Just to clarify, before my account was transferred from IB UK to IBIE, I had the option of Bill Pay (free), ACH (free) and wire transfers ($25 fee at origin) for USD cash deposits. I never had any problems having my cash credited, ever. Following the forced move from IB UK to IBIE, thanks to fekking Brexit, only the wire option was available for USD deposits, and that costs $25 a pop at the point of origin. A few months ago IB added ACH, which is free, but they put a 4-day hold on the cash before it's made available for trading. That 4-day hold is supposed to be in place just for the first ACH transfer (for security reasons), but they never lifted it after my first ACH transaction with IBIE, as they're so damn incompetent, so each time you make an ACH deposit you still must wait 4 biz days to have access to your cash. The fact that I was with IB LLC, then IB UK, and made ACH transfers from/to those accounts for 20 years clearly doesn't count for anything as far as their security concerns go.
A month ago or so they added the Request-For-Pay (RFP) option with from JP Morgan Chase (this
https://www.reuters.com/business/fi...es-new-real-time-payments-service-2021-08-10/). Basically it works like Bill Pay, but better, as payments are supposed to be credited in real time rather than the next day. The way it works is, you send a request for a deposit from your IB account to you IB-linked/verified JPM Chase checking account, which I have. You confirm the payment in your Chase mobile app or on the Chase website, then the payment is sent from Chase, and in theory it should be credited to your IB account immediately. In my case the payment was never credited. I called IB's US 800 number, and the Indian reps who keep answering the funding line don't even know what RFP from Chase is, which I found astonishing, so I keep getting transferred to other Indian reps until one knows what RFP is, then this person claims to have raised the issue with their "funding and banking" team. And then nothing happens, you just keep waiting and your cash is still missing. It's incredibly frustrating because all that's needed is for someone in the US to manually verify in IB's Chase account for RFP transfers the transaction coming from my Chase checking account, whose number they have, and credit the money. It would take a competent person three minutes to do that.
Years ago when I called IB's 800 number I was immediately put through to a capable person in Chicago who immediately solved the issue, currently you must deal with these guys in Delhi or Mumbai who don't even know what you're talking about half of the time, if you can even understand them as their English is so bad. Effing unbelievable.