Money in multiple (denomi)nations
I’ve always had a fraught relationship with banks, wherever I’ve been.
I opened my first account with Midland when I started to earn money from a part-time library job while still at school. I think at the time they called themselves ‘the listening bank’. But whenever I cried for help, they wanted me to repay my overdraft. It helped that my brother-in-law was a Midland manager at the time. Not the same branch but he was still able to bale me out when needed.
He’s a real gentleman. The same cannot be said for Midland. When I was working in Italy and had a static overdraft that was being neither repaid nor increased largely because I wasn’t using it, l was sort of blackmailed by my own bank manager to repay my debt.
So next time I was in Britain, I switched to Lloyds.
But I get ahead of myself. Myself is still in Italy, where I need a bank to keep all the money I’m earning by working my butt off as a teacher of English. To do this, all I needed was a fixed abode, which I had at the moment of opening my account. In fact I had quite a few fixed abodes during my time in the country, all of which pretty quickly came loose from their moorings.
The one I chose was called La Cassa di Risparmio di Asti, or Saint Paul’s Savings Bank of Asti. The reasons for the choice should be obvious. I lived in Asti and was called St. Paul. Serendipity, I thought.
So every payday, I dutifully went along with my savings book and deposited what I could against the day when the school s would close for the summer.
This worked fine until, in circumstances, which in order to preserve the respect that my readers will feel due to me I shall withhold, I was robbed of my bank book, my passport and my substantial pre-summer pay packet. This happened in Turin, where I happened to be at the time. By the time I got back to the bank in Asti the day after to close the account, I found my savings had been claimed by the thief.
Ahimé! as they say over there.
Italy lays claim to have been the inventor of the banking system in the Middle Ages. I can lay claim to the fact that the Italian banking system hasn’t evolved greatly since then. Apparently, all that was needed to clear my account of nearly a thousand pounds was my savings book and my passport and a person who clearly wasn’t the one in the passport or the savings book.
In future, I kept all my money under the mattress of the various beds in my various fixed abodes.
Back in Britain, and even while working in Egypt and the USSR, Lloyds supplied all my banking needs. I had no intention of opening an account in either of those countries, and in any case was paid cash in hand in both of them with a supplement being paid for my work in the Soviet Union directly into my British account. Moreover, I’d bought a property in the UK that I rented out. So I needed a bank for the rent to be paid into while in absentia.
But when I came to Sweden, I was told my salary would be paid directly into a local account. Once again, I was obliged to immerse myself in the mysteries of financial institutions abroad.
The bank I was recommended to choose was called SEB, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken or Scandinavian Private Bank. I didn’t realise it at the time, but this was one of the big four in the country. It is a preferred bank for corporate customers like myself, and is run by a bunch of cutthroats.
Ack! As they say over here.
Well, it sufficed for the time being. But when I got married and we took out a mortgage to buy a house here, I took the opportunity to change to Handelsbanken, or ‘Trade Bank’. Also one of the top four, but marginally less ruthless.
In the meantime, back in the UK, I’d got a bit annoyed with Lloyds and decided to switch my account somewhere that was simply going to use my money to maintain the standard of living of its shareholders. A building society would have been a good idea. But having sold my house in Britain to raise a deposit for our house mortgage in Sweden, I no longer had a British address. So that ruled out most mutuals in the form of building societies – at that time at least.
So I opened an account with the Co-op bank. It was owned by its customers and offered expat accounts – so no Brit address required. It was not super-efficient but that, I felt, was a small price to pay for altruism. It fell from grace somewhat when we visited Australia and stopped en route in Thailand. Since I had used a cash machine there without getting permission from the bank first, they stopped my card. As I found out at our first stop in Melbourne. Luckily we were staying with friends who kept us afloat and allowed me to use their phone while I bawled out a poor guy in a call centre. Eventually he gave in to the invective and restored the card to its usable state. This came as a relief. We were due to stay for another six weeks.
But all good things come to an end. And so do some well-intentioned but space-wasting things. As it turned out, it was not only my own case the bank failed to be on. The management was rotten to the core and the bank soon found itself in a huge financial hole belly up. First to go were the expat accounts, shortly followed by the mutuality as a group of American venture capitalists bought it out. If I hadn’t been pushed, I would have jumped anyway.
There wasn’t much left to choose from, so I lapsed back into being an HSBC customer. I’d have happily switched all my ‘holdings’ to Sweden. But since my father died, I had a private income from British assets. Having an expat account made matters easier, not least because the accounts were not taxed at source. While this sounds like a classic case of tax evasion, that wasn’t really the issue. I lived in mortal fear of the Swedish tax authorities and declared my British income in Sweden. (Did you know that there are records of them having taxed people on more income they earned?) It was rather more that I didn’t want to end up paying tax in two countries.
So there we were until last year. I had accounts in Sweden with a commercial bank and further accounts in Jersey with another. I had nightmares each year when the time came to make my tax declaration. But otherwise the system I’d set up clunked along reasonably well.
As only to be expected, HSBC played the ‘stopped card’ card while we were in Costa Rica right before the start of the pandemic. (We managed to get the last plane back before flights were suspended.) I’d just booked a birding tour to Papua New Guinea and had made two bookings for planes to get us there. The house in the jungle we were staying in had wi-fi of sorts but no way to connect it to your phone. So, when I found the card had been stopped, I had to drive a couple of kilometres down the jungle road to a point where I could connect the phone to a mobile network and then stand there for a hour on the phone in 30 degrees Centigrade and 95% humidity trying to persuade someone in a call centre that I was bona fide and could I please have the use of my card back. Please.
Eventually I got the OK. Then came the pandemic and I never got to PNG anyway. So it goes.
On the plus side, HSBC came good when we were in Sri Lanka. Our hotel there was also a little out of the way and the nearest cash machine was a couple of km from home in the gate of a Piaggio factory. Don’t ask. The last time I used my card there, there was a power cut in the middle of the transaction and the plastic got gobbled up without being spat out. HSBC offered to send a new card out but it wasn’t worth the hassle. We had our Swedish cards to get by with. But they did manage to retrieve and restore the money I’d requested and had never been delivered from the ATM.
As a word of warning, other cash machines in Sri Lanka have furtive guards. As I found out when I tried to draw money out to pay off our guide, who was waiting at the side of the road in his car. I thought, mistakenly as it turned out, that I would only be able to draw up to a certain limit each time I used the Swedish card. So figured I would need to make two withdrawals to pay the guide. When I inserted said card a second time, I heard a voice saying something I didn’t understand. I nearly jumped out of my skin. The ATM was located in a booth in the middle of the street and there was no-one in hailing distance. I was inspecting the corners of the cubicle to make sure there wasn’t a lurking cockroach that had been a sergeant major in a previous life when the voice came again. This time I could make it out.
‘Take off your hat!’ I looked up and sure enough there was a CCTV camera above me. Then I looked out. The disembodied voice must have emanated from the bank behind the box. I whipped off the sunhat and smiled, somewhat aggressively at the camera. Obviously if I used a card twice I must have stolen it. By some twisted logic.
Usch! As they say over here.
Still, overall I wasn’t enchanted with my offshore British, Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, which was earning buckets for its shareholders – much of it from suspect sources.
So when HSBC announced in 2024 that they were demanding a minimum holding of £75,000 over all Expat accounts or pay a hefty premium of £150 per month for the privilege of having them take care of my money, I decided to quit. The problem was, that following Brexit, there were even fewer options for a person residing in a foreign country. A digital bank was a possibility. But I have a boomer’s distrust of money that is even more virtual than elsewhere.
In the end, for want of any better ideas, I decided simply to transfer all my money to Sweden. After all, what the hell. It was where I lived, so it might as well be some local bank that made reprehensible use of my money. In moving all my dosh, I’d also have to close my HSBC accounts. This surely must be easier than opening one. Or so I thought.
I contacted HSBC with the question – in itself, no mean feat. They are not alone in this, I feel. Most companies that have online presence seem to make actual personal botless contact as difficult as possible. I was told logically enough to empty my accounts and phone a given number with my security codes ready. These codes are not the usual short security devices for gaining online access to your accounts. When phoning directly, for reasons best known to HSBC, you have to present two sets of numbers, each as long as a bar code and wholly impossible to memorise unless you are an idiot savant.
I took a breather and prepared the ground by breaking the worrying news to my Swedish bank that they would be receiving over a million crowns. (Don’t get too excited. This is not as much as it sounds.) For some reason, they go into panic mode when presented with unexpected foreign transactions – even though they know from experience that I have double citizenship and accounts elsewhere. Just to be on the safe side, with help from my wife I manoeuvred my way through the maze of questions they call my Personal Profile. The questionnaire regarding financial status is virtually impenetrable – even to someone as bright and Swedish as my better half.
That seemed to work, since I haven’t heard a squeak from them since.
It hadn’t turned out to be the breather I’d hoped for. But it was now time to bite the bullet. I phoned the number I’d been given, reeled off my codes and spoke to a very friendly young lady in Delhi or possibly Bangalore. She held my metaphorical hand while I tried to negotiate my way between my phone app and the bank app I was required to open. Being as competent with mobile phones as I am with quantum engineering, I was unable to do one without cutting off the other. In the end, she phoned me while I was in the bank app and together we managed to whack over all my money to Sweden.
Well, all except for the Thai equivalent of 20p (2 crowns if you’re Swedish) in one of my ‘Global Accounts’. These were a novelty at HSBC. Previously if I was abroad and wanted to withdraw money from an ATM or simply buy something with my bank card, it would simply be drawn from my normal sterling accounts. Now I had to convert the money first and hold it in a dedicated foreign currency account. This was ‘for my convenience’.
The problem with the remaining Thai baht was that the amount was below the minimum balance for transfer. She had no idea how to address the problem. And in any case we got cut off. Again.
I waited to see if anything would happen. Sure enough I got a call a couple of days later from a lady at HSBC with an Indian accent. I thanked her for ringing me back. She seemed confused. It was HSBC’s fraud section. She just wanted to check that it was truly yours truly that had made the transaction. I assured her it was. She told me to open my bank app to validate myself.
Oh!
I explained what had happened the previous time. So she asked for my 10- and 6-digit codes again and settled for checking my favourite colour, my wife’s name and the date of birth of Pope Urban the Fifteenth. I asked if my account was now ready to close. And she told me to ring the number I’d rung before.
So I did. The account was still open, the stubborn baht were still refusing to leave the building and the new contact still couldn’t help me. I contacted HSBC via my personalised secure mail again and was told they couldn’t close the account with the baht still left in the account. When I asked how they would recommend I get rid of it, they responded by saying that I also had interest outstanding on a deposit account. The baht problem was left to me to work out.
Well, I’d have a go at getting rid of the interest first. (Am I boring you? This is nothing to see your doctor about. I’m getting bored myself. At the time I was getting pretty pissed off.)
New problem – the interest wasn’t showing on any account so it was not possible to transfer it.
Well, perhaps it would show its hand at the end of a certain period? Question? So I checked through my statements (also not so easy to locate online) to discover the usual date the interest would make its way into the account. Then waited till that date came round, thanking god it wasn’t an annual payment. As I twiddled my thumbs, a brainwave washed over me. More like a tsunami, really, even if it’s pretty obvious when you think about it. But the bank didn’t have the grace to point it out. When the interest finally showed, I converted it into Thai baht and stuck it in my Global Account. The amount now exceeded the minimum needed for a transfer. So I immediately transferred it back into the Sterling account.
I hope you are still following. You never know, you may be reincarnated into a British Expat if your karma isn’t absolutely tip-top, gracious me.
Finally, the coup de grace. I sent the grand total of £20 and 67p to my Swedish account and instructed HSBC to close all my accounts – to be honest, more in hope than expectation.
A few days later, HSBC informed me my accounts were now closed, thanked me for my custom and wished me luck in my future life. Actually, I made the second two up. But it would have been nice, don’t you think?
Letters from Sweden 