Bank timelines after probate grant

Hi all,

Has anyone any recent experience of Bank of Ireland timelines for transferring funds post probate grant?

Probate has been granted (personal application made in December 2024 and granted in March 2025. Similar to previous posters the Dublin Probate Office are very helpful and I found the personal application process quite straightforward for a simple estate)

The issue of delay has arisen with Bank of Ireland. Just to give an indication the payment transfer form was submitted on 29 April. Following calls with Bereavement Support I made two visits to branch with the certified death cert/letter of admin the week after. I was informed of a 10 days timeline and then a 7 day timeline (each call it changes) but still no sight of funds. Any advice greatly appreciated or is it possible payment transfers need to take 30+ days in BOI. The transfer is BOI to BOI.

Thank you.

Are you transferrin to an estate account opened for the purpose of administering the estate, or directly to the personal account of a beneficiary of the estate?

Also if you are the Executor, you should not be transferring funds anywhere until Revenue have confirmed Tax clearance. Thats a seperate process to Probate.

The transfer is to the personal account of the Administrator i.e. me (who is also a beneficiary with one other). Estate outlays have been covered by the Administrator with detailed records and copy invoices. Thank you for the reminder on the tax clearance cert.

It's generally a good practice to open a separate bank account for estate business, to avoid mixing estate funds and personal funds. Keeps things transparent and in good order and, sometimes importantly, makes it easy to demonstrate that they have been kept in good order if anybody is so rude as to question that at any point in the future. (And you can open this account and put funds into it before obtaining the tax clearance certificate.)

Once you have the clearance cert you can then reimburse yourself out of that account for properly incurred estate expenses that you have personally discharged.

I can't say if this is a factor in the delay here, but you might find the bank less anxious about transferring the money if they were transferring it into an estate account.

An update from the bank this morning - the transfer is being processed and will take another estimated 3-5 days.

So that will be 6 weeks from the date of the transfer request form. It may help others who are trying to gauge bank timelines as I did not anticipate this delay with a BOI to BOI transfer.

Thanks Tom for that information and I can see why an estate account would be beneficial in certain circumstances and more complex estates. The other beneficiary has been happy with all the record keeping to date.

I would note that as the Administrator I provided a High Court bond/guarantee double the value of the estate which should surely also satisfy bank requirements to release funds.