Foreign Transfers (non-SEPA)

Last Article Update 20.11.2025

George Business transfers your money quickly to accounts all around the world. In doing so, George differentiates between transfers within the SEPA area and foreign transfers (non-SEPA).

 

While preparing your transfer there are some things you should keep in mind so your money arrives at the desired destination, whether it's abroad or within the SEPA zone but in a currency other than EUR.

How to make a non-SEPA transfer

1. From your George Business overview, select "New Order" in left-side navigation.

Of course, you can also start a new order directly from one of your accounts,  your account history, or by using Feature Assistant.

 

2. Select "Single Transfer" from the dropdown menu.

 

3. As when preparing a regular SEPA transfer, select the initiating (sender) account. If you initiated the transfer from your account history or from within an account, then this account will be automatically selected as the initiating account. Then the partner/recipient (from the contact list or by creating a new contact) and, of course, the amount.

4. George shows you additional fields for non-SEPA transfers:

 

  • Sharing of expenses: Non-SEPA transfers come with fees. You can choose who pays - you, the recipient, or divide them equally.
  • Charges account: If you want, you can tell George to charge expenses to a specific account.

5. You can now add:

 

  • Text OR payment reference
  • Sender reference

 

These fields are optional. 

6. You can choose a transfer date - the default is today. Tick "Urgent Transfer" if you want the transfer to go through faster. This means extra costs, and is different from Instant Payments (SEPA). 

7. When you click "More options", George shows you more optional fields:

 

  • Purpose code & Purpose code category:
    With the purpose code category you can decide how to categorise your order. You can label it as, e.g., "Pension payment", "Tax payment"  etc. The purpose code itself then further specifies the type of order.
  • Ultimate debtor & ultimate creditor:
    If the initiating account and/or the recipient are not the same people who will in fact send and receive money, you can change them here.

  • Exchange rate (for more details on this, see below)

  • Correspondence bank:
    The correspondence bank is the one that the domestic bank has a business relationship with in order to do international transfers. 

  • SWIFT confirmation:
    By entering an e-mail address, an execution confirmation ("SWIFT-Confirmation") will be sent to that e-mail according to the prevailing conditions. Please keep in mind that this optional instruction cannot be processed by all banks. 

  • Instructions to recipient's bank:
    Here, you can enter either an order code or add text in the text field.

8. In the next step, you can either save this transfer for later, save the transfer and immediately prepare a new one, or sign it right away.

Transfers in a foreign currency

As mentioned above, in the amount field you can select foreign currencies other than EUR in which your foreign transfer (non-SEPA) shall be executed.

For orders in foreign currencies, a foreign currency conversion is generally necessary. Before you sign an order, George checks whether live rates are available. If there are no current rates, you can sign the order using the Erste Group Fixing or try again at a later date. The Erste Group Fixing rate is the daily rate for foreign currency payments.

For more information on the FX Live Rate, please expand the toggle below.

Author: Samira El-Shamy