What is the best way to get €25000 into a UK bank account

[ASB]

If you are doing it in cash don't forget the cash transactions rules in money laundering. Though I don't see why you can't just transfer it using the IBAN of the receiving account.

[lje]

You could open a personal Euro account in the UK, such as the one from Citibank (http://www.citibank.co.uk/personal/b...urocurrent.htm).

I haven't had a Euro account with them but I have had their USD account and a GBP one. They didn't charge for putting money into the USD one and I could transfer it to the UKP one online. I can't remember how competitive the exchange rate was but I do know that it was very useful when I was living in the US as a (slow but free) way of getting money back to the UK.

[Moscow Mule]

I've got a EUR account you can put it in if you like.

I'll charge you whatever exchange rate Cater Allen are doing at the time & + 0.5% to convert it...

[Emigre]

I just PM'd you.

[BolshieBastard]

You should be able to transfer money from a bank in England to the Netherlands and vice versa no problem. I did this when buying a car in Gronigen (sorry about the spelling!). Did the same when buying a BMW in Hamburg.

The only issue is the money has to be converted from pounds to euros or in your case euros to pounds. You'll need an IBAN for the bank you are transferring from and to. This just helps identify the bank and accounts in each country.

You should have no problem transferring money except for the no mark bank employees who dont know or more likely, cant be arsed to do this for you.

[KentPhilip]

I have recently left a contract in the Netherlands due to ill health, and am now living in the UK.
During the time I was working I built up a balance of around €25000 euros in a Netherlands-based ING bank account. I was working as a "temp" not using my Ltd company, so this was all tax-paid money.

When I recovered from my illness (they ended the contract, understandably, after 2 weeks of sickness) I returned to the Netherlands to provide ING with instructions to transfer all the money to my UK Lloyds personal bank account (doing a convert from Euros to pounds conversion of course). But they said this could only be done with internet banking.
To set up internet banking you need a Netherlands mobile phone. You also need to read dutch as the website is only in Dutch.

So I decided to take out half the money as cash (120 €100 bills) and return to the UK.

So my question is: When I go back and get the rest of the balance in cash, and return to the UK, what is the best way of getting €25000 euros in cash into a bank account in the UK without getting excessively stung on cash foreign exchange commissions and exchange rates.
In other words I don't want to have to exchange it all with bureau-de-change type rates, which are wide enough to cause a net loss of over €1000 I recon.

Appreciate this is a bit of a dogs dinner, but there you go.

One idea I already have is to open a HSBC business Euro account, and stuff the euros in there. There is a 1% cash handling fee, but that is OK I think. And I might just leave the money there for the time being.