Banking Overseas

When you are overseas, how to bring money and exchange currencies is always a problem. The solution that has worked out for me is to have a bank card with a bank that has overseas branches. For me in Taiwan, that has been the HSBC bank. I have a US account and a bank card that works all HSBC cash machines, in particular those in Taiwan. Of course, the currency dispensed in Taiwan is the NT(The New Taiwan Dollar), this way the bank(HSBC) does the conversion of the home currency into the local currency.

When using a credit card overseas the Credit Card Company does the conversion and we have been burned by bad exchange rates in the past. But with the bank, you are one of their customers and they have treated us well. In particular, I went to the Bank of Taiwan with crisp $100 US bills and got NT dollars at a rate of 29.11 NT per US dollar. I used the HSBC cash machine and got a rate of 29.15.

Hardly a difference, except that the bank card transaction was much more secure in that I wasn't carrying around cash from the US.(Although in Taiwan, credit cards and checks haven't really caught on, lots of Taiwanese are carry wads that could choke a herd of horses.)

I feel the bank card transaction is more secure for several reasons:

1. There is one plastic card
2. There is a security code to enter into the cash machine
3. The cash machine eats the card if 3 security codes are wrong(This has happened to me)
4. There is a daily limit on how much cash can be withdrawn.


Compared with carrying around a lot of cash in either currency, the bank card is more secure. Also with internet access you have a record of withdrawals, activity, ...

So last time I was in Taiwan, it worked well and I went to my old HSBC cash machine and this is what I found:

I had come outside of banking hours to I came back the next day between 9 and 3:30 but the bank branch was totally shut down.

 
I went to the internet and found the new location in Tainan. This new branch was bigger, better and had 2! cash machines.

Now I'm in business.