I have an account with Interactive Brokers (
http://www.interactivebrokers.co.uk) that I mainly use to trade shares. However, their Foreign Exchange rates are excellent. If you're thinking of investing SOME of the money, it may be worth opening an account.
They have a minimum commission charge of US$10 per month or €92 per year. Basically, you can trade away with shares and options or foreign exchange and, if your charges are below $10, they'll charge you the difference at the end of the month. You need the equivelant of $10,000 to open an account.
As an example, $10 will allow you to make a foreign exchange transaction and seven US share transactions (buys or sells) every month.
As you may be aware, with the banks, there's a bid/ask spread of about €0.03 which means you lose out 1.5% in addition to the €6.35 commission paid (AIB example) - they buy the currency at 1.5% below the going rate and sell it at 1.5% above the going rate giving a 3% spread.
With Interactive Brokers, this bid/ask spread is €0.0001 - or 0.01%.
This means that a £40K transfer could cost you about (£40K * 1.5%) + €6.35 = €725 with AIB whilst the equivelant charge is (£40K * 0.01%) + $2.50 = €7.
Interactive Brokers have a UK bank account, a Euro account, a US account, an Australian account and many others. You can lodge money in any account in the currency of that particular account. Then, it appears in your IB account in that currency. You can then change it to any other currency and withdraw it into your own bank account of that currency.
I use this to transfer sterling to Euro every month (I work in the North) and to transfer Aussie dollars to Euro (my brothers work in Australia, lodge the money in Interactive Brokers' Sydney account and I transfer this to Euros to be lodged in their account).
