Hi everyone,

I have a USD savings account at Scotiabank just to receive funds from stock selling at etrade.

Scotiabank allows you to receive USD in only this account and then you can use their internal exchange rate to convert from USD to CAD so it can be transferred to your personal account for day-to-day usage.

I will almost lose 500$ if I use their interest rate. Does anyone know how can I avoid this?

I am thinking of transferring this money to (a) knightbridgefx OR (b) TransferWise so they can convert it with better rates and then deposit money into my CAD accounts.

However, I am not sure what charges would be for sending money from USD savings to (a) or (b) via bill transfer, EFT, wire transfer & receiving money into my CAD checking account from (a) or (b).

Sending money from USD savings could involve 2 charges:

1 - Scotiabank charges for wire transfer, bill payment, EFT

2 - Fee by fx exchange service provider (which is obvious)

Receiving money into CAD account after conversion could involve 2 charges:

3 - Scotiabank charges for transfer into checking / saving CAD accounts

4 - Fee by fx exchange service provider (if I am not wrong outbound is free by both (a), (b))

My conclusion is it really depends on how much Scotiabank charges for outbound from USD savings and inbound to CAD accounts.

Is there a way I can skip Scotiabank and directly transfer from etrade into knightbridgefx OR TransferWise, do the conversion and route it to my CAD Scotiabank accounts directly?

Please let me know if I am missing something!

Hello. I have a students account in scotia bank. I'll be bringing around 1000 usd with me. Will I be able to deposit this usd and convert it to cad? Or do I need to convert this usd to cad beforehand?

I recently got rid of some assets in the US and had the money (around 30K USD) wired to my scotiabank USD account in Canada. I figured that I’d try and figure out a better way to convert it to CAD than using the horrible exchange rates at the bank.

I stumbled on wise from this sub and everyone is saying that they have the best exchange rates. However, after creating an account I realized that it’s not that straight forward to send USD from my scotiabank account to the wise USD account.

At this point my options are:

1. Send the money back to the US (wise USD account) and pay the transfer fees, and then convert it to CAD and send it back to my Canadian bank account and pay the transfer fees again.

2. Create a RBC USD cross border bank account and move my USD there and then wire it to wise in the US (no fees I think) and then convert and send it back to my Canadian bank account.

3. Give up on wise and find another way.

Has anyone had to do something similar to this? What’s the best way for me to convert my USD to CAD with the lowest fees?

Thanks in advance for the advice!