How easily is a SAR report triggered?

[Dasboot]

So, just to be clear: moving to Asia I have pushed some of my own, already taxed cash through Revolut, N26 and Transferwise - mainly to buy gold cash here ;-)

The total is around 12000 euros, over a period of perhaps a year - using Transferwise for perhaps half.

After using Transferwise to pull cash from Revolut and THEN doing a withdrawal at an ATM Revolut then wanted some documentation. Which was no problem except that their app crashed & support was imbecile, of course - square peg for a round hole and all that...

Anyway, they were finally OK with my explanation & documents - but is this enough to trigger a SAR?

Would setting up particular cashflows between services like Revolut and Transferwise be enough?

 

[realitybyte]

Your plan is 12,000 euro in total, spread over 1 year? I doubt you'd run into any SAR getting filed if you spread it all out. I don't know a lot about this but I do know in the USA a single transfer of $10k USD or more for personal accounts a will automatically trigger many banks (source: spouse works for a bank). Outside of that their own security teams/risk evaluators guys set their own criteria and may file a SAR at any time for any reason on any amount. I'm sure they profile based on everything possible - is this amount typical, does it fit the standard habits of the customer, is the payor or payee seemingly risky, is it within the customer's means based on prior collected info, etc. Outside of this stuff, I think no one really knows unless you can find someone who works in that division of the bank or EMI.

 

[anotherone]

It is really clever to use many different EMI
The SAR report are initiated by bank employees at their own discretion.
12000 euros is way below the trigger. If they ask you documents, this is for internal stuff. This means they want to keep track of this transaction.
In Europe, as long as you transfer less than 15,000 euros it is fine.
Nowadays, banks are very reluctant to people using cash. moving cash is a bad idea.
You should better either use a SEPA transfer (really it is safe between transferwise or Revolut)
Or use Quppy to transfer money between transferwise and revolut.

Last edited: Jul 11, 2020