Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing banking in Thailand. This is always kind of an issue; it is right up there with Immigration, things that foreign nationals especially may have issues with here in Thailand, so I am talking about this specifically in the context of doing business. We're not talking about this in the context necessarily of your personal banking. And I want to be clear, there was a time when it was much easier for foreigners to kind of operate a little bit more freely here in Thailand with your bank accounts most notably PayPal for example used to dump money into a foreigner's bank account here in Thailand, an individual's foreigner bank account here in Thailand. As a practical matter that is no longer the case.

Meanwhile, when you want to get a Business Account for banking, there may be like a ton of other documentation associated with corporate accounts notably the corporate documentation associated with that account. Meanwhile you also may need to go ahead and present things like a Work Permit associated with that account; Checking accounts have their own sets of documentation associated with them. So again, business banking is not the same as just like kind of freelance business banking. There was a time when that was a pretty easy thing quite honestly to do here in Thailand. That time has come gone and for now at least and the situation as it looks like moving forward, yeah individual foreigners coming to Thailand looking to do business are going to have a hard time doing that just out of a personal bank account notwithstanding the fact that if you don't have Non-Immigrant Visa status in Thailand they probably aren't going to issue you and open a new bank account to begin with. For example many banks require that a foreign national either providing Work Permit in order to set up a bank account or show that they have something like a Retirement Visa which that gets into a whole catch 22 associated with which came first, the bank account to show the money that you need to get to get the Retirement Visa or the Retirement Visa itself. Again, Retirement Visas really aren't the thrust of this video but understand that for doing business in Thailand, yes it's very possible. We set up Corporate Accounts for our clients all the time. It is actually rather easy to deal with or I should say straightforward to deal with once you have got the account set up but as far as getting all the corporate documentation together and proving that you are able to go ahead and operate a business here in Thailand, that can prove somewhat cumbersome with respect to documentation.