Who knows where the money actually gets stuck when sending it directly to the bank?))
In my experience, it’s usually at the intermediary banks — some anti-fraud check gets triggered and the money gets stuck. But SWIFT is too old a system to detect that automatically, so you have to open an investigation.
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Listen, once my transfer got stuck for two weeks and it turned out the correspondent bank in Germany was dragging its feet — even my Italian bank couldn’t say exactly where. What helped was that I warned my branch manager in advance; he personally put in a request and everything got pushed through. Without that you can wait a month and be left guessing )
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It turned out that Raiffeisen was the intermediary — the money got stuck there, even though the sender’s bank said everything had gone through fine. If we hadn’t requested an investigation, it would have stayed that way.
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Exactly — before making a transfer you need to go to the bank and talk to the manager. When I did it I brought a statement from a Russian account, and it was in Russian and hard to read, but they accepted it anyway. It’s especially better to discuss large amounts in advance, because no bank really cares about mere transit, but the anti-fraud system can trigger anywhere along the chain. And if SWIFT gets stuck — it’s like walking a tightrope; each new payment creates a risk.
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