I had to pay for something in the Netherlands a while back and the seller (a physical but very small niche shop) didn't take PayPal nor had they credit card facilities... Not a huge sum involved (€50). Bank transfer not an issue though. I was almost at the stage of posting €50 in cash...
I asked my banks (I have 3) and apart from the fastest taking 5+ days to process a simple transfer, wanting fees of £10-£25 for the transaction and giving crappy exchange rates they made it hard work (come to branch, fill in these forms, leave an imprint of your left testicle here,...)
Bit of googlage later and I settled upon XETrade - they do exactly what I needed - ie. I can send €x to person Y in country Z without paying stupidly inflated fees, taking days or acres of form-filling.
The first time you go to use it, you need to sign up for an account (this is by far the longest part and involved an actual person calling back to conduct some verification - took nearly a whole day for it to happen or me) and once you have signed up and have completed verification, then you can simply go online book your transaction (where you enter the amount you wish to send, the recipients details etc)... It offers you a price which you can decline (obviously they don't send the money then) or accept.
You then send the required amount with the reference they give to the domestic (to you) bank account they tell you (for me it's always been the same branch of Barclay's on Baker Street in London) with the deal reference by a (free) domestic transfer.
Then the next day they issue the payment to the recipient. All of which you can see within your XETrade account (and optionally get email notifications for)
Yes the exchange rate is a little degraded (something like 0.5-1.0%) from mid-market rates - but nothing like the 4-5% degradation that my own banks tried to apply and no monstrous fees unless I wanted it überfast transfer at the remote end as opposed to regular (2-5 day) EFT service (EFT has always happened within 24 hours from my payment being sent to the domestic bank).
They offer "free" service to/from these currencies/destinations:
AUD to Australia
CAD to Canada
EUR to Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom
DKK to Denmark
GBP to The United Kingdom
HUF to Hungary
MXN to Mexico
NOK to Norway
NZD to New Zealand
SEK to Sweden
USD to The United States or Canada
They do offer transfers to other places - but always chargeable.
No connection with them other than using them several times now to successfully acquire things that would have had prohibitively high bank charges otherwise. Your own risk if you use them and it all goes horribly wrong. Happy to find out about other similar services - but so far XETrade have done everything I require.
