Euro account in UK

[shanorm]

Are there any UK banks where I could set up a straightforward current account in euros?

[BJSLIV]

Yes there are but, other than providing  certainty against exchange rate fluctuations they have some drawbacks.

They often require large balances to be maintained to avoid regular charges.

They pay low interest rates.

They are of little practical use in France as you either cannot make payments from them to Foreign suppliers , or they charge large fees for eacjh payment.

Unless you regularly receive payments in Euros in the UK you would find it much easier to have an account in France.

[Cecilcaterpillar]

we had a euro account with our bank - First Direct, I think it was actually a HSBC account.  We wanted to change all the money to Euros while waiting for the appartement to be built at a good exchange.  The only problem was the £20 charge to transfer money to France every time, even though we had a IBIN for the receiving account

Cecil

[Val_2]

We had a client send us a Nat West Euro account cheque this year and it cost us 25€ to have it paid into our account, which for small businesses is a lot of profit to lose if it happens regularly. If you pay utilities this way, your account with them will always be in debit and they will not accept the transfer charge. What's wrong with a normal french account to pay your bills with and arrange prélevéments too.

[Paul_Gyn]

The cheapest way I found to transfer sterling to Euros was using Band of Scotland (now HBOS) who charged £5 for any transaction up to £5,000 to move money across into a pre-registered foreign bank (CAAV in my case). It has worked fine for over 2 years now, moving most of my pension across each month. However this month I tried to set up another receiving french bank account in order to directly pay the 10% deposit on a house purchase, only to be told that they were not accepting new accounts.

A bit of probing revealed that the reason for this is that the receiving banking system 'sees' only the originator bank codes rather than the full account details and - guess what - the American ECC (as in Exchange Controls Commission) doesn't like this, so naturally, the entire British banking system is going to roll over and play dead just because Uncle Sam wags his finger. 

Sorry I know this doesn't help you in your original enquiry, but it shows that things are going to get harder, not easier!

paul