The European union got ten new member states today. The new states Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia together have about 74 million citizens who's everyday life will most probably not change significantly. We want to spare you the polemics that's seen on all media today and point to an EU-directive that affects every EU citizen when shopping in other countries. Shopping on the internet is either done with credit cards, PayPal or bank transfers. Customers from many of the new EU member states are not accepted by PayPal, and credit cards are not very popular in eastern Europe, so the only thing left is a bank transfer for mail-ordered goods from other EU states.
EU-directive 2001/C 363/01 applies to these cases. It states that cross-border transfers within the EU may not be more expensive than domestic transfers, provided that the currency is EUR, the BIC/IBAN numbers are used (international account data), and the transfer has been entered online. This also applies to the states that haven't introduced the EUR currency yet. It works fine in Sweden for example, but some British banks prefer not to tell their customers about this directive, and charge high international fees.
Sometimes banks try to trick their customers into making a traditional SWIFT transfer by handing them outdated forms. This transfer method still works fine, but the sender bank and the beneficiary bank deduct fairly high fees from the amount. Since the EU directive does not apply to this older transfer method, the fees are justified. You should insist on electronic access to your account, so you can take advantage from this EU-directive.
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