Transfers
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Sending money overseas
Types of services
It can be useful to divide the institutions offering both currency conversion and international wire transfers into three broad categories:
- Traditional banks (JP Bank, Mizuho, SMBC, MUFG, Resona, etc.)
- Non-traditional banks (Sony, Shinsei, Rakuten, Prestia, etc.)
- International wire transfer services (Revolut, Western Union, Wise, PayForex, etc.)
Which of these categories suits any particular individual will vary depending on a wide array of factors, so it's not possible to say that one category is definitively better than any other. However, this page of the wiki will attempt to compare these institutions from the perspective of someone who wants to convert JPY to foreign currency and send it to an overseas bank account.
Fee structures
Almost every service charges a commission to exchange JPY for foreign currency. (The only exception appears to be Revolut at low volumes.) Most banks announce their exchange commissions publicly, as a fixed JPY amount (e.g., 0.5 JPY per 1 USD). This makes it easy to compare banks with each other to find the cheapest option.
Some services, such as PayForex, JP Bank, and Western Union, choose to never reveal their commission; instead, they just publish the exchange rate at which the conversion will be performed (including their commission), and ask the customer to choose whether it is acceptable to them. While this doesn't necessarily mean that these services are charging high commissions, it does make it very difficult to compare these services to their competitors. It also makes it possible for the services to change their commissions as frequently as they like.
Other services, such as Wise and (to some extent) Revolut, retain the ability to frequently change their commission, but they at least reveal their commission to customers prior to completing the transaction, effectively at the "point of sale". This still makes it difficult to compare these services with their competitors, but it is a more transparent approach than the one taken by services that never reveal their commission at all.
On top of the commission for the currency conversion, most services charge a flat fee, typically representing the cost of the international wire transfer. For most international wire transfer services, this fee is either zero or nominal. This means that the commission on the currency conversion makes up basically the entire cost of the transaction. Whereas for most banks, the flat fee is quite large. The general consequence of this is that the wire transfer services tend to be cheaper at smaller amounts while banks tend to be cheaper at larger amounts.
It's also worth noting that some banks, such as Sony, Shinsei, and Prestia, assign customers a status (e.g., Silver, Gold, Platinum) based on factors such as the value of the assets the customer has deposited with the bank, or the existence of a mortgage. Achieving a high status can entitle the customer to have the bank's flat fee for an international wire transfer waived at least once a month. This can dramatically improve the competitiveness of the bank as a method of sending money overseas. Information about how to obtain these benefits is available here (Sony), here (Shinsei), and here (Prestia). However, Sony Bank offers two other ways to earn Silver status that are not mentioned on the English language website- one is to set up a recurring automatic purchase of foreign currency such that the total converted per month is 30000 yen equivalent or more, the other is to set up a recurring automatic transfer to an investment account that totals to 30000 yen or more per month. Either of these will get you a better exchange rate on converting foreign currency going forward as well as additional free ATM transactions and domestic transfers.
Finally, it's necessary to single out Interactive Brokers, because their fee structure is unlike any of the other services discussed here, and because they don't fit neatly into any of the categories described above. They are a full-scale global investment brokerage, and their commission on foreign currency conversion is thus extremely small, at only 0.002%. Furthermore, they offer customers one free "withdrawal" per month (equivalent to a wire transfer, in this context). However, funding an IB account from a Japanese bank account is more expensive than a normal interbank transfer (see the discussion in this thread).
EDIT March 2022: the comparison tables below reference a USD10 minimum account-keeping fee for Interactive Brokers that no longer exists. This renders IB even more competitive than it appears from the tables.
EDIT September 2024: IBKR no longer offers the hybrid IBSJ (JP) + IBLLC (US) accounts. As a result, using IBKR just for international ACH transfers is no longer possible.
If you have a Schwab account, you can transfer money to the brokerage account the same way as IB (follow the link above for a quick explainer) using these account details (look for "Japanese yen", and the "for further credit" information goes in the "message" field). However, unlike IB, Schwab will automatically convert your deposits to USD (as of July 20, 2023, Schwab's rate was around 0.7% less than mid-market), and at SMBC, if you do not select "SHA" for fees, you will be charged an additional 2500 yen not listed in the online SMBC fee table (if you go to a branch and ask for a paper copy of the fee table, theirs will say that you may be charged 2500 yen to cover any "correspondent bank fees", but this does not appear in the online version), and it took 10 days from transfer to deposit so it can only be recommended for larger amounts and if you're patient.
Once again, the Schwab transfer method does not work to directly transfer to Schwab Bank checking. You must transfer to the brokerage account first, then do an internal brokerage to checking transfer.
Quick comparison
There can be no perfectly accurate comparison of the cost of the various options for sending money overseas, because there are too many variables and unknowns. But it is possible to roughly calculate which options are generally cheap, which options are generally expensive, and which options are somewhere in-between.
To this end, we have prepared the following tables, using the websites of the listed institutions to combine their published currency exchange commission (where a commission is variable or unpublished it has been estimated) with their published flat fees for an international wire transfer (again, estimated where necessary).
Note that it would be overly simplistic to use these tables to say that one institution or service is definitively cheaper than another, especially where one or both have variable fees or commissions. But the tables should give people an idea of roughly what sending money overseas should cost, and which services are likely to end up cheaper than others.
To produce these tables, I confirmed the commission and flat fee applicable to five different JPY amounts (100k, 500k, 1M, 2.5M, 5M), and calculated the total cost of transferring those amounts using the listed institutions. To come up with an overall ranking, I converted the total cost of each transfer back into a percentage of the transferred amount, and then averaged those figures across the five amounts. This produced an overall "average cost" percentage for each institution. I did this for both USD and EUR.
The full tables can be viewed here (USD) and here (EUR). Summary tables are provided below.
JPY -> USD
| Institution | Average Cost |
|---|---|
| Sony (Platinum) | 0.04% |
| Sony (Gold) | 0.07% |
| Shinsei (Platinum) | 0.07% |
| Revolut* | 0.30% |
| Interactive Brokers | 0.51% |
| Western Union* | 0.51% |
| Rakuten | 0.56% |
| Wise* | 0.62% |
| Sony (Silver) | 0.91% |
| Prestia (Gold) | 0.95% |
| Sony (no status) | 0.96% |
| Shinsei (Gold) | 1.17% |
| Shinsei (Standard) | 1.23% |
| Resona | 1.56% |
| PayForex* | 1.69% |
| Prestia (Standard) | 1.90% |
| MUFG | 2.04% |
| SMBC | 2.11% |
| Mizuho | 2.69% |
| JP Bank* | 2.90% |
JPY -> EUR
| Institution | Average Cost |
|---|---|
| Sony (Platinum) | 0.06% |
| Sony (Gold) | 0.08% |
| Shinsei (Platinum) | 0.16% |
| Revolut* | 0.30% |
| Interactive Brokers | 0.51% |
| Western Union* | 0.52% |
| Rakuten | 0.53% |
| Wise* | 0.62% |
| Prestia (Gold) | 0.80% |
| Sony (Silver) | 0.91% |
| Sony (no status) | 0.94% |
| Shinsei (Gold) | 1.34% |
| Shinsei (Standard) | 1.41% |
| Resona | 1.68% |
| Prestia (Standard) | 1.75% |
| PayForex* | 1.94% |
| MUFG | 2.00% |
| SMBC | 2.19% |
| Mizuho | 2.79% |
| JP Bank* | 2.91% |
The institutions marked with an asterisk are those that either don't publish their commission or use variable fees/commissions.
Transfers in other currencies
Some currencies have high fees or conversion spread, either in Japan or in the receiving country. In those cases, using a low spread currency like the USD to make the transfer can result in lower costs.
2022-11 - Using JPY>USD>INR to avoid high conversion costs of JPY>INR
Sources and links
The data in the tables above was prepared based on the following sources:
| Institution | ||
|---|---|---|
| Sony | Commission | Fee |
| Shinsei | Commission | Fee |
| Revolut | Commission and fee | |
| Interactive Brokers | Commission | Fee |
| Western Union | Commission and fee | |
| Rakuten | Commission | Fee |
| Wise | Commission and fee | |
| Prestia | Commission | Fee |
| Resona | Commission | Fee |
| PayForex | Rates | Fee |
| MUFG | Commission | Fee |
| SMBC | Commission | Fee |
| Mizuho | Commission | Fee |
| JP Bank | Fee |