Your father sent the money. It landed in your account, or in the app, and now the bank has paused it. The message asks where the money came from. You have done nothing wrong. Your father has done nothing wrong. The bank has a check it has to run before it releases a large transfer from abroad, and it needs four pieces of paper before the money moves.
Here they are, in the order the bank looks at them.
The four documents the bank actually wants
A signed gift letter from the person sending the money. One page, in the sender’s own hand or typed and signed. It says who is sending, who is receiving, how much, in which currency, on what date, why, and that the money is a gift and not a loan. The exact fields the letter must carry are below.
A copy of the sender’s ID. Passport is best. A driving licence or a national ID card is usually fine too. The bank wants to see the same name that signed the gift letter and the same name on the account the money left from.
Proof of the sender’s address. A bank statement or a utility bill from the last three months, showing the sender’s name and home address. The bank is not checking whether they own the house. It is checking that the person on the letter is a real person at a real address.
A bank statement from the sender showing the money leaving. One page. It shows the sender’s name, the account, and the debit for the amount on the letter, on the day the transfer went. This is the piece most families do not think to send with the letter, and it is the piece the bank asks for twice.
That is the pack. A Wise or Revolut transfer paused for a check, a TransferGo top-up flagged for review, or a direct bank-to-bank transfer that has landed and is sitting in your current account waiting to be released: the four items are the same.
The gift letter, field by field
The letter can be a Word document, an email, or a photograph of a handwritten page. What matters is what is in it. Eight fields, no more:
1. Full name and home address of the person sending the money.
2. Their relationship to you (father, mother, uncle, aunt,
grandparent, sibling).
3. Your full name and address.
4. The exact amount and currency, and the date of the transfer.
For example: "GBP 30,000, sent on 12 July 2026."
5. What the money is for (wedding, school fees, house deposit,
family support, medical costs).
6. This wording, in these words: "This is an unconditional gift.
No repayment is expected. I have no claim on any asset the
recipient may buy with this money."
7. Where the money came from. One line is enough: "This money is
my savings from thirty years of salary at [employer]", or
"the sale of my house in [city] in [year]", or "an inheritance
from my late father." Salary, savings, sale, inheritance, or
business income are the five stories the bank recognises.
8. The sender's signature and the date they signed.Send that letter, the ID, the address proof, and the bank statement together, in one email, when the bank first asks. Sending them in dribs and drabs restarts the review each time and adds a week to the pause.
What changes when the money is going through an app
Wise, Revolut and TransferGo run their own version of the same check, before your UK bank ever sees the money. The four documents are the same. Two things are different.
The apps often ask for a fifth item: proof that the sender is actually your relative. A birth certificate, a marriage certificate, an old passport with the sender’s name in the next-of-kin field, or an official document that names both of you. This is the item most families do not have to hand, and it is the single most common reason a Wise or Revolut transfer sits paused for a fortnight. If you know one of these transfers is coming, ask your family to scan and send you the document that names both of you before the transfer, not after.
The apps also move faster once the pack is in. Wise and Revolut can release a paused transfer within one to two working days of receiving the full documents. A high-street bank can take a week or more, because a human has to review it in a queue.
The house-deposit case is different
If the money is a deposit for a house, and it is going to a solicitor’s client account instead of yours, the paperwork is stricter and the timing matters more.
The solicitor is not asking for the four documents so the bank will release the money to you. The solicitor is building a file that has to satisfy the Law Society’s rules on gifted deposits. That file needs the same four items, plus a notarised copy of the sender’s ID (a notary public stamps it, not just a photocopy), and often a certified English translation of any document not in English. It also needs a fuller account of where the money came from: not a line, a paragraph, with dates and, where possible, supporting paperwork (a payslip summary, a property sale contract, an inheritance grant of probate).
Get this pack to the solicitor six weeks before the completion date. Do not send the money first and then chase the paperwork. If the solicitor’s file is not complete when the money arrives, the solicitor cannot release the funds to the seller, and a completion date can be lost while the file catches up.
The two-hop route: when it works, and when it does not
The common piece of advice in every family group chat is the two-hop route: the sender in Nigeria, Pakistan, Ghana, India, or the Philippines sends the money first to a relative already in the UK, and that UK relative then sends it on to you.
For a wedding, a school fee, a funeral, a family emergency, or ordinary support, the two-hop route works and often clears faster than a direct transfer from abroad. The UK bank on the receiving side can see the second hop end-to-end: a UK-to-UK transfer, in sterling, from a named UK account it can verify. That is easier to release than a wire from a bank in Lagos or Karachi it has no relationship with.
For a house deposit going to a solicitor, the two-hop route is the wrong answer. The solicitor’s file has to trace the money in one clean line from the sender to the deposit. An extra hop through a sibling’s or a cousin’s account creates a gap the solicitor has to explain, and each gap adds days to the file. For a house deposit, route the money in one direct transfer and put your work into the pack of documents that goes with it.
A note on tax
Gifts from a living relative are not income tax for you. There is no UK tax to pay when the money arrives. Inheritance tax can apply if the sender is UK-resident for tax and dies within seven years of the gift, and there is a small annual gift allowance of £3,000 per giver per tax year. If the sender is not UK-resident for tax and does not live here, none of that applies. This is not tax advice; if the amount is large and you are not sure, ask an accountant before the transfer.
When the money is still paused
Most transfers clear within a working week of the full pack being in. If it has been longer than that and the bank or the app is still asking for more documents, send them a written summary: the four items you have already supplied, dated, with attachment names. Ask what specific document is still outstanding. A specific answer forces a specific reply.
The rest of the pieces on money paused between two systems, from a wedding transfer stuck on hold to a savings pot that has to follow you to the UK, sit under between systems.