So, as part of my preparations for moving home, I went into the bank today to close down my account. It turns out that I really should have sorted this out a week or two ago. After I’d filled in the forms for:

  • change of address to the UK
  • account closure (you don’t leave a bank without an address to contact for problems even when closing the account)
  • international transfer of the closing balance to my UK account,

the lady who was dealing with me went off to check up on things and came back to say that they couldn’t do an international transfer from a closing account. She suggesteed that I should transfer today’s balance and then write to them from the UK to close the account once I was sure that the transfer had gone through. I’ve dealt with banks before and that would almsot certainly leave me with a few odd yen in there and that they’d want to do something with it before closing the account. Besides, this account has a charge if it drops below a certain value and hasn’t had a sufficient payment in this month, so I really didn’t want to end up in debt in it.

After some messing around, going to talk to the branch manager, they agreed they could do the transfer. However, she then suggested that a better way to do the transfer might be bankers draft (instead of sending an electronic payment to the UK, I close the account and get the cash – not physically – and then buy a GBP draft drawn on their UK operations – this is Citibank, the US corporation so they’ve also got a UK operation). It turned out that this would be easier and cheaper (Y2800 instead of Y4000), so that’s what I went with. The draft is account payee only, so should be reasonably secure. Certainly better than what she suggested initially, which was that I close the account and hand carry Y500,000+ back to the UK with me!

At least, having worked for a bank, I know what is and isn’t possible, even where they’d rather not do things because it might cause them to actually have to do some work.