What happens if a bank no longer use an intermediary bank?
If your counterparty sent money to a correspondent account at another bank, then it is completely up to the other bank what to do with the money. If the wire transfer completed, then the account is not closed. If I were your business partner, I would immediately contact the bank to which the transfer was made and explain the situation and hopefully they will transfer the money back. Whenever a wire transfer is made, the recipients name, address, and account number are included. If that name, address and account do not belong to you, then you have a problem because you have no legal right to the money in a court of law. For this reason, you should be avoid any situation where you are wiring money to anyone except the intended recipient.
In any business keeping your customers happy is one thing, turining them into advocates for you is another. On the other side of this I knew a person who happened to be the owner and CEO of a multimillion dollar business he built from the ground up. He was incredibly loyal every firm he did business with and expected to be treated with respect. As it turns out he also enjoyed working in his garden on weekends. One Saturday, while working in his garden, he realized he needed to do some banking before the bank closed. He quickly runs out to the bank to do his business and is denied service despite having all the proper ID because of the way he looked (dirty from gardening). That following Monday he went in (In his suit this time) and transferred every penny of his business and personal holdings amounting to 10s of Millions to a different firm. Treat cuastomers well and they will generate business for you, treat people poorly and you will lose customers. Lose enough and you are no longer in business. Your chief problem seems to be that you're mixing Visa (credit cards) and Step2 (a European Automated Clearing House). Credit cards are primarily an American concept, but do work worldwide especially in travel&tourism industry. The Credit Card companies are financial institutions themselves and operate similar to international banks They're typically acting as intermediaries between the customer's bank and the retailer's bank, so this works even if those two banks have no existing agreements.  This is expensive, though. Step2 is a cheaper European system which eliminates the middle man. It allows the consumer's bank to directly pay the retailer's bank. VISA is not a member of Step2. "Most answers have concentrated on this being a scam, however, it is possible this is an innocent mistake. Australian bank account numbers do not have redundant digits to be used to validate an account number; all of the numbers are data and uniquely identify a bank and branch (the BSB number) and an account (the Account number). Computer check digits are not part of bank account numbers because bank account numbers pre-date computers. It is entirely possible that someone entering an incorrect number can, by chance, hit upon an existing account. As the bank clearance system in Australia is entirely automatic there is no cross-checking of account numbers with account names.  Internet banking in Australia is not a wire-transfer as is common in places like the USA (although these can be done): here you are effectively accessing your bank's ""back office"". Nor is it like the BPay service which  is used primarily by B to C businesses as a way for their customers to pay their bills; when using this service the biller code will show you who you are paying and the customer number does have check digit validation. I run a business in Australia and it has happened to us on several occasions than an employee or supplier has given us incorrect numbers. Usually, it is not a real account and after a week or so the money makes its way back to us with a message like NO ACCOUNT or A/C CLOSED.  Very occasionally, however, the wrong number hits a live account: when that happens the person who f*&ked up needs to contact their bank and try and get the transaction reversed. If there is money in the destination account this usually happens with little fuss, however, if the destination account has been closed or emptied things get problematic. Of course, taking money that isn't yours is stealing even if it happens to be sitting in your bank account. However, unless the sum involved is significant the police are usually not interested in diverting their attention away from ""serious"" crimes like homicide, armed robbery and terrorism so the aggrieved party is usually on their own. That said, this is probably a scam because they called you rather than your bank doing so. They cannot get your phone number from your account number: they have to know who you are and what your account number is. This is not as hard to do as it sounds since both your name and account number are prominently printed on your cheques and deposit books (possibly your phone number as well which saves them looking it up in the White Pages)." "**Japan Has Entered The Next Phase: Unlimited Money Printing**  Investors have been watching Japan for over a decade now, wondering what happens to a country that has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 234%--too big to realistically pay off. We are starting to get the answer. For review, Japan was the first country in the modern central banking era to begin a policy of quantitative easing--an unconventional form of monetary policy that is used when interest rates have already been lowered to the zero bound. Quantitative easing, which involves the purchase of ""printed"" money to buy government bonds, was widely viewed in Japan as a failure, but what most people don't understand about Japan's early QE experiments is that they were very small--less than $20 billion a month. It took Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda to ramp up asset purchases significantly in what was called ""Abenomics.""     Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister. Photographer: Akio Kon/Bloomberg     The results of Abenomics have been mixed, but the stock market is certainly higher and the yen is certainly lower, although it's not clear that either of those two developments have really helped. Japan's stock market is mostly foreign-owned, and the weaker yen didn't materially help the balance of trade. Still, there are a lot of people who said that Japan's endless debt deflation would have been worse without Abenomics, so it has remained firmly in place for five years.  Abenomics rapidly began to cause distortions, as accelerated asset purchases caused the Bank of Japan to hold a huge percentage of outstanding government bonds, at 40% and rising, as well as being the majority holder of index ETFs. Investors who traffic in JGBs have remarked that the market now functions very poorly, since so much of the market is held by the BOJ. It seems that will get worse, not better. Last year the BOJ implemented a policy of yield curve targeting (ostensibly to help the banks), keeping the overnight rate negative but targeting a 10 year rate at zero percent. The BOJ has been buying longer-dated bonds for years, but this was the first time it ever explicitly capped a rate at longer maturities. Some people wondered how committed the BOJ would be to maintain that cap in the event that JGBs were caught up in a global duration selloff, which we experienced in the last two weeks.  As 10-year JGB yields rose above 0.10% last week, the BOJ announced that it was prepared to buy an unlimited amount of bonds to keep yields close to zero percent. As you can imagine, buying an unlimited amount of 10-year JGBs involves printing a theoretically unlimited amount of yen, so the yen weakened significantly on the news.  It still remains about ten percent stronger than it was in 2015. We are getting closer to the endgame for Japan. What happens if yields rise further? What happens if the yen depreciates significantly? How much could it depreciate? Could Japan have a currency crisis? What happens if the BOJ ends up owning the entire bond market? These are the questions that investors are asking, and nobody really knows the answers. We are in uncharted territory. I believe that a currency crisis isn't just possible--it's inevitable. And it probably happens at about the time that the BOJ owns all or nearly all of the JGB market, and has to resort to canceling the debt. This sounds like a neat magic trick to make the debt go away, but the laws of economics are not to be conned. Anything is possible--a currency crash, a bond market crash--anything. This is the very definition of debt monetization that resulted in hyperinflation in places like Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe. Is Japan different? We shall see. We will find out soon, as Japan has taken a major step in that direction.  Jared Dillian is the author of All the Evil of This World, and the editor of the 10th Man newsletter for Mauldin Economics. Subscribe here.  *Forbes articles have 8 tracking cookies and 9 tracking scripts. This comment has none.*(https://www.reddit.com/r/raws/comments/68xk37/about/)" I don't think the verbal confirmation from the branch manager is worth anything, unless you got it in writing it basically never happened. That said, what did you sign exactly? An application? I'd think they would be well within their rights to deny that, no matter what the branch manager said. If you actually signed a binding contract between you and the bank, things would be different but the fact that 'approval' was mentioned suggests that all you and the bank signed was an application and the bank manager made some unreasonable promises he or she doesn't want to be reminded of now. If the complaints department can't get off their collective backsides, a firm but polite letter to the CEO's office might help, or it might end up in the round filing cabinet. But it's worth a try. Other than that, if you are unhappy enough to go through the pain, you can try to remortgage with another bank and end the business relationship with your current bank. If the FDIC didn't insure your deposit, there would be a run on EVERY bank, so there is no way the government will let it fail or go broke.  It will be backstopped one way or another.  So I wouldn't worry about losing my money.   The only worry is the hassle of having to deal with the bank failure and getting at your money and getting it out.  There could be a few days of illiquidity while the government is stepping in to sort things out.  If that scares you or would be a big problem, then I'd find a safer choice. I work at a large bank, that isn't too unusual although a lot of banks are moving to fee-free basic accounts and upping their fees on other specific transactions. For example, my bank did away with minimum balance requirements to waive a monthly service fee, but we started charging $2/month for paper statements and upped our out-of-network ATM fee by 50 cents.  Would like to point out that most financial institutions will reorder your transactions slightly for the purposes of accounting. It is much easier to run all transactions in big batches at the end of the day than individually as they come in. Required disclosures you receive upon account opening explain the exact order but most banks do all credits (money in) first and then debits (money out) like checks, debit cards, and ACH payments after. If you overdraft you can usually avoid a fee if you make a cash deposit before the end of the business day as the cash will go into your account before your purchases are debited.  OCCASIONALLY this accounting-based reordering will result in additional fees but that is not the intended purpose of reordering them. And I would always refund any incurred fees that happened due to accounting-based transaction reordering.   What Wells Fargo is doing has been illegal since 2008 and their continued appeals are hoping to get the ruling overturned so they won't have to pay out restitution to affected customers. It's frankly despicable. "No money is gone.  The movement of the existing currency has slowed down.  Currency moves through the economy through deposits or loans to banks, and withdrawal from banks as proceeds from loans or return of deposits.  When a bank makes a loan they provide a balance in a bank account, which isn't converted to hard currency until withdrawn.  So those bank loans essentially count as currency, and thus effectively multiply the stock of currency available.  Deposits into money market funds, and those funds loans into the commercial paper markets, have the same effect.  Banks and money funds are now making fewer loans.  In particular they are not funding ""companies"" that invested in securitizations of home mortgages and credit card receivables, but they are also lending less to businesses and consumers.  Because they are lending less they are ""effectively multiplying"" the currency less.   Think of deposited and lent currency as spare cycles on a desktop computer.  You let your computer help decipher the genome when you aren't using it yourself.  If you somehow feared that you would lose those cycles, slowing down your own computing, you would be less likely to lend those cycles out.  There would still be the same number of computing cycles in the world, but the stock of those available for actual computing would appear to be diminished.  The technical term for this concept is ""monetary velocity"" and it is a crucial factor in determing the level of overall economic activity, banking stability, and inflation."