Can an employer pay earnings in such a way that the worker incurs a fee from the bank? This has been happening to me for the last year, but they have been adding the fee to my pay to reimburse me. I am now being told that they can no longer reimburse because of a new EU directive and I will have to open a Euro bank account if I want to avoid a fee (one of these https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/transferwise/how-to-open-a-euro-account/). The company is based in Holland and I work on a freelance basis for them. I've been paid without incident by them for the last 5 years. They have kept changing the way they pay me though, presumably as they find a cheaper method of doing so: Bank account WITHOUT a fee charged to me, then Paypal and now bank account WITH a fee charged to me.
I don't know about your problem but I've used Transferwise to transfer small amounts of money to Germany many times with no problems. When the transaction goes through the exchange rate is usually the trading rate so much better than the high street rate and fees are always low (tell you up front what your bank would charge as higher sums get higher fees so bank would be cheaper). All in all ok to deal with and not rip off merchants so if you have to do it that way then you could use worse.
I know previously the costs involved in sending / receiving a payment between currencies allowed for the charges to be paid by the remitter, beneficiary or split with each paying their own banks fees. I think banks have now changed to have the fees split between the two now - If you get paid to a euro account, you’ll probably incur a fee or it will be incorporated in to the ‘spot rate’ that you money is exchanged at.
