Due to the fact that the clinic is in Russia, and no one particularly likes paying Russia large sums of money, this can cause problems. The political situation means that banking and Russia are not good bedfellows. The way the clinic get round this is to have a holding account out in Hong Kong. They have a multicurrency account that can take Euros as well as US dollars. It appears, for the European patients at least, that they prefer being paid in Euros. This means, as someone from the UK, that I have two get €45,000 out to a bank in Hong Kong, paying an electronics company as a beneficiary. This electronics company bank account is the holding account for the clinic in Russia and they can then transfer that money back to their accounts in Moscow.
The problem is, not many exchange companies appear to like to want to pay some random Hong Kong electronics company for medical treatments in Moscow.
I will detail the slight financial nightmare I had in paying for my treatment. I was advised that a company called HiFx were really good at paying for the treatment. HiFx had recently become XE and were the company that I chose to send the money to Hong Kong. The reason I chose a money exchange company instead of my bank was that it would save a vast amount of money in doing so. Banks charge a not insignificant amount to transfer such large sums of money out to places like Hong Kong.
When I was filling out the online forms for my transfer, for some reason the first two letters of the electronics company were missed off. This meant that my original payment was rejected and wasted a number of days. I remedied the situation straight away and had the exact name and details for the receiving bank beneficiary account put in place (and verified by everyone). For some reason, and I don't know for the likes of me why, the account in Hong Kong refused to take the payment because the beneficiary details were supposedly not correct even though they were definitely correct. As a result, my payment through XE was delayed so long that it hadn't gone through by the time I was out of isolation. XE kept trying after two further rejections.
Anastasia, pressured by the accounting team at the clinic, was becoming frustrated with my lack of payment. However, as far as I was concerned, I had done nothing wrong and the delay was as a result of the clinic's own bank account in Hong Kong. However, I decided that XE were unable to get the payments through to the bank accounts so I decided to try other exchange companies. I went onto the Russian HSCT forum on Facebook and asked for names of exchange companies who could do the business. I was given a number of company details that other people had used successfully. However, the next two or three companies I tried to use were unable to help me due to the fact that the payment was in Euros and it was going out to Hong Kong or that there was an issue with the beneficiary company details correlating with treatment in Moscow. I couldn't understand why I was being refused payment transfers that other people had done successfully.
Here are the companies that I failed with:
- XE (HiFx)
- HSBC (refused to do it in Euros)
- Transferwise (said they could not do Euros to HK)
- Worldwide Currencies (Compliance unit refused to match HK Electronics Company to Russian clinic)
You can imagine how panicked I was getting in being refused by these different companies. By now, I had already finished my treatment and needed to pay the clinic and had the money to pay for it too! It was just frustrating.
In the end, I found Smart Currency Exchange came up trumps and saved the day!
Whoop!
So my advice is to use them…
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