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As the title of this video suggests, we are posing the question, are there banks in Thailand that are refusing to open Bank Accounts for Americans here? I thought of making this video after a viewer sent me a link to ASEAN NOW, that is aseannow.com, under the title: Bank was no longer accepting new accts from AMERICANS. Quoting directly: "In preparation for direct deposit of US Veterans benefits e (I think they meant ‘we’) went to our bank here in Khon Kaen where we have 4 accts to open a new one for a DD, (I think they mean direct deposit) only to find that the bank was no longer accepting new accounts from Americans. Have you heard of this from other Vets here in Thailand? The Bank Officer was unsure if this was an all Thai Banks policy, said that she heard there were some banks in Bangkok still taking new accounts. Also I assume the direct deposit can't go into a joint account for obvious reasons. How much else can go wrong? I have certainly had a year of it. We will be checking in with other Banks but it doesn't seem hopeful." 

Long story short, I haven't seen this and we assist foreigners, a lot of our clients, in setting up Bank Accounts. Now we are primarily operating out of Bangkok here as I have discussed in other videos. We do have a Pattaya annex primarily for me to meet clients if I am down in Pattaya but for the most part we have run most of our operations out of here in Bangkok. We haven't seen this; we haven’t seen any issues opening up Bank Accounts for Americans. One thing I would note a) this was a direct deposit account for certain Federal benefits from the United States, those are very complex accounts. Two things could be going on here: one, they may be refusing to do it. They may be saying "look there's just too much hassle that goes into dealing with these American Accounts and then on top of it these direct deposit accounts, we just don't want to mess with it, we're going to refuse to do it.”

We saw a lot of that after the Foreign Account Transparency and Compliance Act was promulgated in the United States. Now this is going back I think almost 10 years ago when they promulgated FATCA and we saw a lot of banks including here in Thailand start to really tighten up on whether or not they were going to take American Accounts. In the end, with regard to accounts here in Thailand for Americans, there's just extra paperwork. Now, some 10 years later after we saw that all come down the pike, basically the upshot was look you have got to fill out extra forms and they do disclosure back to the United States.

Again this is a direct deposit account they seem to be talking about. Again for Federal benefits there is a lot of stuff that goes into those kind of accounts. Maybe that was the reason. On top of that, sometimes Thai Banks just get a wild hair and they just don't want to mess with it. Local banks will have their own protocols, local branches and just say No, we are not taking a foreigner. That happens more frequently than people would think here in Thailand where a bank just says we don't want to mess with it or again it sometimes depends on visas. If somebody has a Tourist Visa often times Thai Banks are not really willing to set up an account for that person because they don't think they are actually going to stay here in Thailand and for a number of reasons they don't want to set up an account for that kind of person; again, visas may come into play.

At the end of the day though from my observation, I want to be clear here from our observation here in Bangkok in our firm, and we probably set up a couple of bank accounts for Americans I will admit not all the time every week but I would say we are at least dealing with two or three Americans a month in setting up Bank Accounts here in Bangkok. As of yet we have yet to have any kind of problem with that. That said, it doesn't mean this might not be in the offing hence the reason for the video. If it is in the offing I kind of like to give people a heads up but as of yet we haven't seen these problems but we will certainly keep you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.