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Comment by patd | Hacker News Reader

Aren't you asking a bit too much info for a simple SEPA transfer ? The IBAN should be all you really need, the rest are nice to have.

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I've heard that too, but my bank (Sbanken, normally a good user friendly bank) wouldn't let the payment go through without all the fields filled out.

IBAN == bank account number with the bank info baked in, although I think for foreign transfers you might still have to provide the bank code separately.

I've never been asked for an address when doing a wire transfer.

From what I've heard banks stopped validating the name field a long time ago and you can enter whatever you want.

My Finnish bank has always (10+ years) asked for the full recipient address when I've entered a foreign IBAN (even within EU). Just tested that it still does.

I don't think they validate it, though, IIRC I've gotten away with simply putting in "Germany".

Did you use "foreign payment" or just pay as if it were a domestic payment?

I don't remember seeing issues in SEPA area, if I just use the IBAN and pay like any normal payment. If I am specifically doing a "foreign payment" some extra fields need to be filled in. That is how I recall the process, last time was 1 year ago though.

No, I used the normal "domestic" payment form. It detects a foreign IBAN and then dynamically adds the extra mandatory address fields on the page.

Here in NL, the name field recently has gotten even stronger validation. I think this coincided with a system where minor spelling mistakes are corrected by a suggested "Did you mean ...?"

I suppose that would be because of EU regulations against money laundering.

Definitely not, because a few of my banks allow it without a problem.

Same here, I did a bunch of SEPA transfers between two EU countries last year, and all they asked was for the IBAN.

Sweden is not in eurozone, so SEPA credit transfers have limited usage there; the full SEPA process works only for EUR-to-EUR transfers.

It's also free for €-to-€ transfers. I paid for accommodation in Switzerland this summer from the Netherlands, and was glad that the proprietor didn't mind me transferring the deposit in Euros instead of Francs; the cost of sending an amount in Francs to Switzerland is quite high!

True, but that doesn't weaken his point.

It removes the entire second paragraph. It takes about 5mn to do a SEPA bank transfer: open banking client, open transfers, create new transfer, enter destination IBAN, enter amount, optionally set a data & some text, confirm.

Which is much longer than handing someone a 10 euro note.

That would be of limited value to someone in Sweden, which uses the krona. Automatic currency conversion is one of the advantages of electronic payments over cash.

And then you wait 3 days for the money to actually arrive. I frequently send money between EU countries and the speed of transaction is abysmal unless you want to transfer to be denominated in Euro which means that if you're sending money between two non-euro currencies you're losing money twice.

SEPA is for euro-denominated bank accounts. That's what the E is.

You can send a sepa transfer out of a non-euro denominated bank account to another non-euro denominated account, but it will get converted to Euro first. That's why I said you get charged twice - once at origin and again at the destination. And you might want to do that if you want the speed of a SEPA transfer - regular inter-bank transfers between different EU countries still take days to process.

So assume he's an Aussi and paste that second paragraph back.

Nice to have a tendency to escalate. Certain things have a tendency to creep along the nice-to-have-|-must-have continuum. IMO, digital money generally does.

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