Mt. Gox To Change Deposit Conversion Policy For International Wire Transfers
Mt. Gox (@MtGox) published a notice that starting next month bank transfer deposits now go into the currency wallet that corresponds to the currency actually transferred by the bank.
For example, when the currency of the wire transfer is in Euro, the Mt. Gox account holder’s EUR wallet will receive the funds rather than Mt. Gox following the previous default method of converting the funds to the currency that the account holder specified as the primary wallet.
Account holders do have the option to convert their deposited funds to USDs through a manual step but a conversion fee applies.
Previously, the operator of Mt. Gox had shared how needless currency conversions often are performed by banks for bank wire transfers prior to the funds being credited to Mt. Gox’s account. The example given was how an Australia bank customer sent USDs as an international bank transfer to Mt. Gox. Because Mt. Gox’s bank for wire transfers is in Japan, some banks then will convert the funds to JPY. Of course, the previous handling for this situation (prior to today’s announced policy change) would be that the those funds would then be automatically converted to USDs or whatever primary wallet the account holder had specified.
A request of “Do not Convert” can be added to the bank-to-bank instructions for the wire so that in the case above, the conversion to JPY would not have been performed. With this new policy, if the bank had made the conversion to JPY, a wallet for JPY would have been created for the account holder and the funds added without any conversion. Fewer unnecessary and undesired currency conversions will likely be the result of this change announced today.
Because of a growing global client base, the spreads for many of the sixteen currencies supported at Mt. Gox have been narrowing.
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