I’m very pleased to announce that we have a new currency exchange partner, Lumon and I’d like to introduce you all to our personal point of contact at Lumon, Stephen Eakins.
As longer standing members will know, here on SF we never promote anything that we don’t use and believe in ourselves, so please give a big SF welcome to Stephen and think about using Lumon for any FOREX needs!
Lumon is a property-focused currency broker who’ve been helping clients (with a strong focus on the French expat community and property market) for nearly 25 years. Stephen has been with Lumon for 16 years; the team is now 200 strong and they are currently opening their tenth office in Marbella next month.
Lumon’s mission is to offer “better rates and better service” than the banks. And point out “When was the last time your bank called you to check in?”
Their services include:
Notaire-approved French RIBS – we’ve received payments from over 250 Notaire offices last year
SCI-approved accounts
Bank accounts based in France
On-the-ground, bilingual teams
A personal account manager for clients, helping manage currency risk and transfers
All required paperwork for France, from attestations to provenance de fonds
The factual stuff:
Regulated in both the UK and Europe (FCA and BOI)
Offer e-wallet accounts in 60+ currencies
Completed over 10,000 property exchanges
Trading around £35m a day, reaching £11 billion this year
25 years of experience, recognised as French Property Currency Specialists
Partners with lots of French expat services, from Insurance, to banking, immobilier to tax.
We really hope this new addition to the SF stable will prove useful to lots of you - enjoy!
I will keep that in mind but my ‘problem’ is that, having been forced to change to Torfex at the end of last year I have had no complaints about their service so far.
Also, the man that I dealt with personally, all by phone, for many years at Worldwide Currencies, emailed me out of the blue a couple of weeks ago to say he had moved to another company, Synergy Exchange, and was thus in a position to resume our previous phone based personal relationship.
We’ve been customers of Lumon (previously Foreign Currency Direct) since arriving in France in 2006. We use them for our Regular Payment Plan. Our money is transferred each month from our UK Bank, we receive an email from Lumon with the exchange rate (commercial rate) and it is transferred to our CA bank within a couple of hours.
The staff are really helpful and we would definitely recommend them.
I’ve found them rather pushy. They might want to review their hard sell cold-calling policy.
I don’t know how they got my phone number - I suspect through another company selling it - but I’m getting regular phone calls from them, leaving messages.
I would answer the phone and politely tell them that you’re very happy with your current provider and that they should not call again. Most reputable outfits won’t. They are allowed 30 days to remove you though I think. They are regulated in France and so legally I think have to abide by your instruction. If they call again after 30 days then report them.
All companies, reputable or not have databases of people they call. They buy the numbers of these people from companies that categorise the people appropriately and the companies buy these numbers according to categories that match thier profile, hence why you are being called by such a company. This is a modern marketing tool used by most companies these days and to expect companies not to do this, and to call such companies untrustworthy is naive. The way to get rid of them is to do as I suggest. If you don’t then they will continue to call as they have no way of knowing that you find the calls annoying. Just because they are calling from the UK doesn’t absolve them from responsibility to follow the law in France as they are also regulated in France.