Help Spanish banks have gone crazy!!!!!!!

Today has been a crazy day.. Here's some background: I run a 100K+ a month business here in Spain. Around 20% of my clients pay with international bank cheques... Everything has been running smooth for 4 years... Last month I was told that cheques would take a while to clear. Upon first instance I didn't take much notice until this morning. I had 87,000 euros on my account which was blocked!!! I go to my bank and enquire... The answer: Oh bank cheques can take up to 6 months to clear. I'm incredulous and ask what changed. The answer: This is regulation. To cut a long story short it turns out they changed directors last month and now I don't have any direct access that can answer my questions. All the other employees appear to know nothing of importance. All I know is I have 87,000 euros blocked on my account and that nobody knows why... is this normal? what's changed? what is the law about this? i've never heard about a cheque taking longer than a few days to clear????????

I don't know if cheques in business accounts take longer, but a cheque, even an international one, only takes 28 days to clear in my personal account!

Some banks allow the balance to show as the cheque having been cleared after a few days electronically, but the reality is that the money is withheld until the cheque physically clears.

We pay in on average around 400 USD cheques into our La Caixa account. The value is shown in our account immediately but is actually witheld for 20 days before being released . For Canadian cheques the holding period is 40 days.

Until January this year, regardless of the value of the cheques or the number, we paid a flat commission of 12 euros per transaction. After  January the bank wanted 12 Euros per cheque; given that some of the cheques are only 30USD this converts to 21.58€ (todays rate) if the bamk takes 12€ this leaves us with 9€ so the bank gets more than we do!

We protested this with the bank and after a great deal of  email to-ing and fro-ing between our branch and head off ice in Barcelona our manager negotiated a new rate of 4€ per cheque. Still not good but a damn sight better than 12€.

He explained that whereas cheques are still widely used in the US over here their use has practically stopped and each cheque has to be manually handled. Given that the banks are looking for as much cash as possible, this manual handling charge has gone up.

Its just a point, but at La Caixa the managers have a bit of leeway in the length of time that a cheque is witheld. Whilst the new commission rate was being negotiaited our manager held onto a dozen or so cheques without putting them into the system; when we agreed the new rate he credited them to our account and cleared them within 3 days...free of express clearance charges.

jj; I realise that compared with your situation ours is very small change. I know its bloody frustrating and I just hope everything works out well.

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Just a thought would it not be better is your clients were to pay into a Paypal account that way you would have access to the money within a couple of days

they could also use a Moneybookers account  all you need is an email address

In our case, Paypal is not an option unfortunately; cheque or bank transfer are the only surviving options. but with bank transfers the issuer charges 35 USD and will not make the transfer until over 250 USD is due for payment. Our cheques come from a variety of sources and with some of them it would take literally years to accumulate the minimum figure for a bank transfer. Shame but there you go!

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Hi JJ,

Unfortunately this is the bind that banks are holding over most businesses who receive international cheques, it has become the latest way of holding onto funds and offering zero interest whilst they gain profit by sweeping all uncleared deposits onto the overnight money markets.

The best option is to use an intermediary payment provider and getting your clients to transfer their funds direct to that providers currency accounts. The incoming payments can be sent to you at a 'Spot' exchange rate (whereby funds are converted at the going rate) or you can fix an exchange rate for your currency pairs which can handle multiple draw downs for a specific period of time.

There are a multitude of international payments specialist or foreign currency brokers who could establish your requirement and tailor solutions to fit your needs.

Hope this helps

Ben

 See if they could use something like xe.com, a Worldwide funds transfer compay. They don't charge (in the UK, US, Canada and other countries) for transfers made through EFT, but you don't get the option of appending a reference number. You can send as little, or as much as you want and once it hits the account,it's yours.

Mark