Now the UK is considered a third party country to the European Union, this means financial establishments no longer have the same rights and access to the European market as before.
I was checking my balance within the CaixaBank App and happened to notice that I had received a new notification from the bank itself. This notification alerted me to the fact that making transfers between the UK and Spain would now be charged a fee set out in Caixa’s documentation for fees to and from countries outside of the European Union.
Looking through Facebook, I have seen accounts of people who have reported that simple transfers they would have made in the past are now being charged more, for example, one woman said that she would normally transfer to herself £250, but this time she was charged a fee of £80 to make this simple movement of funds.
Luckily for me, I have no financial dealings with the UK at present, so I will not feel the effects of these new regulations post-brexit, however, many people like swallows, who only live here for a limited amount of time and rely on the money they receive in the UK and transfer to a bank here in Spain, these new regulations may become tedious.
The full notification reads like this:
“As of 1 January 2021, the United Kingdom is no longer a member of the European Union. This means EU regulations no longer apply, including those relating to transfers (Regulation EC 924/2009). As a result, fees for international transfers outside the European Union will apply to transfers to or from bank accounts opened in the United Kingdom. You can view these fees in the fees appendix of your on-demand account agreement.”
If you plan on transferring money between UK and Spain or any other European Union country or EEA country, you will have to do some comparisons and look for the best transfer rates/fees that you can find.
I would recommend looking into a type of travel card which you can top up on the go, for instance, in the past before I had a bank account here and was financially independent of the UK, I would use a top-up travel card from weswap.com. I could load money onto the card whenever I want, convert it to euros and withdraw money without fees, or use it in stores to buy things without fees.
Check with your bank what the fees will be moving forward with this Brexit situation and look around for alternatives. The saga of Brexit continues and for now, there is no real solution to this problem which undoubtedly will affect a lot of people.