British Expats - transferring sterling to spain

Quote:

Originally Posted by guirijohn (Post 10681956)

This is news to me, I remember reading that foreign currency bank accounts, i.e. non euro, are considered complex financial products and are not offered by Spanish banks to non business customers. Nor could I find any reference to foreign currency account services in the web sites of Santander, BBVA or La Caixa.

If you have a sterling account with a Spanish bank it is obviously possible. But I wonder if the accounts are offered through offshore subsidiaries, in which case they would not be covered by the deposit protection scheme. I doubt if the bank would take the trouble to point this out.

Lloyds and Barclays offer it, and I think Santander and a few others do too. But I wouldn't hold money that way because there's far less expensive ways to get from Sterling to Euro (as many have pointed out here). Going Euro to Sterling is a different matter, as most European banks offer far better international fees and exchange rates than UK banks.

By the way, if a bank is registered and operating in Spain or anywhere in the Eurozone, it's regulated under EU law, and not offshore. That's not to say that banks registered in Spain don't have offshore branches.