Hey, does anyone know if a person with a US bank account can just write a regular check to a person with a Royal Bank account? Or does something special need to happen for international banking?

 

RBC will take the cheque, but it may take upto a couple weeks to clear. A draft or wire transfer will be processed much quicker.

 

Exchange rates at the time of posting will apply to the dollar value of the cheque.

 

From my own personal experience, both things the posters above are correct. Btw, good to see you spelled "cheque" correctly.

 

Haha; he ended up saying "check" in the post though.

 

HA... the person I'm dealing with kept calling them cheques through email so I figured that must be the Canadian spelling.

I wanted to go the wire transfer route, but its a $40 fee to wire money internationally from my bank. Worse with Western Union.

 

In addition to that RBC will collect a $15 wire transfer fee from the recipient.

 

RBC says that in order to ensure that the personal check clears, it can take about 30 days! A bank draft or cashier's check (sometimes referred as 'Official') from the US bank will clear no problem.

It's speculated that Canadian cheques clear much faster because the unique combination of extra letters involved, ie. -que as opposed to -ck add extra security to the transaction.

 

Tell the person to open a US dollar account and then you can have them just deposit the cheque. They will have to wait for it to clear, but there shouldn't be any additional charges.
GL

 

There shouldn't be any additional service charges for depositing a US$ cheque in a CDN$ account.