Not quite sure of your point? If you have a visa eg 50+ long stay you need 800k or proof of regular income into a Thai account to qualify for visa renewal. If you have pension/income/savings etc in your home country you need to retain your home account. The shall I call it account for people living overseas from their home country account used to be a link between your current country and home country account so you were more easily connected. For example you get locked out of your account you would have been able to call the bank in country to sort it out not make international calls to do the same. Additionally if you had or wished to make any investments you could also do that in country. No longer.
In my case if I use UK bank cards I would pay the banks crap exchange rate, a foreign exchange/service fee and the ATM fee to the Thai banks. That is not a great way to access your money.
Oh and if you go into your local branch asking questions about overseas accounts/transactions you'll be met with a wall and a fob off of we don't deal with that here you'll have to ring in. Back in July/August and I'm not sure how it is currently but they shut the international department down in the UK (Covid/staffing blah blah), but they still try to put you through to the number which of course nobody answers 🤷♂️
So if you ring up do ask the question - is the international dept open or you'll be on hold for a very long time like I was.
I've just made the move and have kept my UK HSBC account for pension/rental income/UK bills. I've just updated my address and phone number to Thai with no real issues, except a message telling me it affects investments/ISA as you aren't a UK resident.
If you don't already I'd suggest you start using/getting familiar with the online application rather than just a phone app as some things you can't do on the app.
As regards transfers, if you use Wise I'd suggest sending a transfer to the 'holding' account within Wise if you think you might use it. I usually transferred straight into my Thai bank account but the first time I tried to send to my holding account HSBC stopped the payment and suspended my account as they viewed it as fraudulent activity. This required a phone call to unlock it again which would be a pain from Thailand.
Is that via Bangkok? Or do you have to approach them directly? Plus would I be any better of contacting Singapore for advice than UK, not sure I'd be any better off?
Thanks Greg, I already do exactly the same with HSBC/Wise/Bangkok Bank funnily enough. I'm happy with that system but the expat link seemed to be an added bonus with my existing bank/account, but clearly not... 🙄😁
