UK internet banking

Does anyone know if it's possible to get internet banks from the UK and NZ talking to one another? What I mean is, can I open a NZ bank account and transfer money directly into it from my UK internet account, all via the web? Also, if I leave my money in a UK internet account and wait to transfer it, does this screw things up taxwise in NZ?

I'm just wondering about the simplest way to hold off transferring money over to a NZ bank account until the exchange rate suits us. If I can leave my savings in my UK internet account, then just click a button on the webpage to transfer it to a NZ account whenever I like, that would be, um, nice.. wouldn't it?

You can electonically transfer your money to a sterling account over here and just change it up when andas much or as little as you choose.

Would be nice to think we could transfer money ourselves via internet banking, but I've not yet heard of it. And besides, how else are the banks to make money out of you? By getting my bank to wire it to NZ, they like to charge £25 a pop. Sending a cheque costs the person presenting it about $15 and clearance time of at least 15 working days (despite the sum being debited from my account the day after presentation).

If you do find out how to do it, please let me know!

And talking of banks making money out of you, I'm not looking forward to going back to NZ banking, where they charge you for every transaction thinkable! Still, small price to pay to be back with the whanau, eh?!

S.

Hi Matt

I've opened an offshore account with HSBC which I can access via the internet. You can do transfers so long as you have the full address of the bank and the account number. The transfers are limited to £10,000 in each transaction and you pay £27.50 for each transfer. If you want to transfer more than £10,000 you simply have to fax the request through to them, in which case they charge you £30. You can also choose whether to transfer the funds in Sterling or NZ$.

You are supposed to declare the interest on your offshore account in NZ as foreign income so that they can tax you. :roll: Obviously 'cos it's offshore you are not taxed on the interest at source. Takes about 2 days to transfer direct into NZ account and is available to draw on immediately. It's handy to have if you still want to pay standing orders in the UK - e.g for insurance policies you want to continue. You will also be issued with cheque cards (Switch cards) which can be used in the ATM's in NZ and also used as you would use them here. But of course there's a charge for using the ATM's.

Hope that answers your questions.

Hi Matt

We could not find any banks that would work the way we wanted them to. The UK banks all pushed us towards offshore accounts when they heard we were leaving the UK, but as above these tend to be geared to bigger money than we were working with, or not internet friendly. We ended up trying to basically seperate our UK and NZ finances and keeping them that way - it's very easy to operate UK things over the internet. We opened a SMILE account as our UK current online account. We can make direct payments to international accounts (including our own in NZ) over the internet - but it costs a minimum of GBP25 a shot... Frankly the banks will get their pound of flesh one way or t'other, and by keeping NZ / UK seperate we hope to minimise that as much as possible!

We have also kept an account running in the UK, that way paying and DD's that you still have like our life insurance until we get round to starting a new policy here isn't a problem.

Not only that, but it will keep us with a good credit rating in the UK should we ever have to go back :wah :wah (what a horrid thought) :laugh :laugh

Sorry, I wrote something misleading in my post. When I said transfers are limited to £10,000 I meant that was the maximum you could transfer via the internet. Anything above that has to be done by fax. :oops:

I'm not quite sure but I think they usually look for a minimum deposit of £5,000 to open an account

Just to add our twopenneth's worth...

We've just opened an account with ASB in London. Very simple :D

The way it works is this... We have an account in London into which we can transfer sterling from our English account via the web... this then gets transferred to a sister account in New Zealand. The exchange rate is roughly the same as the inter-bank rate and we only get charged £15 per transfer. We can request that they hold the money in sterling in the London account if the exchange rate isn't too good at the time.

I'm sure there are other options but we liked the idea of being able to transfer money between accounts in both the UK and NZ without having to worry about inter-bank transfers.

Sorry if this is more confusing than helpful :uhoh but it made sense to us :nice1

Thanks for all your comments!

I'm just in the process of opening an NZ account, ASB no particular reason for them. Try migrantbanking.co.uk for a few helpful hints.

The guy I spoke to in the UK was leighton.norman@cba.com.au who was very helpful.