So I went down this very deep rabbit hole of expat / “international” bank accounts recently, and it’s quite interesting. Now, because a few friends asked me about it, I’ve written up my findings here.
My situation is that I’m moving from Germany to Thailand but, that being said, most of the findings here are rather generic and independent of which country you’re planning to move to.
Why Should You Get an International Bank Account?
First off, if you’re American, you can probably stop right here and just stick with your American bank account because you’re paying American taxes anyway, regardless of where you live, and American banks apparently are mostly able to deal with people living internationally.
For all other people, here are some reasons:
- Some banks in your home country might cancel your account once you’ve officially moved somewhere else (others might continue to offer their services).
- Some banks in your home country might not be good at handling the logistics of you living overseas – it might e.g. become tricky to get a replacement debit/credit card etc., and some ancient banks (looking at German banks here) still provide online banking access by sending you a physical letter with a password or QR code.
- Depending on your country’s tax laws, once you leave the country as a resident (and therefore tax payer, in most cases), there might be bureaucratic tax reasons which make it favorable for you to use bank accounts outside your home country. Germany, for example, places you in a more extensive tax regime (erweitert beschränkte Steuerpflicht) if you still have substantial German income and/or investments and/or savings; having cash in a German bank account counts towards this, whereas cash in a non-German bank account does not. Or, in the UK, certain income was tax-exempt if not remitted to the UK (the whole non-dom thing). And Thailand taxes only income remitted into the country (= into a Thai bank account) in the same year, although this is being changed and debated.
So having a foreign bank account is not about tax evasion, it’s about optimizing your taxes if your current tax regime treats foreign cash differently, and/or it’s about optimizing for “operational reasons” as your bank at home might not be able to resolve problems well while you’re living abroad.
You get the idea.
Next up, here’s why Revolut and Wise often don’t work.
The Problem With Revolut and Wise
Here are a few more data points to illustrate these concepts. Assuming you move from Germany to Thailand like me:
- Revolut will cancel your account as they don’t offer accounts to non-EU residents (as a side note, Revolut will cancel your account any time you move countries, even within the EU, and require you to re-open an account).
- Wise will continue to offer you an account, but without a physical card. This means you can’t get cash from ATMs any more.
- Established banks like Deutsche Bank, Sparkasse, ING and DKB will continue to offer you an account and card, but these are German accounts, so they still pose the (theoretical) problem of the enhanced German taxation described above.
As you can see, so far none of the banks is a Magic Unicorn Bank account. What is that, anyway?
The Magic Unicorn Bank Account For Expats
So the magic unicorn you’re looking for is this:
- Bank not located in Germany
- With a physical card to use ATMs
- Doesn’t cancel you when you move to your destination (Thailand)
.. and this is a surprisingly hard combination to find.
Let’s look at some candidates next! In short, they can be separated into two groups: Modern, affordable banks and ancient, expensive banks.
The modern and affordable options are:
- Swissquote Luxemburg
- Swissquote Switzerland
The ancient and expensive options are:
- Barclays International
- Lloyds International
- HSBC Expat
- NatWest International
- Santander International
- Standard Bank International
Let’s look at the modern ones first.
Swissquote Luxemburg vs. Switzerland
Swissquote looks cool because it’s a brokerage and a bank. As a side note, talking about brokerages, Interactive Brokers (IBKR) seems to be the #1 choice for digital nomads and expats by a pretty huge margin because they offer great fees and many countries as residencies. However! If you’re neurotically over-engineering like I am right now, you might want to have a backup brokerage in case you get locked out of your account. Swissquote seems like a solid choice here, along with Saxo. I won’t write more about IBKR or Saxo here as they don’t offer bank accounts. End of side note.
Back to Swissquote. Brokerage and bank account, and the Swiss version even offers a physical Visa Debit card. Hold on, Swiss version? Yup, this is where it gets complicated, and I’ve spent a significant amount of brain cycles on this.
Here’s the situation: Swissquote basically consists of two mostly-independent banks: One in Switzerland and one in Luxemburg. Both look similar and even run through the same mobile app. But your account is located in different banks, and comes with different fees and features.
Because I apparently have nothing else to do with my time, I signed up for an account with each branch and came back and made a handy comparison table here for you which I think no one else on the internet has done before (you’re welcome):
| Swissquote LU | Swissquote CH | |
| Account location | Luxemburg | Switzerland |
| IBAN | Starts with “LU” | Starts with “CH” |
| Physical debit card | No, only virtual | Yes, 6.90 CHF / month |
| Foreign currency fee on card payments | Mastercard rate + 0.9% | Mastercard rate + 1.5% |
| ATM withdrawals | 1 free, then 5€ (inside EEA) 0.4% (outside EEA) | 4.90 CHF |
| Custodian fee | Free if you live in the EEA, otherwise 15€ / month (= 180€ / year) | Depends on portfolio value, maximum 50 CHF / quarter (= 200 CHF / year) |
| Swiss stamp duty on transfers | No | Yes |
| Withholding tax on US stocks | Lower | Higher |
| Can be used as real bank account (third-party transfers) | Yes | Yes |
| SEPA transfers | Free | 2€ (or free with 6.90 CHF / month card package) |
| Tax reports available | No | Yes, 200 CHF / report |
The TLDR is this: Swissquote CH has more features, while Swissquote LU is cheaper. There’s no clear winner here, hence me taking forever to compare them. A few notes though:
- Choose Swissquote CH if you need a physical debit card (ATMs etc.). Swissquote LU only offers a virtual card (Apple Pay etc.), and I wouldn’t rely on finding ATMs which support contactless cash withdrawal.
- Choose Swissquote CH if you need tax reports, e.g. because your country taxes capital gains and you continue to live there (Germany). Costs 200 CHF / report. Banking outside of Germany is not cheap. Swissquote LU didn’t offer this, at least not in their UI.
- Choose Swissquote LU if you want to hold significant US stocks which may benefit from the better double taxation treaty of LU <> US vs. CH <> US, i.e. lower US withholding tax.
- Choose Swissquote LU if your main purpose is trading stuff as you don’t have to pay the Swiss stamp duty on transfers which results in lower transaction fees (chances are however that you’re not optimizing for cost here).
- Lean towards Swissquote LU if you plan to live within the EU / EEA as the custodian fee is free. Otherwise, outside of the EEA, custodian fees are similar (LU: 180€ / year, CH: 200 CHF / year).
So Swissquote CH is the more “complete”, slightly expensive package, while Swissquote LU is the “budget” EU package.
Finally, to make things even more confusing, note that the Swissquote website redirects you to different branches based on your location. As far as I understand, it redirects you LU if you’re in the EU, otherwise to CH. But this doesn’t mean you are limited to sign up with a specific entity. You can just navigate to the respective website and create an account with LU or CH, whichever you prefer. Here are direct links for you:
Again – you can open an account with each of them, they’re not connected. When using the mobile app, you do have to sign out and in again though which is a bit clunky, it only worked for me by uninstalling the app. Besides that, their app is top notch, quite impressive.
Swissquote Third-Party Transfers
The big remaining question with Swissquote was whether they allow third-party transfers. In other words, can you “only” use your account as brokerage account where only you can pay in cash, or can you use it as “normal” bank account where any person can wire you money?
Interestingly, I researched this in various online forums and the consensus seemed to be that third-party transfers were not allowed. I thought this was confusing because the Swissquote marketing explicitly calls itself a “bank”.
So I reached out to the Swissquote CH and LU support – yes, separately, and yes, I apparently have nothing better to do with my time. Somewhat interestingly and surprisingly, each time they explicitly confirmed that, yes, the account can be used to send and receive third-party payments. Wow! So this is one of those instances where I have the impression that everyone on the internet is wrong. Or maybe Swissquote recently changed their policy on third-party transfers.
Regardless, this makes Swissquote CH very interesting (again), because it indeed looks like a fully-fledged bank account with a physical card. And it’s reasonably cheap (compared to what comes next) and the app is polished and modern.
There’s one wrinkle though: Technically, the physical card is only available to residents of certain countries. Specifically: Liechtenstein, Italy, Austria, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Cyprus, Spain, Malta, Monaco, the United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Greece, Belgium, and of course Switzerland.
The big question here would be what happens if you get the card while you’re a resident there and then move away shortly later? Haha..
So yeah, Swissquote CH looked like a perfect match for our Magic Unicorn Bank Account, but it’s limited by the country availability of its physical card. Still, for many people, it might be good enough as it indeed seems to provide a “real” foreign bank account.
Which brings me to the ancient and expensive alternatives.
Ancient and Expensive International Bank accounts (Channel Islands)
When people hear “Channel Islands”, they usually think of “money laundering”. Just kidding. But there may be some truth to this as there seems to be some weird historical and legal reasons why many “international” banks are located on the British Channel Islands.
Anyway, their commonalities are:
- They require high initial deposits, e.g. 75k GBP.
- Their monthly fees are expensive, e.g. 50GBP / month.
- Their card fees are expensive, too, e.g. 3% foreign currency fee.
- They tend to not offer SEPA transfers and transfers are expensive (~20€).
- You can’t reasonably assume that they include a brokerage for your ETFs.
- Their software and UI tends to be ancient.
Here’s the comparison table you didn’t know you needed:
| Barclays | HSBC Expat | Lloyds | NatWest | Santander | Standard Bank | |
| Initial deposit | 100k GBP | 75k GBP | 5k€ | 25k GBP | 75k GBP? | 7k€ |
| Can apply in EU? | No | Yes | Yes | No | ? | Yes |
| SEPA support | Maybe | No | No | No | No | No |
I found one forum report which mentioned that Barclays seems to be the only option which offers SEPA transfers in and out. That might be beneficial if you’re expecting to move cash to and from your EU bank accounts.
Besides that, all of their fees are similar: There’s usually some high monthly fee if your cash balance drops below the monthly deposit; the card fees tend to be very high at e.g. a 3% foreign-currency fee; ATM fees tend to be high, too; and the general “clunkiness” of the whole experience seems similar, e.g. having to rely on SWIFT transfers to move cash in and out.
But yeah.. I guess people don’t choose these bank accounts for their great fee structure and card offerings.
As far as I saw, the minimum deposit can actually not be invested in low-cost ETFs, either because the account simply doesn’t include a brokerage account or because it might limit your investment choices to specific funds / products. So you’d have to treat that initial deposit indeed as a cash deposit, which indirectly translates to an account fee, assuming 3% interest you might otherwise get in a money-market ETF right now – so an initial (and minimum) deposit of 100k GBP indirectly costs you 250 GBP / month “foregone interest”. Suddenly that bank account looks quite expensive.
With that in mind, Lloyds and Standard Bank look like noteworthy “budget” options, requiring initial deposits of only 5k€ and 7k€. Those might be worth looking into.
Based on very subjective reviews I found, Barclays International might be the most “premium” choice of them, while also requiring the highest initial deposit.
Interestingly, Barclays and NatWest accounts can’t even be opened while you’re a resident in the EU.
Conclusion
Now, where does that leave us?
The Magic Unicorn bank continues to be hard to find, assuming it 1) is outside of Germany, 2) doesn’t cancel you when you move to another country (Thailand) and 3) offers a physical card there, too.
Swissquote CH comes very close, but the remaining question is what happens to your physical card when you move.
Lloyds and Standard Bank look like reasonable options with a reasonable (read: not ridiculous) initial deposit, but it remains to be seen how easy (or hard) going through their KYC process might be.
Until then, the Magic Unicorn bank remains elusive.
I’ll keep you posted!
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