Sorry for not being specific enough, let me give more details about the incident. My bank tell me they can see the transaction but it is not approved so they cant do anything about it and recommend me to contact with the sender's bank. Sender's bank tells the sender that the amount is held by the beneficiary bank and they can not do anything about it either. At some point, sender's bank told the sender that the beneficiary bank released the payment (around 25-30 days ago), but the transaction is still not completed anyhow. Weird thing about this is, the amount is very small (around 1k EUR), and I have received 20-30 payments from the same sender, same bank in the past 4 years. The most troubling part is, I or the sender, can not take any action to fix the issue and the neither bank tells us what the issue is or recommends us an action to fix the issue.

I am not saying this happens all the time, or all SWIFT transactions are flawed by nature, but this occurring even once is enough for me to be in a very stressful situation without any remedy.