What Your Bank Knows and Will Not Say
Your bank can see its own leg of the journey, and in some cases is prohibited from telling you about it.
Still yours, and statedTaken, never statedUnit changes; scale restarts
Four steps from instruction to arrival. One step carries no figure: the hatching marks where the money leaves and is not drawn to scale, because there is no figure to draw. Nothing here adds them up, since an amount you cannot see is not an amount you can subtract. One line, two facts, and a gap where the rest of the journey was.
Your bank knows what reached it, when, from which institution, and what it did with the money afterwards. It knows almost nothing before that, and in certain cases it knows something and is forbidden to tell you.
The practical point in “What Your Bank Knows and Will Not Say” is that a landed payment should be supported by a record somebody can explain. Used for tips to increase productivity, tips to increase productivity can add transparent time and project context when collection is proportionate, people can correct mistakes and financial records remain separate.
Separating those three categories saves a great deal of time on the telephone.
Additional context relevant to “What Your Bank Knows and Will Not Say” is available through Asian Development Bank. A useful review distinguishes the sent amount, conversion, fees, settlement date and landed amount.
What it genuinely does not know
What was instructed at the far end, what any intermediary deducted, what route the payment took before the last hop, and why it arrived on the day it did.
None of this reaches them. Asking persistently produces apologies rather than information, because there is nothing to produce.
The person on the telephone is in the same position as you are about everything upstream of their own institution, which is worth remembering when the conversation is going badly.
What it knows and will tell you
What it knows and will tell you:
- The amount received and the currency.
- The sending institution.
- The date and time of receipt.
- The reference exactly as it arrived.
- Its own fee and its own rate.
All of it is available and some of it is not printed on your statement. Asking for the full incoming message is an ordinary request.
What it knows and will not tell you
Why a payment is being held for review. In many jurisdictions a bank conducting a financial-crime check is legally prohibited from saying that a check is happening.
That silence is a legal obligation rather than poor service, and no amount of escalation changes it. It is worth knowing before spending a week pushing.
How to tell the categories apart
A bank that does not know says so and offers to help you ask somebody else. A bank that cannot say tends to be noticeably vague without explaining why.
The second pattern — repeated inability to give any reason or timescale — is usually the legal one.
Asking the right question
Not "where is my money", which is the question they cannot answer. "Have you received a payment from X, and if so what did you do with it" is one they can.
That rephrasing converts a useless call into a useful one more often than anything else in this note.
The incoming message
Payments arrive as a structured message with more fields than your statement displays, including the sender's details and sometimes fee information added en route.
Banks will usually provide a copy on request for a specific payment. It is the single most informative thing available at your end.
Ask for it by name — the incoming payment message, or the advice — rather than asking for more detail, which produces a restatement of the statement line.
Who to ask
Not the general enquiry line, which handles card disputes. The international payments team or the business banking line, by name.
Ask to be put through to whoever handles incoming international payments. The difference in the quality of the answer is substantial.
Getting it in writing
Where something has gone wrong, ask for the answer by message or letter rather than by telephone.
A written answer is checkable, forwardable to the payer, and produces more care in its composition.
Complaints
Where a bank has actually failed — lost a payment, applied the wrong rate, charged something not in its tariff — the formal complaints process exists and works.
Where it has simply applied its published rate, there is nothing to complain about, and using the process for that wastes a mechanism worth keeping for real failures.
The ombudsman or regulator
Most countries have one for banking disputes, and it is free. It handles failures to follow a bank's own terms, not dissatisfaction with pricing.
Knowing which of those you have is the difference between a process that helps and one that ends in a polite refusal.
Changing banks over it
A legitimate response where the receiving fee or the automatic conversion is poor, and a slow one.
Measure first, ask for a better rate second, and move third. Several banks will improve an incoming conversion rate for a business customer who asks with figures.
Opening a second account elsewhere is usually easier than moving the first one, and it lets you compare two institutions on the same payment pattern before deciding anything.
What asking harder cannot reach
The middle. Your bank is the last institution in a chain it did not assemble, and it has no more visibility of the earlier hops than you do.
Recognising that early is practically useful: it directs the questions you can usefully ask to the payer, who holds the reference, and leaves your own bank with the narrow set of questions it can actually answer well.
It also makes the relationship with your own bank better. A customer who asks answerable questions gets better service than one who asks for things that do not exist.