[TokyoDrifter]

Xoom works like a charm, and offers great exchange rate too. Highly recommend.

[viscosity]

I also follow the approach of transferring USD from US side to my local India Bank account and then let my local bank convert $ to INR. The local bank usually gives a better & decent exchange rate compared to directly converting to INR first and then transferring that from US.

To find the exact benefit and whether I should also switch to Transferwise, is there a way to find historical prices offered by Transferwise or specifically was exchange rate TransferWise offered on this Thursday ? On Thursday (12th Nov), I got 74.1 as the exchange rate from my local bank.

Is the rate shown on the Transferwise webpage is what we really get while converting through them ? Are there any fees they charge ?

Just did some conversion experiments on Transferwise page and it seems they charge something like 0.55% to 0.95% as fees.

[Gurgaon_lyon]

Originally Posted by QuadraticAmoeba

I have always transferred funds in USD and let my Indian bank (Citibank) work out the exchange rate. It doesn’t seem to be very bad, and takes out any third party.

You might want to cross check the exchange rate they charge. Last time (has been quite a few years) when I transfered around 50k from my USA account to nri account in India with them, it was like 2-3% just in exchange rate. Never did try again.
If you are not comfortable with TW despite all recommendations you might want to go with PSU banks.

[CountMe91]

I use TransferWise regularly and Remitly sometimes. The conversion rate and fees varies sometimes but TransferWise is very secure and sometimes the transfer is done within minutes to my NRI account. Can vouch for TransferWise anyday.

[QuadraticAmoeba]

Originally Posted by Gurgaon_lyon

You might want to cross check the exchange rate they charge. Last time (has been quite a few years) when I transfered around 50k from my USA account to nri account in India with them, it was like 2-3% just in exchange rate.:

Thank you, I will check this out. I have only done some back of the envelope calculations a few years back and concluded that things were ok. I will surely take a deeper look.

[n_ramesh99]

Looks like TransferWise is quite popular. It was a revelation. I was not aware of this type of services.

I also have requirement to transfer money from US to my account (in India) once or twice in a year due to vesting of stock options. However, the amount involved is small, a few thousands of dollars. I normally get it transferred as dollars and the Indian bank does the conversion. Transfer itself does not cost much, but I am not sure how competitive the bank rate is. Is there any way for us to find the transfer rate offered by different banks on a day so that we can choose the bank in case you have account in different banks?

[Ruchitya]

Originally Posted by n_ramesh99

I also have requirement to transfer money from US to my account (in India) once or twice in a year due to vesting of stock options. However, the amount involved is small, a few thousands of dollars. I normally get it transferred as dollars and the Indian bank does the conversion. Transfer itself does not cost much, but I am not sure how competitive the bank rate is. Is there any way for us to find the transfer rate offered by different banks on a day so that we can choose the bank in case you have account in different banks?

You can google "<bank name> usd to inr rates". Your bank should maintain a list that is updated every working day. Since SBI rates tend to be good, I use that as my reference on a given day. P.S. I recollect you should refer the TT rate, please correct me if I'm wrong here. Depending on your relationship with your bank, you can ask for a better rate than seen on the online table. And also factor in the taxes that the Indian bank will charge.

The last time I used transferwise, I think the total fees etc. worked out to be approx. 1% of the total amount. You can choose whichever option works out better considering all charges.

The difference here is between wiring money from abroad yourself v/s doing it through a broker after a stock sale. Wiring from a US bank will incur its own wire charges, and transferwise is attractive in this case since you avoid that and pay a potentially lower overall fee. But if your online broker does free wire transfers, then you would have to recalculate based on the other factors I mentioned previously.

[Comrade]

For those asking about Indian banks vs transferwise for FX conversion, you can check the TT buy rate that all big banks publish on their website. PSUs offer better rate than private banks. In PSUs, the bank offering best rate changes on daily basis. Sometimes its Oriential Bank of commerce, sometimes its pnb, and sometimes its indian overseas bank. However, in my experience third party services like Tranferwise & xoom beat these rates by small percentages. You might not realize much difference in INR if its small amounts like 1000 USD, but for larger transfers like 10000 USD, it could be few thousand rupees more in your account. And I wouldnt want to throw away those few thousands freely.

[mav2000]

Hey guys, seems that transferwise does not allow money to be received if you are located in India. It says this service is not available. Also the minimum amount to send seems to be INR 20,000. Is that right, or am I doing something wrong?

[Gurgaon_lyon]

Originally Posted by mav2000

Hey guys, seems that transferwise does not allow money to be received if you are located in India. It says this service is not available. Also the minimum amount to send seems to be INR 20,000. Is that right, or am I doing something wrong?

I'm sure it would allow you to "receive" in India. The sender need to be outside India, so you need to go to website of that country e.g UK or USA. About minimum amount it would vary from country to country.

[Anuruddhs]

I have not used transferwise but based on my experience with transferring money to India there are two main thing to keep in mind.
1. Transfer USD directly to Indian account rather than converting in INR as US banks charge 3-3.5% conversion charges.
2. Best conversion rate is not given by SBI, ICICI, HDFC etc. actually its Indian Overseas Bank which gives the best possible rates. You can visit websites of bank and see what are the rates and you will see there is a big difference in rates even after having so called preferred and priority status in private banks which offers slightly higher rates.

I am using IOB from last few years just for wire transfers.

[n_ramesh99]

In view of the previous discussions in this thread, I decided to try Wise (as TransferWise is renamed) for my current requirement. I created an account and to my dismay I realize that they do not provide options maintain balance if your address is in India. So this means you cannot receive money using Wise in India now. I had a phone call and a chat and they claims that this is the case at least from Sep 2020. May be the previously created account still works - Not sure about that.

Can anyone suggest an option for me to transfer some account from a stock account (Merryl) in US to my India bank account? I would like to use direct wire transfer as the last option due to my previous experience.

[Comrade]

Thats unfortunate. My wise account is from US. Next best option (keeping paper trail) is try checking if Indian Banks would allow you to use their Nostro accounts facility. Here is ICICI website explaining same. Although this article is under business banking, I believe this facility is available even for personal banking. Almost all banks offer this. In this, fx rate is controlled by Indian bank and is usually much better than if you ask the US broker/bank to wire INR directly to your savings account.

https://www.icicibank.com/business-b...mittances.page

[ontheroad]

Hello friends, I need to urgently transfer some money from India to UK. I had gone through the above discussion here, but it mostly deals with money sent from other countries to India. Can someone please suggest the best option to sent money from India to UK? Thanks in Advance.