While Mercury doesn’t charge fees to send an international wire, other banks might. When sending in USD, you can optionally choose to cover these fees for your recipient when sending a payment.
What are the fees?
When an international wire is sent, it often passes through multiple intermediary banks before ultimately hitting your recipient’s account. If one bank in the chain doesn’t have a relationship with the next, they may charge an additional fee for their services.
Those fees are paid in one of two ways, depending on how the wire is coded.
- If the wire is coded as Charges Shared (SHA), the fees are deducted directly from the wire amount. So if you sent $1000, and intermediary bank charges were $50, your recipient would end up with only $950 when all was said and done.
- If the wire is coded as Charges Ours (OUR), the intermediary bank fees are covered by the payer and the recipient gets the full amount. The payer or payment provider pays a higher upfront cost to use this method.
How Mercury handles these fees
You have two options when it comes to sending international wires:
- Send the wire as a SHA payment. This option is free for you, as Mercury will cover the outgoing payment fees, but any intermediary bank fees will be absorbed by your recipient
-
Send the wire as an OUR payment for a flat $15 fee to cover any additional intermediary fees for your recipient.*
There’s not a lot of transparency built into this system, so it’s hard to predict the number or amount of fees your recipient might encounter when sending a wire as SHA. That’s why we allow you the option to send the payment as OUR, with the $15 flat fee going towards the higher upfront costs associated with this wire type.
We usually recommend choosing that option for high value transactions (such as contracts, invoice payments, etc) where you want to make sure there’s no question how much your recipient will get.
*This covers any fees that may occur while in transit between banks. Mercury does not reimburse fees charged by the receiving bank when accepting a wire.
How to cover your recipient’s fees
As long as you're sending in USD, you can cover your recipient's fees. Here's how:
- Create a new international wire by clicking the Move Money button in the upper right corner of your dashboard and selecting Pay Someone.
- Fill out your recipient details.
- When asked How do you want to pay?, select International Wire.
- Below the Recipient Gets field, you’ll see a check box labeled Cover recipient’s fees. Check this box to add the coverage.
- Once it has processed, the $15 fee will show up as a separate transaction on your Transactions page.