What are OUR, BEN and SHA charges on an international transfer?
You sent a round number. They received an odd one. A three-letter code you never chose is the reason.
Only one of these lets the recipient know the amount in advance.
What each code actually instructs
OUR. The sender pays all charges, including those of the intermediary banks and the receiving bank. The recipient gets the exact amount stated. The sender's bank usually charges a higher fixed fee for this, because it is now guaranteeing costs it does not directly control.
BEN. All charges are deducted from the amount in transit. The sender pays nothing beyond the transfer. The recipient gets whatever survives the journey.
SHA. Shared, and the most common default. The sender pays their own bank's fee. Every institution after that deducts from the money as it passes. The recipient absorbs the middle.
Why the recipient's amount is unpredictable
Because under both SHA and BEN, the deductions happen along a route the sender did not choose and cannot see.
An international transfer often passes through one or more correspondent banks. Each is a real business applying its own charge, and the number of hops depends on the corridor, the currencies and the relationships between the banks involved. Two transfers between the same pair of accounts can take different routes on different days.
So the honest answer to "how much will they receive" under SHA is a range, not a number. This is not a bank being evasive; it is a genuine property of routing through institutions the sender has no contract with.
When each one is the right choice
Use OUR when the amount matters. Paying an invoice, settling a fee, sending tuition or anything where arriving short creates a problem for the recipient. It costs more up front and it removes the ambiguity entirely. An invoice paid short is an invoice unpaid, and the cost of resolving that exceeds the fee.
SHA is fine for informal transfers where a small variance does not matter.
BEN is rarely the right choice as a sender and is worth checking for, because the recipient bears everything and often has no idea it was selected.
If your bank does not offer the choice, that itself is information. Providers that pre-fund in both countries avoid the correspondent chain entirely, which is why they can quote an exact landing amount, and why the comparison that actually matters is what lands rather than what is charged.
Three ways to make a long-distance phone call in an older era. You pay for the whole call. You reverse the charges so the other person pays. Or you each pay your own exchange and nobody quite knows what the operators in between will add. The third one was the default, and it was the one that produced arguments about the bill.
Where you meet it
Every international transfer form with a dropdown you did not understand. Every invoice that arrived a few units short. Every "intermediary bank charges may apply" line that turned out to mean something specific.