The Best Bank

Welcome, financial reader, as this week I take you on a tour de force of what it's like to bank in America if you're an expat. Or more specifically, what it's like to bank in America if you ever have the gall to leave.

Our time here is running out: we have a bit less than a week left in the house. I've been fretting about still being able to access things like bank accounts when we're not here, and mostly managed to allay my fears. The one big thing that didn't seem easy to sort out remotely was transferring money from the US back to the UK.

We have some savings here, in US dollars, in our US accounts. Primarily, this is because the US taxes overseas investments of any kind very heavily, so we kept everything here. That means we need to be able to transfer it home at some point. I was hoping and expecting to do this fairly lazily, maybe some time in the next few years, because of course you'll be able to do that easily and online in the current era.

I'd forgotten that the current era hasn't really infiltrated the banking system here in the US. The system is arcane, arbitrary, manual, slow, and full of undocumented limits on transactions. For those of us in the UK, an international transfer is something that just requires an IBAN (international bank account number) and BIC (Business Identifier Code) and can be done online. Here in the US, the story is different.

There are two methods of inter-bank transfer here in the US: ACH (Automated Clearing House), which is a bit like a direct debit (i.e. initiated by receiver, authenticated on both ends) although slower, and wire transfer, which is a bit like a CHAPS transfer (i.e. faster). Wire transfer seems to be the more popular option, and international transfers are called "international wires". Note that regular bill payments never use this kind of authenticated electronic transfer: typically you just give your card details to the company you're paying, and they charge the card every month. If your only tool is a hammer...

At our bank, domestic wires can be set up online (that's how I've been paying the rent), but international wires... sigh... international wires require you to attend a branch in person. I think the clue's in the name here: if I want to do an international wire, isn't there a reasonable chance I'm not in the country? And what possible explanation is there for requiring me to go to a branch?

The explanation appears to be "blah blah security blah blah", which I think actually means "we can't be bothered to do security properly online so instead we'll go for the much more secure option of some total strangers verifying that you are who you said you are". Now, for various boring reasons, it was going to take us a couple of days to have access to our savings money, so imagine my delight (and anxiety) when realising that I might actually need to make a special trip back to the US at some point to transfer money back to the UK.

In practice, after several attempts we managed to find some tame, helpful bank staff, and it's looking like we can get this done before we leave the US. Fingers crossed!

All this fun also involved printing a few things, which required a bit of ingenuity given that we got rid of our printer last weekend (and I did an extended celebratory dance). Fortunately, Palo Alto's wonderful libraries have public printing facilities; when we went to pick up our prints, my first thought was, "Now that's a proper printer!".

So despite some stresses and strains, we're getting quite close to sorting out most things before we leave. One week to go!