Why did my recipient receive less than the amount I sent from my Aspire USD Account?

How can you ensure that your recipient receives the exact amount?

For SWIFT transfers, intermediary fees may be charged. The sender has the option to choose the SWIFT Fee type for their transfer:

  • SHA - Sender and recipient will split the intermediary fee
  • OUR - Sender will bear the entire intermediary fee

See article What are Shared (SHA) and Our (OUR) Charges?

Aspire offers the OUR SWIFT fee type option. If you're sending a SWIFT transfer from your USD account and want to shoulder the intermediary fees, you can select the toggle: "Pay USD(amount) extra and fix this amount". Without this toggle, the default SWIFT transfer will be a SHA SWIFT transfer.

Sometimes, in rare cases, the recipient may not receive the full payment amount, in spite of you selecting the toggle. 

Why? When the payment enters the US clearing system, certain payment data is removed (including the payment charge type information relating to OUR) as they are not fully optimized to receive SWIFT payments.

As a result, the transfer is being reverted to the default SWIFT fee type, SHA, and the correspondent bank passing the payment through to the beneficiary bank can potentially deduct an intermediary fee from the payment amount itself.

Please note that this payment scenario is out of Aspire's and our partner's (The Currency Cloud Limited) control and can happen to any bank or financial institution.

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