out whose hand was in the till. It might not be theirs.

Who can take money out of a payment on the way in

A cross-border bank payment often passes through several parties. Each can legitimately touch the amount.

The sender’s bank. Charges the sender for sending. That’s usually billed on top, to the sender, and it’s why your client’s statement might show 4,000 plus a fee.

One or more intermediary (correspondent) banks. When the sender’s bank and yours have no direct relationship, the payment hops through others. Each intermediary can take a fee from the amount, and there’s no standard size. Payment vendors’ estimates run from roughly 10 to 50 dollars per bank, which are estimates rather than rules. You can’t predict it from your side.

Your bank. May charge for receiving, and then converts the money if it isn’t already in your currency, using its own rate.

The currency conversion. Not a line item. A margin over the mid-market rate, buried in the rate you get. Usually the biggest piece. You see it only by comparing the rate to a live reference like our dollar page and doing a bit of arithmetic.

That’s four possible takers. Our job below is to cut the number of them, and to let you see what each one took.

The three charge options, in one table

On an international bank payment, the sender picks who bears the bank charges. The three codes are OUR, SHA and BEN. The labels are the same everywhere, even though what banks do with them varies.

Many banks pre-select SHA, so the client may not have even considered it. If you want the full invoice value, ask in advance: put “Please send with charges paid by sender (OUR)” on the invoice. Some clients will ignore it. Some payers’ systems won’t offer it. And choosing OUR typically costs the payer more, which they may resent. Ask politely, and know that sometimes a client prefers to gross up the invoice a bit instead.

In the euro area the situation is easier. Within the SEPA area a euro transfer is made with an IBAN, and the rule is that charges for cross-border euro payments must be the same as for comparable domestic ones, according to the Austrian central bank’s SEPA page. So a euro payment from Germany to Spain shouldn’t cost more than a domestic transfer. That doesn’t apply to dollars sent from Texas to Lisbon.

What to give your payer

Bad details cost days. Some cost money, when a payment is rejected and returned with fees taken both ways.

• Account holder name exactly as on the account. A mismatch can cause a delay or rejection.
• Account number or IBAN. If your country uses IBANs, give the IBAN; one UK bank’s guidance says an IBAN is preferred for international payments because it identifies the account more accurately. Where there’s no IBAN (the US, for instance), you give the account number plus whatever local bank code applies, such as a routing number or sort code.
• SWIFT/BIC code of your bank, eight or eleven characters, the same thing under two names.
• Bank name and address, and your own address as the bank holds it. Some sending banks refuse to proceed without a town and country.
• Currency you want to receive, written as a code.
• Purpose of payment, if your country’s banks ask for one. Ask your bank.
• Payment reference: see below.

Put it all on one page and send that page every time. Don’t retype from memory. If your details ever change, confirm by phone with a number the client already trusts; fraudsters like emails that say “our bank account has changed”.

The reference field

Reference fields are small and unforgiving. They’re what lets your accounts person match a credit to an invoice three weeks later.

Ask the payer to put the invoice number first, short and alone: “INV-2026-114”. No sentences, no punctuation experiments. If one payment covers several invoices, ask for the numbers separated by a comma, and ask for a remittance advice by email so the breakdown exists somewhere.

Without a reference, an incoming credit just says a name and an amount. If two clients each pay 1,500, you’re guessing.

A worked example: how 4,000 becomes 343,513

All numbers illustrative. A client sends 4,000 USD under SHA. An intermediary takes 25. Your bank charges 12 for an incoming wire. You get 3,963 USD, which is 37 short.

That’s the visible part. Now say your account is in local currency, and the bank converts the 3,963 at a rate 1.5% worse than mid-market, which is 88.00 on the day (made-up). 3,963 x 88.00 x 0.985 = 343,513 (rounded). At full value, mid-market, the invoice would have been worth 352,000. The gap is 8,487, or about 2.4%.

See the proportions? The 37 dollars that caused the complaint came to roughly one percent. The unseen conversion margin was bigger. Most people chase the deductions and ignore the rate, because only the first is on the statement. If you can receive and hold the dollars and convert elsewhere, or negotiate a better rate with your bank for regular receipts, there’s more to save in the second step than the first. Our EUR to GBP page, and every other pair page, gives you the mid-market line for your own check. Rates refreshed hourly.

How to read what landed

Do this when a payment comes in short.

First, get your bank’s credit advice. It shows the amount credited and any fee your bank itself charged. If it shows no fee and the credit is still short, the money was taken before it reached your bank.

Second, ask the client for the payment confirmation from their bank. Banks use an MT103 message for many international payments. It records the amount sent, and a charges field that shows OUR, SHA or BEN. Only the sender’s side can ask for it, so you ask your client to request it from their bank and pass it on. SWIFT is moving payments to a newer message format, so what you receive may look different, and some banks give their own confirmation. Whatever it’s called, ask for the same things: amount sent, charge option, any tracking reference.

Third, if the gap matters, use the tracking reference (the UETR) to trace it. Your bank can look it up on SWIFT’s tracker for banks that support it. It’s the number that stays the same across every bank in the chain.

Fourth, settle it in writing: the client tops up the difference, you add it to the next invoice, or you write it off. For small gaps, write-off often wins on time. For repeated gaps, switch to OUR or change the route.

Keep the invoice, remittance advice, bank confirmation and credit advice together. How a bank charge is treated in your books, or whether it affects tax on the income, is a question for your adviser.

Cutting the number of takers

Local rails are the cleanest trick. If you can be paid into an account that is local to the payer, using their domestic scheme, then there’s no chain of banks to deduct from. Some banks and non-bank providers give you local account details in several currencies for that reason. Local transfers also tend to land faster than SWIFT wires, which one source puts at one to five business days, though a compliance check or a holiday can stretch it.

The second trick is asking for the right charge code. The third is receiving less often in larger amounts, since flat fees hurt small payments most. And the fourth, the cheapest one: test with a small payment before the first large one.

Sources

• SEPA payment instruments (Oesterreichische Nationalbank)
• What payee details are required to send money abroad (NatWest)
• SWIFT charges (Xflow)
• How to receive an international wire transfer (Grey)
• MT103: what it is and how to get one (Skydo)
• Client paid in full but you received less (Winvesta)

Checked: November 2026