Your client says they sent $2,000. Your bank shows $1,943. Nobody stole anything, and nobody made a mistake. That gap is how international bank transfers are priced, and most of it was decided before the money left.
Here is where the money actually goes, and what you can do about each piece.
The four places a transfer is charged
A single cross-border payment gets touched four times. Only one of those is obvious.
| Where | Who charges it | Typical shape | Visible? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outgoing wire fee | Your client’s bank | Flat fee per transfer | Yes, on their statement |
| FX spread | Whichever bank converts | Percentage of the whole amount | No, priced into the rate |
| Correspondent deduction | Intermediary banks in the chain | Flat fee, taken in transit | No, discovered afterwards |
| Receiving fee | Your bank | Flat fee, sometimes waived | Sometimes, on your statement |
The outgoing fee is the one everyone talks about because it is the one printed on a receipt. It is rarely the biggest.
The FX spread is the quiet one
When a bank converts your client’s currency into yours, it does not use the reference rate you would find on a market data site. It applies its own rate, and the difference between the two is the spread.
Because the spread is a percentage of the entire transfer, it scales in a way flat fees do not. On a $2,000 payment, a 3 percent spread is $60. The wire fee next to it might be $25. The larger cost is the one that never appeared as a line item.
Spreads vary widely by bank and by corridor, so treat any single number as a range rather than a rule. The way to check yours is mechanical: note the rate your bank applied, compare it against the reference rate for that pair at the same timestamp, and express the gap as a percentage.
Correspondent deductions explain the missing money
Your client’s bank often has no direct relationship with your bank. The payment gets there by hopping through one or more correspondent banks that do have relationships with both ends.
Each hop is an opportunity for a deduction. The intermediary takes its fee out of the money in transit, then forwards the rest. This is why the shortfall is not predictable in advance: neither you nor your client knows how many banks will be in the chain or what each will take.
This is also why chasing the difference afterwards rarely works. There is no single party who took it.
Three ways to lose less
Ask for OUR charges, not SHA. Every wire instruction carries a charge code. SHA, the common default, means the sender covers their own bank and you absorb everything downstream. OUR means the sender covers the whole chain and you receive the full amount. Changing one field on the instruction moves the cost back to the side that agreed to pay you a specific number.
Put the amount in the contract as a net figure. If your agreement says “$2,000” without saying net of transfer costs, you have no basis to ask for the difference. If it says the client is responsible for transfer charges so that you receive $2,000 net, the shortfall becomes their problem to solve, usually by switching the charge code.
Consolidate the payments. Fixed costs repeat per transfer, so four $500 wires cost more in flat fees than one $2,000 wire. If your client is willing, monthly beats weekly on this rail. The spread does not care either way, because it is proportional.
What a platform payout changes
A bank transfer prices the same journey in four places, three of which you cannot see before it happens. A platform payout collapses that into a fee you are shown before you confirm.
With Omnivoo Contract Management, the client pays a per-contractor subscription from $49 a month, the underlying rail cost passes through at cost with competitive FX. The number is on the screen before the withdrawal happens, which is the practical difference from a wire: you are deciding with the cost in front of you rather than discovering it on your statement.
Bank transfer is one of several ways to receive money through the platform, alongside ACH and SWIFT, and five more payout methods. See how to pay contractors in 220+ countries and territories for how the rails compare on the paying side.
The bottom line
A bank transfer is not expensive because of the wire fee. It is expensive because the FX spread is invisible and the correspondent deductions are unpredictable.
If you are being paid this way and want to keep more of the invoice, the highest-leverage change is the smallest one: get the charge code changed to OUR, and write the net amount into the contract so there is something to point at when the numbers do not match.