Foreign Transfers (non-SEPA)

Last Article Update 10.03.2025

 

George Business transfers your money quickly to accounts all around the world. By 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 area 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 initiate a new order directly from one of your accounts,   your account history, or by using Hey George!

 

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 (using the address book or creating a new business contact) and, of course, the amount.

4. As you can see, George now displays additional fields. Since there are expenses for foreign transfers, you can decide who will accept them: You, the partner, or you both share them equally. If you fully or partially accept them, you can also select an account that George should charge for the expenses.

5. Now you can enter a charges account, either a text or a payment reference, and a sender reference. These three input fields are optional. You can also select whether the transfer should be executed as "urgent transfer". In this case the payment will be processed with higher priority but comes with additional costs. Please be aware that this is not the same thing as an Instant Payment SEPA.

6. By clicking on "More options", other optional fields expand: 

  • 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)

  • Correspondance 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.

7. 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