Originally Posted by
Gaucho100K
Don't know if your bank will allow this, but some banks do allow you to have accounts in various currencies as part of your retail banking accounts, HSBC through their Premier banking is one famous example, Citibank with their CitiGold service is another. Perhaps its best for you to first have your French bank open a US savings account, then do the ForEx trade electronically and final step draw the cash. Depending on what amount you need, it may even make sense to open the account just for this, and you can close the USD account after you draw the cash, this is especially smart if the bank will start to levy fees on that account should it remain open.... all this varies from bank to bank and from account to account. As you know, Banks say all their clients are equal but we know that some are more equal than others....
Thanks for the suggestion but I do not think that it would be very practical in my situation. You can open an account in foreign currency in France but, afaik,* you would not be able to directly withdraw cash in the currency of the account. You could send and receive electronic payments for it, possibly pay or receive cheques in the currency of the account (although there are complications with that) but you would not be able to withdraw cash directly. If you wanted to withdraw cash within France, it would have to transit via a Euro-denominated account (and therefore converted to euros with forex fees to be paid) and withdrawn in euros and then converted back to the currency concerned at retail rates for banknotes, which would completely defeat the purpose of the exercise and cost more than if you had just bought banknotes in the first place. At any rate, this was the way things were last I looked at it, which I must admit was quite a few years back, but I would be surprised if it had fundamentally changed.
Moreover, even if it were possible, it would be a way over-engineered solution to my needs. I have relatively few EUR-USD transactions and it would not really make sense for me to open a new bank account with another bank (in fact two accounts) for a facility that I will rarely use (or should I say once in a (dolar-)blue moon
), and that is before we even take into account the bureaucratic faff of dealing with financial service providers in France.
So while I can see how this might make sense for others in some countries, it is not really practical for my circumstances.
*:
at any rate as far as personal banking is concerned.