I’m moving to London in March, and I’ve been hearing terrible things about opening a bank account when you have just arrived in the country.
I’ve had a look at the ID requirements of a few banks and they want utilities bills or suchlike to prove one’s address (in the UK), and obviously I won’t have these. There is a service here that I can buy for $75 which includes the opening of a bank account but I would rather save the money and open it myself.
Does anyone have the straight dope on this? Anyone work in a UK bank? Anyone been in the same situation? Anyone know how I can find out the solution (the banks seem to want me to ring rather than email about this and I don’t want to have to ring from Australia!)?
I should note that I have a British passport, and I have relatives in London who can lend me utilities bills (which won’t have my name on it, but they can write a letter saying I’m staying there). I don’t know if that’s helpful.
Contact your bank in Australia and see if they can assist you. For example, my bank here in New Zealand has an association with Barclays bank and I can open a UK bank account from here. The process is often fasttracked because your current bank writes a letter stating that you operated your bank accounts properly etc.
If anyone has similar information on opening a UK bank account if you’re not in the UK, I’d like to hear that too. (My mother lives here in Canada but wants to open one in the UK).
Natwest, the Aldwych Branch in London makes it a practice to accept young foriegn travellers. Make an appointment ahead of time and bring your passport, £100 in cash and if at all possible try and pass yourself as a student. I think I had a letter of reference from my bank back home but they didn’t even look at it.
My aussie roommate set up her HSBC one via her HSBC aussie bank before she even got here so that may be easier. Anyway, good luck and don’t bother with travellers cheques as you can use your debit card here no prob and changing travellers cheques is a bitch.
Excellent, Aldwych Branch of Natwest. I’ll check that out. Did you take anything else to open the account, bills or anything? Or just passport and cash?
Let me give you a word of advice, having dealt with a few UK banks and opening accounts - the people at the smaller branches often seem absolutely gobsmacked about the possibility that a non-UK citizen would even try to open an account with them. On paper, the process is not really hard; in practice, you get a lot of even branch managers who start demanding all sorts of unnecessary things like lengthy past employment records, “letters of recommendation” from your old bank, etc. What smooths the transition is to call in advance and talk to an expert on the phone to see what you really need (don’t bother with the web; the branch managers seem to be mostly unaware that this whole “web thing” exists), take down their name, number, and what office they’re at, and then when the branch manager starts to ask you for butt-cheek prints so they can check their database, you can give them the contact number at their own company so they can call up and ask questions.
With HSBC, if you have more than £100,000 to deposit you can get a “Premier Account”, which gets you a “personal phone concierge” who can actually handle most of the messy stuff for you.
I just moved back to the UK after thirteen years away, and I am reeling at the new beaurocracy that’s grown up here since I last lived in the country. Not just banking, but cars, taxes, etc. etc.
It is an absolute nightmare is all I can say. You need a bill in your name, sent to your current address. Nothing else will do. Luckily most utilities don’t run credit checks, but it takes a few weeks.
Not just that, but just to open a simple current account - no overdraft facility, no debit card, no chequebook - they run through a whole credit check even though you have no credit history. It takes a long time. I finally have two accounts, but it took me about 6 weeks.
When I was in Asutralia recently (specifically Brisbane) I saw some banks that offer to open an account in the UK on your behalf. If you can, save yourself a world of pain and DO IT.
Slightly off topic but it’s not just people who have recently entered the country who have problems opening up accounts in the UK - lots of us natives do too. I had to go without a bank account for nearly a year after I was screwed over by Barlcays (don’t join them under any circumstance) and even then I had to get a savings account.
In the UK it’s made very clear to you that having a bank account is a privilege, not a right (there’s even a policy committment from the government to make it possible for everyone to get one, and help the 1/6th of the country who aren’t eligible for one actually manage it!).
It puzzles me that you would be surprised by this. Can you explain why? My view is that the bank would be foolish not to run checks on persons arriving from overseas even if they have lived here before. And they’d be doubly foolish to immediately give credit to someone with no known history. Is there something i’m missing here that makes you think it’s unreasonable?
Yes, so maybe I didn’t express myself properly. The point is that I wasn’t asking for credit at any point: I just wanted a basic bank account into which I could deposit and withdraw money. It would be impossible for me to defraud them. Yet they still ran a credit check, even though they knew I had no credit history.
Another bugbear that I forgot to mention is that they all refuse to take into account my immaculate credit history from Ireland, even though it’s another EU country.
I agree it seems reasonable that a letter of recommendation from your bank would suffice. Although maybe banks don’t like to take risks recommending customers to banks in other countries in case it comes back and bites them.
The trouble is that things like cheque-books and debits cards are actually a form of credit. Although security is good it’s not impossible that someone can rip off a company using a debit card and obviously there is a delay between presenting a cheque to a company and them drawing on it. I remember at 18 receiving my first cheque-book but no guarantee card. When i queried it the bank said they would not guarantee my cheques until i had built up some credit history and proven able to manage my money properly. It seemed reasonable.
There are types of Post Office account which restrict the account holder to only using the money they actually have. i think they have more experience with customers who are perhaps without (or with poor) credit histories and so are more willing to adapt to them. Maybe that would have been a better bet initially?
Were you actually applying for a true ‘basic account’, or a standard current account with Switch card? If the latter, it’d be very easy for you to run up a large unauthorised debt. I’ve met several antipodean backpackers who don’t see anything wrong with doing this in their last few days in the country.
And I’m not at all surprised they can’t make use of a foreign credit history, given the general inefficencies due to any foreign transactions whatsoever.
A lot of banks do offer these accounts now, normally with an Electron or Solo card. But you need to specifically ask for this rather than a normal account.
All I wanted was an account with an ATM card. That’s all I knew I could get, so that’s all I asked for. But they still went through 6 weeks of screwing around.
Another reason they still jumped through all the hoops: identity theft. If I were able to set up a basic account (which generally still have DD/Standing Order facilities) in someone else’s name, I’d subsequently be able to get all sorts of bills & utilities in that name to use as ID elsewhere.
The reasons the banks are so fussy are nothing to do with commercial pressures, or credit checking, it’s because its the law. Indeed, a bank recently was heavily fined for not following the correct procedures.
The reason behind the law is primarily money laundering. I only have to look at the amount of spam I receive offering me a “sales job” transfering money through my personal bank account for companies that inexplicably can’t open their own. It’s obviously an issue.