Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I was surprised when I cashed mine at the BoS that they charge £5 or 1%, whichever is lower. Glad I cashed 4 at once, much cheaper ;)
How are you fairing with your bank, amd how much are they skimming off your cheques? Same at most banks or better/worse?
The HSBC usually hit for you for £14 if you are in the four figure cheques....
There is one online website that will take your USD cheques and either send you a GPB cheque or pay it direct into your account.
They are a small website that I have had dealings with from the ebay days. They do charge an exchange rate of $1.79 to £1.00 but that is okay for small cheques.....
If anyone wants the address just sticky me.
And no I do not own it.......
I am in the process of changing from the Royal Bank of Scotland because they were hitting me with tourist rates on the exchange.
As I get 4-fig dollar cheques, my bank was costing me £50 to £70 difference:(
Since theyve merged with Halifax they might give the same rate (if they even provide an exchange service)....worth a look as it sounds like some of the banks are less forgiving.
I moved to Lloyds - initially foreign cheques are sent for 'collection', which takes around 3-4 weeks. Once they can see the track record they clear them by 'negotiation' which takes 7 days.
Most other banks offer this as well, if they haven't mentioned it, its worth asking about.
Now that we are on the subject, I was talking to the Cash Management Department head at my workplace and he told me that, while he could not send an electronic funds transfer to Europe without incurring more expenses than the pennies that it costs to send one within the US, that you guys had a similar system in place within Europe that would be just as cheap.
The solution is then clear for a company like Google: Open an adsense account in a European Bank, fund it once a month from their New York Bank via wire and initiate the EFT to European adsense partners from that account. Something to think about.
There might be a similar solution for the Asian Partners, but I suspect that this market might be more fragmented.
I wonder if it would not be worth it for some of you guys to actually take one of those "special fare deals" and travel to the US just to open an account.
i thought its against tos to use webmasterworld to sell one's "special fare deals" widgets
I wonder if it would not be worth it for some of you guys to actually take one of those "special fare deals" and travel to the US just to open an account.
It's probably getting very hard for a non-resident with no US address to open an account at a US bank, rules are quite strict now (and it was never that easy in the past). Phone a few banks before making the trip!
Much simpler is to open a US$ account at a bank in the UK (or offshore). At my bank I keep company accounts in US$, sterling and Euros, no charge for depositing US$ checks that way. Then you can exchange it (online) to whichever currency you have expenses in at a time that suits you.
Some banks (mainly offshore) also do US$ debit cards so you can pay for US hosting directly from the US$ account without having to change currencies twice.
loanuniverse, most european countries have cheap/free internal electronic transfers, but it still costs to transfer to other european countries (at least from the UK anyway) - There was a big hoohaa about payments for inter-country Euro transfers in the Eurozone, so they may have done something about it now (though I doubt it - if it lowers bank profits its not going to happen)
