Banking Experience

It all started on Friday, Jan. 13th, realizing we needed our passports in order to open a bank account.  Almost turned them in to the immigration office to apply for our resident cards (no more 3 month visas!)  We will be able to obtain 3-year resident cards at less than the cost of 3-month renewal of our visas.  Unfortunately, Ann’s passport expires in 2 years, so her resident card will also expire in 2 years.  We’ll find out down the road what we need to do then.

We went to HSBC bank, thinking that it would be best to open an account at an international bank rather than a local Vietnamese bank.  As it turned out, the minimum balance for a corporate/business account is $8,000.00 US with a $100 fee per month should the balance fall under that amount.  We were shocked at the amount. 

So we began researching Vietnamese bank accounts to find out which one would be a safe one as well as easy to use.  One criteria that’s important is how close the office is for us to do business.  Standard Charter has an office in Hanoi now but it is more than 30 minutes drive to get to it.  Citibank refused to give us any information over the phone.  And after what happened at HSBC, we decided it probably required a minimum we couldn’t possibly work with.

We decided over the weekend on the Military Bank.  It guarantees deposits (a good thing) and has English on its website as well as online access capability.  Only a 10 minute drive away.  So far so good.

On the web, we were told we need our passport, our business license, and our tax code.  No problem.

When we got to the bank, we were told we needed to have a notarized copy of our business license, tax code and red stamp.  Ouch.  Getting notary done could sometimes take a few days because of the crowd.  We were told there is an office close by, somewhere on Quan Thanh Street.  They didn’t know the address.

So off we go, driving slowly down the street to spot whatever office it could be.  2 rounds and we could not spot it.  So we stopped and asked a parking guard if he knew where we could get paper notarized.  He didn’t know and went to a nearby bank to ask.  He came back and told us it is one street over:  14 Phan Dinh Phung.  We were thrilled to be given an address.

We got to the address and close by there was a photocopy shop.  I ran over and got a copy made of our business license (we had one already but needed another one for the immigration office.)  Walked into the District People’s Committee Office to get the notary and were told we needed 2 copies of each—so back to the photocopy shop.  We were able to get our copies notarized in about 15-20 minutes!  (We were told later this is very rare to have no one else in there.) 

Back to the bank, we were able to get our accounts set up (although it took more than the 5 minutes the lady told us it would take—it actually took about 1 hour.)  But it was not without difficulty trying to understand all the banking terminology in Vietnamese.  We guessed at much of it (in context) and got the accounts set up:  one in Vietnamese Dong and another in U.S. Dollar.  They were even offering to sell us checks (which we didn’t know what it was until another lady came by the table and was signing and red stamping her check.  Where she was going to use that, we don’t know since we don’t know of any store which would take a check.)

While we were at the bank, our friend, who is helping us with all the procedures, called and said that we need to pay our first VAT tax which is due the next day and that it needed to be paid by bank transfer from our bank account.  Whew!  Glad to know we decided to get the account set up now as next week the banks will all be closed the entire week for Tet (Lunar New Year) Celebrations.

All in all, we spent 4 hours running around and setting up a bank account for CrossPoint.