Foreign Currency and Your Client Files: The Problems Most Solicitors Accept (But Don’t Have To)

If you’ve ever had a conveyancing file where the purchaser was based in New York, or a probate file where the estate beneficiaries were scattered across Australia and Canada, you’ll be very familiar with a particular kind of low-grade stress. The kind that sits in the background of a file, quietly generating problems that aren’t really legal problems at all – but end up on your desk anyway.

Wrong amounts landing in your client account. Intermediary bank fees arriving out of nowhere and leaving the client short. Test payments that vanish into a transatlantic ether and come back three weeks later, minus fees, to a client who has long since stopped being patient. Beneficiaries calling to ask why their sibling got a different amount to them. And somewhere underneath all of it, the unspoken assumption that whatever went wrong with the money transfer is somehow the solicitor’s fault.

None of it is your area of expertise. None of it is what you’re being paid to do. And yet here we are.

In March, we sat down with Margaret Horan from Currencies Direct – a currency specialist that has been working with Irish solicitors for nine years and is the preferred currency partner for the Law Society of Ireland and the Law Society of Northern Ireland – to talk through exactly these scenarios, and what a better process actually looks like.

Why International Files Are Such a Headache

The core problem is that overseas banking systems simply don’t talk to Irish banking systems. When a client in San Francisco tries to send 300,000 euro to your client account, they go into their local bank, get a rough approximation of how many dollars they need to hand over, and wire the money. By the time it arrives in Ireland – having passed through one or more intermediary banks, each applying their own fees – the figure in your client account is almost never right. Either there’s too much, and you have to figure out how to return the surplus. Or there’s too little, and your closing is delayed.

That’s before you get to the more complicated scenarios. The client who says they have an Irish bank account, only to discover it has a €10,000-a-day transfer limit. The co-owners of a property who each receive a slightly different sterling equivalent of the same euro sum, because their respective banks applied different exchange rates and fees – and who now suspect the solicitor of pocketing the difference. The executor beneficiaries who knew roughly what the property was worth, got considerably less than expected in their local currency, and want to know where the rest went.

There’s also the AML dimension, which is easy to overlook. When funds arrive from overseas, your standard checks – ID, address verification – only go so far. You have limited visibility into who you’re actually dealing with. Margaret gave the example of politically exposed persons: a retired High Court judge in another jurisdiction, or someone whose family has political connections in the United States. How would you know? And if Currencies Direct identify a red flag during their own checks and decline to proceed with a client, that’s a signal worth paying attention to on your end too.

What a Better Process Looks Like

The principle behind Currencies Direct is straightforward: solicitors should never have to get involved in currency exchange at all. Your role in an international transaction should be purely legal. Money in should arrive in euro, in the correct amount, in your client account. Money out should be sent from your client account in euro, with no uncertainty about what reaches the other end.

Everything else – the exchange rate negotiation, the AML checks, the timing decisions, the conversations with clients about whether to hold dollars and wait for a better rate – should happen directly between the client and a specialist. At no cost to your practice.

Currencies Direct operate local banking in the jurisdictions where their clients are based: JPMorgan Chase in the US, Bank of Montreal in Canada, Barclays in the UK. That means payments go out of local accounts, in local currency, and typically arrive within hours rather than weeks. For clients in time zones that barely overlap with Irish working hours, having a dedicated contact – including a team based in Florida for US clients – makes a practical difference.

The client testimonial Margaret shared during the session said it well. A US-based beneficiary of an Irish probate, who had spent eight years as a currency trader himself, wrote to the solicitor to say that his interactions with Currencies Direct had been excellent, communication timely, exchange rates right at market, and same-day dollar transfers received into his US account. His words: “I appreciate your recommendation of their services.” Exactly the kind of thing you want on record.

What You Actually Need to Do

The process on the solicitor’s side is deliberately minimal.

Here’s the full picture:

1. Email your client to introduce the concept. A brief note is enough – let them know there’s an alternative to using their own bank, and that a currency specialist is likely to get them a better rate with fewer delays.
2. With their permission, send Currencies Direct the client’s email and phone number. At that point, you step back. Currencies Direct handles onboarding directly.
3. Once the client is onboarded, Currencies Direct may ask for supporting documents for AML purposes – typically a sale contract, or a grant of probate or will.
4. For incoming payments, the correct value arrives in your client account – in euro, to the penny.
5. For outgoing payments, the client emails you Currencies Direct’s euro bank details (IBAN and BIC)with an instruction to send the funds.
6. Call Currencies Direct to verify before you send. A quick call confirms the details are genuine. Simple fraud prevention that takes thirty seconds.
7. They confirm safe receipt the following day – and if anything is delayed, they’ll contact you proactively rather than waiting for a problem to surface.

That’s it. No currency conversations. No chasing missing transfers. No fielding calls from beneficiaries who want to know why their brother got more than they did.

Worth Knowing

Currencies Direct have a dedicated Ireland team covering Munster, Dublin and the southeast, and the northwest – with direct contact numbers for each. If you handle international files with any regularity, it’s worth having those details to hand before the next one lands on your desk.

You can watch the full session with Margaret Horan in The Growth Hub, where she walks through each of these scenarios in detail, including how client onboarding works and what their AML process actually involves.

Contact details for the Currencies Direct Ireland team can be found below and on their website here.