one thing that's not mentioned but is crucial in opening a foreign currency deposit is the exchange rate spread, i wanna ask, for Citigold and HSBC Premier, when you open an AUD deposit, what's the forex rate that they quote? is it the same as other banks' published board rate or do they offer you a better rate?

because if you exchange at say for example Maybank's forex counter rates, the spread is about 8 AUD cents, so if you buy at 3.08 AUD100k, as opposed to a more favourable 3.05, you're spending RM3000 more to buy the same amount of AUD



anyway, for me personally, i finished my studies in Melbourne last year, so i've got a few bank accounts in Australia, i closed all but NAB's and Raboplus, as NAB's division UBank offers the highest ongoing savings interest rate, and Raboplus offers pretty competitive rates as well
i'm getting 5.95% for my UBank USaver

so what i did was transfer some money from Malaysia to my bank account in Aus and park my money for the high interest rate, and i converted at a favourable forex rate

the problem is though technically both UBank and Raboplus stipulate that you have to be an Australian resident for tax purposes to hold accounts with them, i suppose at the time i opened i was one and i'm not clear on what happens if you cease to be one, i'll just pretend that it's ok to keep them, as i do keep a postal address in Australia

as for my NAB account my address is my Malaysian one and it's ok for foreigners to open bank accounts

so if you have a large sum of money and you intend to invest in AUD, perhaps it's better for you to fly yourself to Australia and open a bank account there, because the better interest rates you can obtain there would cover your flight there provided it's a large enough sum


by the way the information provided by theage.com.au is kinda misleading because most are introductory rates where they only last for the first few months upon the opening of accounts and thereupon which rolls back to the lower standard variable rate

a fairer comparison would be here http://www.raboplus.com.au/savings/high_in...gs/compare.aspx for standard variable interest rates

the forex rates offered by banks wouldn't differ much

and of course i understand the manoeuvre that's been discussed earlier, i however was talking about my experience of having bank accounts in Australia

as to obtaining better rates from money changer, i'm not sure about other banks but i've enquired before, Maybank requires you to convert with them and not bring your own physical foreign currencies, correct me if i'm wrong

of course it's normal for banks to have teaser rates, however i'm commenting strictly based on your screenshot, which does not indicate that those rates are for an initial short period only


Thanks for your info. How much better are the rates? AUD for example compared with their board rate. I've got no HSBC account so i can't check myself. If it's really good i might just open one myself to transfer funds. Also would you know their TT charges to Australia? Since i do not have a HSBC premier account in Australia to transfer to.
Thanks in advance.

I'm assuming you've got a HSBC premier account, is it like a private banking account where there's a dedicated staff for you?

Haha as with all currency matters you can never tell if it's going down or up, you can only hope, but i think AUD should stay pretty strong provided the global economy is really recovering. It's astonishing how it went from 0.98 USD/AUD in 2008 to 0.60 in 2009 and now back up to 0.91.

Transferring funds back is the other thing, i bank with CIMB and the staff told me i need to use my local AUD account to make sure that when the funds are transferred from Australia it won't be converted to Ringgit automatically, if so i think the bank will of course use the prevailing board rate which is not a good rate.

so the question is can you bring your own foreign cash to a bank and buy a draft or tt to overseas?

by the way, can you transfer foreign currencies between two different local banks' foreign currency accounts? can you withdraw foreign currency in cash for that matter? and can you deposit that foreign currency in a different bank's foreign currency account?

appreciate it if someone knows the answer to the above

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Added on March 21, 2010, 4:28 pmYou mean i can open an account with HSBC Premier Australia and conduct transactions like transferring funds online between my Aussie accounts without having to show up in a branch in Australia and show proof if ID's?

And it's free to transfer AUD in Malaysia to my HSBC Premier Australia?


Haha, i can only dream to reach US$10 million.

K la, that shall be my aim one day, one can always dream.

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Added on March 21, 2010, 4:32 pmI suppose to hedge against such fall in AUD i can always sell AUD in the forex market. Too bad i don't know of any easy way to sell AUD against RM, but i guess AUD/USD should be a pretty good proxy, perhaps i should ask the private banks if they offer forex trading for retail investors, in RM.

This post has been edited by heliora: Mar 21 2010, 04:32 PM

On the HSBC Australia side, are they gonna give me a security device thing to transfer funds to my other Aussie accounts?

I think i'm gonna set up one liao, sounds like a pretty good deal.

Haha i meant CIMB Private Banking, my mum's got an account there. Don't need to be a super high net worth person to open one.
As for the US$10 million one, i'll wait for that day to arrive.

Hmm, no forex trading in RM, how about currency futures?

Btw, how do you know about the Russian Rubles investment? You sure you're not one of the privileged few?

This post has been edited by heliora: Mar 21 2010, 05:04 PM

Do you know what are Malaysia's tax provisions pertaining to income earned overseas? I believe there's a tax treaty between Australia and Malaysia so your income wouldn't be taxed twice.

I suppose you can just leave the money there and eat some interest.

wow sounds like Malaysia's a pretty good place to be, income derived overseas not taxed plus no capital gains tax

lol total ownage by MilesAndMore, you sure you don't work for HSBC?

as for transferring funds out, i think there isn't any limit imposed by BNM, you just have to declare if you're transferring more than RM5k worth of funds, the only limit would be the one set by the bank

in the process of opening a HSBC account

You're saying the HSBC Premier rates are worse than PBB's special rates? How do you obtain PBB's special rates?

Can you elaborate on the bad Premier service in Kepong? I might be opening an account there.

When you say PBB's rates you wouldn't be referring to their published board rates right? Is it some special rates for some special customers too?

Well if the PBB special rate is better than HSBC's by one cent you'd save more going with PBB despite the TT charge, 50k X 0.01 = RM500.
But i imagine their rates would be really close to each other.

CIMB charges RM30 too but their agent bank NAB charges AUD35 which is a whopping amount.

I'm not exactly sure how it works but i'm guessing that you're only charged by the agent bank, so if i bank with Westpac and i transfer using CIMB i'll be charged AUD35 by NAB, but when NAB forwards the fund to Westpac it could be like a local transfer hence free?

My surmise. In any case i bank with NAB so i don't know lol.

have been looking at the forex board rates of a few banks and Maybank seems to have consistently offered better rates

i don't really like DCI, you get the downside of unfavourable forex movements but you don't get the upside, ya you might get better interest rates than RM but you'll get it anyway when you convert to say AUD

so perhaps it's simpler and easier if you just convert straight to AUD and get the higher interest

You can also look into UBank Online Savers which offers 6.01% standard variable interest rate and 6.51% if you have regular deposits of at least $200 a month, UBank is a division of NAB. And as far as I know when I last closed bank accounts last year, NAB's bank account is the only one without monthly service fee.

I checked the BankWest regular savers, you can only open at a maximum of $500 deposit, and save a maximum of $500 per month, so if you have a large amount of money you can't put all in. UBank has no such restriction.


As for the interest earned, if you are a non-resident you will only have to pay withholding tax at 10% and that's all, this applies to interest and dividends received. The bank automatically withholds it when they pay you interest.

No you can't open a bank account without being physically there, my limited understanding is that you can apply online and they will open one for you provisionally, but you would still need to be there physically to verify your ID to open it fully, something like that.

However it's different for HSBC premier, if you have one in Malaysia, you can automatically open one in Australia without the need to go there, that's the advantage. The other main reason is you can transfer funds in between Australia and Malaysia free of charge and instantly if i'm not wrong, i'm in the process of opening my Australia's premier account heh.

To open a bank account in Australia you need to fulfil 100 points for the ID requirement, which can be your passport, credit card, bank statement, driving license etc. Check at the bank's website.