US Financial Institutions And 2FA

I have to say, I felt nervous as heck with a check that size in my purse, and the while it wended its way to Fidelity!

A week or 2 ago our daughter, here in England, received a paper check of well over $100k as a result of a class action lawsuits on gender pay gaps. I helped her successfully do a mobile check deposit into her Vanguard money market account. At least there is some progress in the USA.

I think the life lesson here is, if you retain any financial interests in the US after moving back to the UK, you'd better ensure you have a way of depositing USD cheques.  I've never tried to do it but I understand that depositing a USD cheque into a UK bank is a nightmare.  One of my better financial decisions, although I didn't realise it at the time, was to keep my US bank account open when we left there.

I know it's not directly related to the topic of this thread but I thought I should give an update on my latest transfer from my US bank to my UK bank via Wise (that I mentioned earlier in the thread).  The transfer was by ACH.  I initiated the transfer on Thursday and was warned that it would take longer than usual (can't remember if it said 4 or 6 days).  Anyhow, the funds left my US bank on the Friday.  The funds finally arrived in my UK bank today - Tuesday.  Previous ACH transfers have happened in seconds, or minutes - end to end.  Something strange has happened this time that I haven't managed to get to the bottom of - although I realise that ACH transfers are not instantaneous, even if they sometimes look like they are.  All Wise could offer as a reason was that sometimes random events (IT issues, intermediary bank issues, random checks) can cause a delay in ACH.

I know it's not directly related to the topic of this thread but I thought I should give an update on my latest transfer from my US bank to my UK bank via Wise (that I mentioned earlier in the thread).  The transfer was by ACH.  I initiated the transfer on Thursday and was warned that it would take longer than usual (can't remember if it said 4 or 6 days).  Anyhow, the funds left my US bank on the Friday.  The funds finally arrived in my UK bank today - Tuesday.  Previous ACH transfers have happened in seconds, or minutes - end to end.  Something strange has happened this time that I haven't managed to get to the bottom of - although I realise that ACH transfers are not instantaneous, even if they sometimes look like they are.  All Wise could offer as a reason was that sometimes random events (IT issues, intermediary bank issues, random checks) can cause a delay in ACH.

Thanks for details, I guess the lesson to be learned is that an ACH transfer can take 4 business days so if you need the money earlier then you should go the wire route.

I did a transfer with Wise today and for the first time, the system wanted to verify my ID. I did this via the automated route, (selfie and passport). The process had taken less then a minute to verify and within 4 seconds the money was in my U.K account. This was via ACH.