Send an investigation
What you will learn
✅ How to ask another financial institution a question about a wire you sent or received, for example where a payment ended up, or why funds you received cannot be applied.
Learn about Wires.
Before you begin
Make sure you have:
- Permission to send investigation requests. Request access through your usual role process.
You can send an investigation request about any wire that has reached the Fed, whether you sent it or received it:
- a customer transfer
- a bank transfer
- a return
- a drawdown request
- a drawdown response
The task does not appear on service messages. You cannot open an investigation about a return request, about another investigation, or about a status message.
What an investigation request is
You send an investigation request when you need something from another institution about a wire:
- confirmation of where the funds were credited
- an explanation of why funds arrived that cannot be applied
- an answer to a question about charges
- an adjustment to the value date
It is a question, not an instruction. No funds move and nothing changes on the wire you ask about.
An investigation is not the way to ask for money back. If you need funds returned, send a return request instead. See Return requests.
Process overview
You open the wire, select the Investigation Request task and describe your question. The request is built from codes rather than free text, which lets the other institution route and prioritize it before anyone reads it. The narrative tells them what actually happened. When you submit, the request is sent and appears as its own record, linked to the wire you asked about. The other institution replies with an investigation response, which arrives in COS Explorer as an inbound record.
To answer an investigation request that another institution sent to us, see Respond to an investigation.
To create an investigation request
Select the wire you have a question about.
Click Investigation Request in the payment tasks list in the right-hand pane. Mandatory fields are flagged with a red marker.
Choose a Type. Mandatory.
This is the kind of question you are asking. Request For Information is the broadest and most commonly used. Others cover specific situations: the beneficiary says the funds never arrived, funds arrived that cannot be applied, a question about charges, or a request to adjust the value date.
Choose Other only when nothing else fits, and explain in the narrative.
Choose a Sub-Type if one applies. Optional.
A Sub-Type narrows the question to a compliance context, such as anti-money laundering, sanctions or fraud, which affects how urgently the other institution treats it. Any Sub-Type can be used with any Type.
Leave it empty if none applies. When it is empty, it is left out of the message rather than sent blank.
Choose a Reason. Mandatory.
Where the Type says what kind of question you are asking, the Reason says which part of the payment it concerns, for example the amount, the creditor, the remittance information or the settlement date. Select the closest match.
Choose Other (see narrative) when no code describes your question. Selecting it makes the narrative mandatory.
Write the Narrative. Up to 500 characters, with a live character count. Optional for most reasons, mandatory when the Reason is Other (see narrative). Write one anyway. See Best practices below.
Submit. There is no approval step. The request is sent immediately and cannot be withdrawn. The investigation appears as its own record, linked to the wire you asked about, and you can navigate between the two.
What happens next
The other institution replies with an investigation response, which arrives in COS Explorer as an inbound record linked to your request. Their reply carries a status, a reason code and a narrative:
- Closed: the matter is resolved and the narrative contains the answer.
- Pending: they have your request and are still working on it. Expect a further response with the answer.
- Rejected: they are not going to action the request as sent. Their reason code and narrative say why.
Sending an investigation does not change the wire you asked about. If the outcome is that funds need to come back, that is a separate action.
Best practices
Always write a narrative. A code on its own rarely tells the other institution enough to act on, and a thin request usually comes back as a question rather than an answer.
Put the essential facts first: what you are asking, and what you need back. For example:
- "Beneficiary reports funds not received. Please confirm the credit date and the account credited, or advise where the funds are held."
The reader is an operator at another bank who has only what you send them. Avoid internal shorthand and reference numbers that mean nothing outside Cross River.