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I sent a payment through international bank transfer to Germany. But, the account holder name has special characters like ö, ä, ü, and etc. In my case, it's ü.

Is there any other words that are equivalent with ü (read: u with umlaut), that in some way the correspondent bank will accept it and it's world-wide accepted?

Because if I changed it to just u/ue, I'm afraid the bank will regard it different than it's supposed to and my transfer will be stuck.

The account holder name is as important as the IBAN. When the receiver bank checks the IBAN and its account holder name is different with the one I specified in the transfer, they won't accept the transfer and my money will get stuck and it's taking forever to (maybe) get the money back to my home country bank account. (according to my experience, check below comments for the story)

E.g: Grundstücksverwaltung and Grundstucksverwaltung have different meaning.

Any help is appreciated.

UPDATE

27 Jul 2018 I followed my home country bank’s recommendation and changed the ü in the beneficiary name to just simple plain u (not ue).

28 July 2018 Turns out transfer was successful. I can conclude if there’s special characters (like German ö ä or ü or Danish å ø etc), banks probably tolerate it to the closest word (globally recognized ones), like ö with o, ü with u and so on. Thanks to everyone who has given opinion or answers.

Hopefully for those who face same problem as me can get some answers from this thread.

samuel christian
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6 Answers6

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I am from Germany and occasionally avoid Umlauts because I use a non-German keyboard layout. So I might share some experience here.

Usually, the German financial institutions are ok with ue, ae, oe, sz/ss in upper- and lower-case variant. In the wild, even minor variants of the account holder name seem to be ok. What's most important is the IBAN, and the holders names seem to function as a checksum counterpart.

Fun Fact: until the mid 2000s, most German banks ran operating software that could not handle Umlauts. So you actually have been supposed to use Umlaut variants like UE, AE, OE or sz/ss.

You can find the umlaut conversions in this post at German Language exchange: Conversion table for diacritics.

Troyer
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Dennis
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Chances are umlauts are ignored/implicitly converted anyway.

SWIFT symbols

It is important to remember that cross-border payment form can only be filled in with SWIFT symbols. If illegal symbols are used, the system will give an error message and it will not be possible to confirm the payment. SWIFT symbols include the following:

SWIFT symbols

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z a b c d e f g h I j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9+ ( ) ? ' : - / , .

Symbols not allowed for payment forms:

NON-SWIFT symbols

! @ # $ % ^ & * ; " | \= _ < > { } [ ]

If names contain letters with diacritical marks, they should be replaced with the closest basic letter without the marks. For Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Spanish names with tildes, a-rings and o-slashes, the diacritical should be simply ignored: Å = A; Č = C, Ñ = N; Ø=O, Œ = OE.

source: Nordea

0xFEE1DEAD
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Replace ä with ae, ö with oe, ü with ue, and ß with ss.

If possible, use the correct letters. It may not be printed on the keyboard, but for example on a Mac, you press and hold the a key and after a second or so a little window comes up letting you pick various variants of the letter a. Use ae if the website doesn't accept it.

gnasher729
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4

Is there any other words that are equivalent with ü (read: u with umlaut), that in some way the correspondent bank will accept it and it's world-wide accepted?

For names, especially in international transfer only the basic 26 latin characters are valid. AFAIK SWIFT will reject anything else. If at all, some interface may change it to the base letter, U in your case. Then again, this may in fact cause rejection, as it's (almost) unheard of in Germany to drop the umlaut dots.

Because if I changed it to just u/ue, I'm afraid the bank will regard it different than it's supposed to and my transfer will be stuck.

It is standard for account names that umlauts are handled as their two letter equivalent. Similar to when printed on credit cards - which leads to the effect, that in web interfaces holders of such names have to enter it like spelled on the card.

Within Germany (and some European countries) orders can be made using umlauts. Outside it's better to play safe and use the two letter equivalent (UE for you)

The account holder name is as important as the IBAN. When the receiver bank checks the IBAN and its account holder name is different with the one I specified in the transfer, they won't accept the transfer and my money will get stuck and it's taking forever to (maybe) get the money back to my home country bank account.

The introduction of IBAN by EU law did remove the legal requirement to check for the holders name. Banks may still do it, but it's no longer required.

Unrelated side note:

E.g: Grundstücksverwaltung and Grundstucksverwaltung have different meaning.

Err, I hav to admit, I'm German, but never heared of a Grundstucksverwaltung - what's a stuck supposed to be and why does it need management? SCNR :))

Raffzahn
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Out of interest and fun, friends and I began writing completely fake names in order to find out which ones are rejected during SEPA transfers.

We've been doing it for a few years now, in Germany and France, for both domestic and international transfers, up to a few hundred euros.

"M. Ricou" instead of my real name, "Mamoox Vonderbruecke" instead of "Maxime Dupont"...

Every single transfer worked fine, and we couldn't find any hint that the bank cares about anything else than IBAN and amount.

Eric Duminil
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You may even see banks which turn Grundstücksverwaltung automatically into Grundstuecksverwaltung somewhere in the process.

TorstenS
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