Opening a US Dollar Account Online

[UbonOz]

I live permanently in Thailand. I am an Australian/British citizen, two passports.

In the next month I will have quite a large sum of US dollars which need to find a home.

I have bank accounts in the Australia and the UK.

I was originally thinking of transferring all the funds to my UK account.

The GBP is now very strong against the US dollar which means I would lose quite a large sum if converting US dollars to pounds sterling.

If I could open an account, online, where the funds were transferred in US dollars to a US dollar account, I could then decide when to transfer funds without losing too much.

I realise I will have to provide KYC details etc, that is not a problem.

I have searched the web to find more information.

Any suggestions what other members use or know of would be greatly appreciated.

[Soutpeel]

Try Citibank International personal banking in Singapore, if its a reasonably large sum, they should be able to fix you up

[topt]

OP it may be worth asking (if you haven't already) either of your banks if you can have a $US account as well - a friend of mine had a business account in UK and had a linked $US account with it a few years ago - that was Barclays.

Lloyds International have a few options as well. http://international.lloydsbank.com/ - I have $US with them but not GBP for example.

[Gonsalviz]

Pretty sure Bangkok Bank does it.

[stoli]

I have a dollar account setup at Bangkok Bank. Takes a while to do, but they do all the paperwork. Yes, if you can guess which way the exchange rate will move in the future, you can make it work. So far, my crystal ball has not been that good. They will charge you, if I remember correctly, 0.25% of the amount you bring in. Don't remember if there was a maximum on this charge, but there must have been. No charge then to convert to baht, but a 1% fee if you take it out in dollars. For this reason, if you ever carry in say $9,999 USD, you would never add this money to your dollar account.

[WonnabeBiker]

Open a USD account somewhere - many banks offer that. The forex is outrageous (am with HSBC, they really rip one off). You need to keep them in USD.

Another Q: What will you use the funds for? An investment? Not wanting to pry, but to ask whether you might leave it in the U.S. www.optionsxpress.com offers a range of services you might find useful.

I've had some checking accounts with stockbrokers for a few decades.

Chris