Recently I had cause to curse the workings of the great financial giants that astride the currency markets. Now I'm not suggesting that I fell foul of currency crooks for millions but in it's own way I was frustrated by the money system.

I wanted to make an investment in a particular programme that traded in Euro's. As my home currency is the British Pound it seemed fairly straightforward. All I had to do was send my GBP to a payment processor, use their services to convert to Euro and make the investment. Unfortunately things didn't work out quite like that.

There was no problem sending the funds from my own account to the payment processor. Next was the conversion to Euro's. Cringing at the less than favourable exchange rate I was presented with I nevertheless pressed the submit button and hey presto my original GBP miraculously turned into Euro's.

Then I made the payment to the online programme. All sounds pretty simple really and there is where things went wrong. When I logged in to the online investment plan I realised that the amount of Euro's I was expecting wasn't in the account.

As I'd done a similar transaction in the previous week I wasn't expecting any problems so this was something of a shock. I submitted a support ticket to the online investment group and asked why the funds I had invested weren't as I'd expected. I was anticipating a reply to say that a mistake had been made and that my full amount would be credited.

What I got was a reply to say that they had invested the sum they had received from the payment processor. Yet I knew that the sum I'd converted was higher than I was seeing on the screen. Doing a little more research I discovered that the online investment programmes' account with the payment processor was designated in US$.

So, I'd converted GBP to Euro's in the belief that when I paid the investment account it would transfer the whole amount of Euro's. That's where my assumption went awry. What happened in practice was that when my account had been converted into Euro's the processor then converted the Euro's to US$ so that they could be applied to the investment company account. These US$ then had to be re-converted to Euro's to be placed with the investment programme. The result of all this was a cost I wasn't expecting!

Moral of the story is to check just what machinations your funds have to go through to get from your account to its final destination.