Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Whilst I haven’t had to sell my home in the UK, the rise in interest rates has landed large numbers of people in the situation where they have loads of equity in their house but not enough money to pay the mortgage on it.

You can end up in that situation extremely quickly so it’s often the case that you find one month you can cope and the next you can’t. If that’s happened, then you need to do something about getting cash quickly.

Likewise, if your house has been sitting on the market for a while and you’re now living somewhere else, you can easily find that you need to get the money fast.

If this has happened there are now a number of outfits that will buy your house in as little as seven days. Yes, just a week!

That’s an obvious question to ask but, of course, most people know roughly what the answer will be for hotels in general ie after lunch to late evening.

In fact, we state that it’s from 3pm to 10pm although there’s usually some flexibility at either end of that time. So, for example, we can normally let people check in from around noon if they let us know in advance. Similarly, whilst we officially close the office at 10pm it generally takes us ’til around 11pm to actually get everything locked up.

However, despite us being clear on the hours, we still get people saying that they’ll be arriving at 1am or 5am now and again. Historically the 1am people have rarely made it on schedule so we routinely reply that their reservation has been cancelled.

The 5am people are always Parisiens who have booked “Saturday” and are planning on spending the entire weekend in the south of France but only paying for one day in a hotel. It takes quite some time to explain to them that actually hotels are booked by the night and if they want in at 5am on Saturday then they’re going to have to book Friday too or the room won’t be available ’til noon at the earliest.

Anyway, I’m sitting now for someone who should have been here some hours ago and will be billing them as a noshow once I finish off this post.

My parents were asking for a passbook account for their grandchildren as they aren’t keen on card based accounts.

Almost all accounts these days are card or internet based and the initial couple that I came across weren’t great as the building societies concerned didn’t have that many branches. Finally, I settled on the National Savings Investment Account which only requires a £20 deposit to open and also pays interest gross at quite a reasonable rate.

Opening it is a little peculiar as the Post Office branch doesn’t ask for any proof of ID or address and instead National Savings do the whole lot electronically. That worried me a little as I wasn’t sure that we’d turn up on their records but the books have arrived so we must do. Even stranger though is that they didn’t ask for any proof of ID from the children (normally you’re asked for a birth certificate) and one of ours was born in France so I can’t seem him appearing on any UK records.

Anyway, my parents are happy that they’ve a book for the grandchildren.

As part of the business of being customer friendly we’ve local rate or tollfree numbers for a few countries which can sometimes result in very confusing phone calls from the sheer number of different phone numbers that we have.

For instance, now and again we get a little run of phone calls for some garden centre in America because we’ve a tollfree number that’s similar to theirs. So, any time that they run a promotion we’re sure to know about it just as soon as it hits the streets.

We’ve also quite a nice local rate number for the UK which gets a fair number of duff calls too now and again. For reasons which escape me, these particular callers take a bit of convincing that really we’re not who they want to speak to.

And then there’s the French who seem to assume that all phone numbers are also the fax number and vice versa so we get quite a raft of faxes on our normal phone number and a surprising number of people calling on the fax number. What they seem completely unable to grasp is that in fact our real fax number is actually a UK number that forwards the “faxes” to our e-mail.

If you are intending to buy a property in France at some point, it’s pretty much essential to open a French bank account before you get to the point of purchase.

For non-residents, the internet banking companies are not an option. Indeed, they are, on the whole, not an option unless you have been resident in France for a year or two as they ask for proof of French income. An exception to this is Ing although that’s purely a savings account and also requires you to already have a French account.

If you bank with HSBC, the easiest option for you is to open an account with HSBC in France. Those with Premier accounts can ask their relationship manager to do this but otherwise it’s best just to pop into an HSBC branch whilst you are in France (they’re not currently set up to open non-resident accounts outside the Premier arrangement). Although with Premier accounts in two countries you get free transfers between them, HSBC France is one of the highest charging banks in France so this may not be the best option for you.

Before starting the opening process, you should have a look at the French banking practices section of our Living in France guide.

Both Barclays and LloydsTSB offer a French service. However, their branches are clustered around Paris and the Cote d’Azur and not particularly cheap.

A number of French banks offer English speaking services and, on the whole, these are much cheaper than those on offer from the British banks (the American banks in France only cater for high net-worth individuals and not suitable for most people).

Of these, the most popular is Britline which is a English speaking phone & internet banking branch of Credit Agricole based in Normandy. The service from them is excellent but the services of most other branches of Credit Agricole is between dire and truly dreadful; you can however use the Britline across France so usually don’t need to bother with the local branches. Credit Agricole is a regional bank so, unless you live in Normandy, your local Credit Agricole is a different bank from Britline which limits the facilities available in branches if you’re using Britline as your bank but in practice this merely means that you can’t use the automated deposit machines.

More generally useable is Banque Populaire which has a number of English speaking branches in various regions around France although the most targetted at the English speaking community is that in the Cote d’Azur. This is also a regional bank so you can expect some limitations to the services on offer through your local Banque Populaire. The biggest plus of this is that the service in the branches is, on the whole, much better than Credit Agricole and the charges are significantly less too.

The two national banks, BNP Paribas and Societé Générale, also have a number of English speaking branches but they don’t promote these actively. An account opened with any of these can be used anywhere in France with the same level of services as they are not regional banks. The other plus point is that they are much larger banks and therefore offer a much wider range of services.

To open accounts in any of the above, use the contact details here and they’ll send you the necessary forms (you can’t open any non-resident accounts online in France). In terms of documentation, all that is normally required is a photocopy of your passport and an original electricity bill. If you are opening the account some time in advance of needing to use it, don’t bother getting a debit card as these cost from EUR 20 to EUR 200 per year. It’s quite easy to stick to using cheques in France as everyone takes them with proof of ID (passport or driving license). Finally, don’t be caught out by inactivity fees which are around EUR 50 per year if you don’t use the account.

If you are moving to France, do not wait until you are in France before you try opening an account here as you won’t be able to provide the proof of address required for several months. If the account is opened before you move, you can simply change the address which in turn will provide you the required proof of French address required to get a French mobile phone. Opening an account whilst you are living in France is, for the most part, a nightmare best avoided involving making appointments with your conseilleur and getting signed up for expensive and useless additional services which are next to impossible to cancel afterwards.

Before opening your account, you should read the French banking practices section of our Living in France guide.

This is part of our series on international banking which covers how to open and use accounts in various jurisdictions around the world including America, Switzerland and various offshore banking centers such as the Channel Islands, Isle of Mann and Bermuda.