Banks have a particularly bad habit of making telegraphic transfer (TT) payments very difficut and far too expensive.
This regular over charging coming from what was once a close to monopoly situation (particularly in smaller countries) is one of the main reasons that the online money transfer market exists at all.
Recently the business I look after received funds from an off-shore account where the advertiser was booking a small amount of online advertising and were paying the in invoice through telegraphic transfer. The payment received was $25 short on the expected amount so we assumed the client had done the wrong thing and ticked a box saying that the money transfer charges should be paid out of our account not theirs.
When questioning the client in the transfer they said they had in fact ticked the correct box and that they had paid the charges themselves.
We called the bank to question what happened and the bank responded saying that they were entitled to charge boththe client and us as the clients bank only had a relationship with a different local bank so it had to go through this other bank before it came to us, hench the extra telegraphic transfer fees!
We were very annoyed at these extra transfer fees as it made this method of recieving the money too expensive. Effectively the banks took three sets of fees from us for the money transfer. One from the transferee, one from us and another for the commission on the forex rate itself.
So, if you are ever thinking if using expensive TT payment options directly through a bank, think again and use a trusted online money transfer service like PayPal or Currency Online.