After being highly amused by a recent thread I thought I'd post about my experiences of using money transfer services to Thailand other than Western Union. I've used three this year - Skrill, PayPal and the newer kid on the block TransferWise

From a security perspective Skrill and Paypal work the same way - you give them access to your bank account via their App. TransferWise has a "cut out" - you have to send them the money from your bank account after you've placed the order online with them. I maintain a bank account in Thailand to which I have Internet banking access so I can see exactly what's going on

My observations (and I stress they're mine, take it or leave it):
Skrill: this worked quite well, you can nominate your base currency and if you stick with that you'll be fine except when you're transferring money internationally. My experience was that they convert the money being sent into Euros and then convert those Euros into the destination currency. Very costly

Paypal: With each Paypal account you can have two bank accounts attached by default - your US one (if you have one) and one for the country where you've registered your account. I didn't want to use my US bank account so it means I have two PayPal accounts - one for the UK, the other for Thailand. I simply send myself money from my UK account (withdrawn by PayPal from my UK bank account - same as Western Union) as "Family & Friends" so the transfer fee is minimal. When it reaches my Thailand account (instantaneously) I accept the transfer and convert it into baht. The exchange rate isn't bad - certainly better than if I sent it direct from bank to bank - and the very low fees are an advantage. The downside is that it then takes around 5 working days from the time I withdraw it from my Thai PayPal account until it reaches my Thai bank account. Why? Who knows. I suspect it would give the opportunity for fraudulent transactions to be stopped

TransferWise: This application is brought to you by the same geeks who invented Skype. I requested the money and was told the probable exchange rate at the time. I had 48 hours (I think) to effect the transfer, during which time the exchange rate could change so I was offered the opportunity to "hedge" or insure against that. As I transferred from my bank to TransferWise immediately, I didn't bother. They acknowledged receipt within a few hours (all by email) and gave me a date 48 hours later by when they said the money would be in my Thai bank account. It actually took a few hours longer, but I put that down to the inefficiencies of the Thai banking system and the time differences. And it was exactly the amount they said it would be. Best of all, the exchange rate was as good as I could get by passing cash over the counter at a branch of Super Rich (who have an App you can download to your phone if you want, giving up the minute rates they're offering against the baht). TransferWise say they're charging an administration fee but for what I was transferring at the time (roughly 10,000 baht) a fee of zero was charged

All three have smartphone Apps. I'd rate the services as follows:
1 TransferWise. Best exchange rate, best transfer time (bank-to-bank); requires more manual intervention
2 PayPal. Second best exchange rate, poor transfer time (bank-to-bank); requires some manual intervention (accepting the payment and withdrawing it to the Thai bank account)
3 Skrill. Lousy exchange rate unless your home currency is Euros; no further comment is necessary

However if you simply can't wait, Western Union with its poor security, high fees and terrible exchange rates is the way to go - take Bucky as your exemplar

I should point out that I use my trusty VPNs (I have several VPN accounts scattered around the world, some hosted by Kommie's Boys) for additional security. I know this will be a huge shock to Surfcrest's IT "guru", cdnmatt, whose complete ignorance of modern-day IT security and how the banks view it still causes amusement. However I'm sure he's a great help to Surfcrest ... somehow

For those who are interested, the emerging security especially for banking transactions is the subject of a leading article in this week's Economist

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