MONEY transfers from personal account in Mexico to U.S.A.

[Apachewoman]

Can one rely on a Mexican Bank or Investment House(Intercam, Muliva, Bancomer, etc)

to wire transfer my account funds to my U.S. bank account

and if so, what is usual maximum transfer amount (transaction)

permitted.  Is there a costly fee ?

Thank you

😶

[ibarra]

We wire transfer funds regularly from O'Rourke to major U.S. bank. Very inexpensive. No problems.   

[GDouglas]

I am an ex-bank employee (fintech apps).

Short answers:
1. Yes
2. Wire fees vary from $5 to $100+ (USD or CAD) depending on bank, on size of transfer, etc.
3. No limit.  

You can transfer billions of dollars between US-CAN-MEX if you have a legal reason to do so.

Banks make far bigger profits on the Forex than the wire fee.  

Mexico is part of the SWIFT banking system.   It’s the world’s standard for wire transfers.

You’ve been hearing in the news about SWIFT, and how the world is cutting Russia off from the SWIFT system.

But yes, all the major local banks can do wire transfers to both USA and Canada.  With some banks you do need to book an appointment for large wire transfers, but at others, it’s just a 15-minute process at a bank teller.   You just have to make sure to use the tellers authorized to do wire transfers.

America has ACH (America Clearing House) which is a faster version of domestic wire transfers, and some Mexico banks can do ACH too.  But even if you can’t ACH, you can at least SWIFT.

Metaphorically, for those unfamiliar, ACH and SWIFT are kind of like a “Western Union between banks”, but with no transfers size limits (limited only by fraud detection, bank lawyers, government, etc).

We don’t have a MX bank account but having banked with dozens of bank accounts in Canada and USA in my lifetime (and I used to work for a bank — I was on the programming team for the mobile app for banking/investments for one of Canada’s big 5 banks).

So as an ex-bank-employee (5 years of my life), my answer is “in general, yes”

Wire fees usually are in the two digits USD at most places.  In Canada, we wired a whole house (a few hundred thousand dollars) to buy our house in cash here in Chapala.  It was the lawyer’s escrow account at one of those banks you mentioned, so clearly, I had no problems with essentially transferring a large pizza pie piece of life savings in one fell swoop, legally.

A house-sized wire transfer (a whole mortgage) took me only 15 minutes at my Canadian bank, once I showed them the signed contract, the supervisor immediately authorized the teller to go ahead.

There is no limit to how huge a wire can be done vis SWIFT — there have been billion-dollar wire transfers via the SWIFT system — but you will be subject to more appointment-making (and, possibly government approvals) once you’re in stratospheric territory.  

Simple amounts like a few thousand dollars can easily be done quickly at a good teller who already knows your name — while a newbie teller might make you stand for 20 minutes while a supervisor helped them  how to do a wire transfer.

This is my general experience, generically at a random Canadian and USA banks, and the process is usually similar at most of the world’s fully functioning banks.  

Government rules may pre-empt things (e.g. capital outflow laws) but money generally freely flows between US-CAN-MX on the wire transfer system with no size limits.  

As a rule of thumb, the governments will know when you do big transfers though (the banks report large wires), so they will cross-check with your tax records, so make sure you’re not doing anything silly with wires.  

It typically just takes 15 minutes for an experienced wirer to do a wire transfer of half a million dollars — stay legal.  House purchases are noticed by governments in any of our countries eventually through transaction monitoring, thanks to the bank reporting laws of large wires.  Make sure all of this aligns with your tax filings!