jason8612

I'm looking at a few banks in Poland and that is one of the options. They seem to have a good % 3 month term deposit here and plenty of options for clients. Any experiences?

BobbySteel

Wirelessly posted (Blackberry8700c: BlackBerry8110/4.5.0.69 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/123)

Pretty lousy service but they are one of the few decent options if you really need cross border functionality. Better than citi and cheaper than any private banks.

Beany

I think the service and cross border functionailty are great. Never had an issue with them and can highly recommend them ^

Raffles

Agree with the above. In the UK HSBC is generally seen as one of the least worst options. What is good with Premier is that if you move to a different country where HSBC has a presence, you will not have any problems opening an account there.

Sixth Freedom

I rather like the old system they had at the main HSBC branch in DOH. You used to enter the bank and had to take a ticket. The machine was helpfully labelled 'A', 'B', 'C' and 'D'. Each meant something different and it seemed to change regularly so one week 'C' was for cashier, next week 'C' was customer services. So the thing to do was take one of each.

TravellerFrequently

I have a Premier account in more than one country and am very impressed with the service, products and preferential interest rates.

The ease of the transferring money between my accounts in different countries is excellent.

I would certainly recommend, especially in the current climate of many banks having difficulties.

Expatbear

We opened up an HSBC premier account specifically to ease the move from the US to the UK; as others have said it makes it easy to transfer funds between our accounts in each country.

That said, the "service" doesn't seem to be that much greater. It's a level of attention that is above the bog-standard indifference you normally get from banks, but it still seems much more oriented to selling you additional products than it does to giving you a high level of service.

Having a personal premier banker, which was a selling point for me, turns out not to be very useful. It appears to be a role that turns over fairly frequently in branches--in 3 years we've had at least five, and currently we don't have one assigned as the one in our branch recently left. So this notion of a personal point of contact, at least in London, seems to be a fiction. The call centre is fairly helpful, though, and the premier centres at various branches are usually helpful too if you need to go in for something.

There's also a higher level of customer care at HSBC--apparently they have a "private bank" if you have a million or more in liquid assets to put on deposit. And if you do, can you spare a brother a few bob?

Anyway, just glad we didn't go with Coutts--now owned by NatWest, who have had troubles recently... some of my colleagues did and are exiting in droves.

Traveloguy

Sadly that system was not unique to DOH. Also in existence in the UK especially during the Midland Bank era.

graraps

I personally think that buying more than 1 financial products from any given vendor is madness!

Moreover, going with a big bank usually means a lousy deal; the exclusive HSBC Premier Savings a/c pays a measly 0.5%, whereas my open-to-all, instant-access e-savings account is at 2.95%.

Land-of-Miles

I think others have summed it up, Premier makes it very easy to open up new accounts in other countries which may ordinarily be difficult (try opening a regular bank account in Thailand for instance). Service is hit and miss though, I recently had to jump through flaming hoops and wait over 4 weeks for my new debit card to be delivered (a combination of the crap courier service HSBC use and poor timing). This led to a day and a half wasted trying to resolve things (including 2 visits to a "Premier Centre") and the shame of having my debit card rejected in Costco because unbeknown to me HSBC had cancelled the old one before the expiry date when ordering the replacement (some 3 weeks out of the normal replacement sequence).

They initially thought that saying "sorry" was enough but begrudgingly sent me a case of mediocre wine after half an hours ranting on my part. My relationship manager is great and gets things done quickly but NEVER trust the "Premier Call Centre" to do anything no matter how simple and expect anything in the back office to be a shambles.

TravellerFrequently

I know that when I receive the missed delivery note for any card (including Amex, MBNA etc) I can feel my blood pressure going up at the thought of trying to arrange to get the card!!!

With my HSBC cards, I get them delivered to a branch near home or work and usually I can collect them in a couple of days without any problems.

Land-of-Miles

Well part of my recent problem was that it took them 2.5 weeks to get my card to the branch after I had arranged for someone to be at home all day on the day agreed with the courier muppets they (unsurprisingly to me) didn't show.

I now have a standing instruction to deliver my cards to a branch but since this was arranged with the Premier call centre I have no confidence this will actually happen as per my rule above (NEVER trust anything the Premier Call Centre tells you).

frankvb

I'm surprised that you all mention that HSBC (and others) uses a courier to deliver cards. I've always received them via regular mail as far as I remember. But maybe it depends on your post code

Kibison

I have HSBC's Premier service in the UK, Malta, Panama, and the US.

The customer service is not very good with any of them.

However, for cross border transactions, foreign exchange, and emergency services , they are fantastic. I could not beat their rates on USD to GBP exchanges.

I also enjoy their "Global View" option on their website where I can view all my accounts in all countries on one screen shot.

It is extremely easy to use Premier to establish banking services in new countries.

jason8612

Hmm
I think I will go with HSBC as they are offering a 7% 3month term deposit and a 5% normal account. Others here are offering from 5-6% term desposits with a exception of 1 bank offering 8%. But I don't want to place all my money into 1 bank as these days they have a tendency to disappear. So about 50,000euro/bank/person is covered in Poland
Also, it seems 1PLN=1point on the credit card...