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Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

> really hard to do because of catch 22

To expand on what mrtksn means: in the UK, it is difficult to get a bank account without proof of address. It is also difficult to rent a flat without a UK bank account. There are a few ways around this:

- Have a friend put you on their water bill and use this as proof of address. I suspect this is illegal.

- Join a flatshare without getting on the lease, pay for your portion of the rent with Transferwise or something, and have your flatmate put you on the water bill. I sure hope this is legal.

- Find a bank which is a bit lax about proof of address and is willing to accept things like proof of employment. Lloyds used to do this, but I've heard they no longer do.

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That's correct. After 2 months of working and not being able to get paid, finally, someone at an HSBC branch accepted the letter from the agency and opened my account. With the statements of that account now I have proof of address and I can open as many bank accounts as my heart desires :)

Later I got a job as an UI developer in the City, but the first few months were hard.

The bank side of the equation has become a lot easier. New services like Monese and Revolut make it trivial to get a basic bank account without proof of address. You can open an account in minutes and start receiving payments from an employer or send payments to a landlord.

https://monese.com/

https://www.revolut.com/

The rental side has become more tricky. The Immigration Act 2015 made it a criminal offence to rent a property to someone who does not have the legal right to live in the UK, with a maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and an unlimited fine. Unless you have an EEA passport, it can be very difficult to find somewhere to live. Some landlords are even more cautious/discriminatory and won't rent to anyone who seems foreign. It's another embarrassing symptom of Theresa May's illiberal and inhumane "hostile environment".

https://www.gov.uk/penalties-illegal-renting

Monzo(It was Mondo back then) recently introduced current accounts and I see that Revolut too now offers a real current account. That's great news, but still, you'll have trouble wherever proof of address is needed since these apps don't send paper statements as far as I know.

You can just chat Monzo in the app and ask for a paper statement. They will mail you one with a official looking stamp on it. Worked fine for me when the idiotic government bureaucracy required I produce such an archaic thing.

Good to hear that the situation is improving drastically! Just a year ago Monzo didn't even offer a current account.

Monzo Bank no longer requires any proof of address. They are doing this specifically to address the issue immigrants have with access to banking [0]. They are a fully licensed and regulated UK bank, and have built their entire infrastructure from the ground up (zero legacy mainframe software) [1]

You can mail your debit card to any address you choose, no verification required.

“When you sign up through the Monzo app, we’ll ask you to take a picture of that ID and a short video of yourself. That’s it! You’ll need a UK address where we can send your debit card, and then you’re good to go.”

[0] https://monzo.com/blog/2018/05/29/getting-bank-account-immig... [1] https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-bac...

4 - be a student.

If you are registered to a university, Barclay's will have something to sell you.

Same situation I had moving to ireland. Cant have account without proof of address, can’t have proof of address (an utility paid in your name) without renting and very hard to find a rental unit without a letter from the bank.

Eventually the employer strongarmed the bank to open an account for me.

Can anyone comment on why this is the case? It seems ridiculous on it's face.

It's a UK thing -- everything has to not work in the most ridiculous way possible.

This also applies to anti-money-laundering stuff: it's better to affect loads of people really badly who are most certainly not money laundering as long as it does not affect the people who are money laundering at scale.

That said, there are people who don't really understand that people on social media paying you for access to your bank account are probably money laundering.

This is in a country where it is perfectly permitted to open several stores of the same chain of gambling establishments in the same street with fixed-odds betting machines and no questions of where the large sums of cash being handed over come from.

This is painfully accurate. Buying a house now involves proving that your funds came from bona fide sources (i.e. that you are not a criminal), thanks to new anti money laundering regulations.

It's not a UK thing. Most banks have the same regulations. The UK is one of the easy country to move to.

AML regulations and scams.

Apparently in the past people with questionable sources of income used to open fake accounts to move money and the banks were happy to do it until the regulators slammed them with fines.

Also, when you have a bank account you can get things like a phone contract with a direct debit payment. Apparently, some people made it a habit to leave the UK without paying their bills after they are done with their seasonal work.

I'm sure some people run much more elaborate scams.

It is simply incredible how governments do never decided that banking is a public service and should be regulated as such (it's been what? 300 years? Maybe that's still too little)

A passport is enough to prove your identity isn't fake. But since it's not enough to give you a credit line, banks simply refuse the service. There are way too many people with no access to banks.

It is simply incredible how governments do never decided that banking is a public service

They did https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girobank https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_Money

A passport is enough to prove your identity isn't fake

Theoretically, perhaps, but in practice anyone who needs to validate identity will ask for multiple forms of ID.

my mate opened a back account in 2010 because he ordered Burton catalogue and he got a letter with the address.

Back in 2015 I ordered a Vodafone Pre-paid SIM to a friends address and that was how I got "my proof of address".

Yeah, I tried that but it was not accepted. One branch told me that some countries are considered higher risk than others so they need to be stricter and want a utility bill or a statement from another bank.

I am curious if a hack exists to have an account in a bank in UK if you use the same bank in another country. For example, if you are a software developer with a good salary being an HSBC Premier customer can be easy in developing countries, you then go to places like US and they treat you like an HSBC Premier there where you just need to show you are a customer in another country and they use your overseas address as a proof to open the account.

Yes, I did exactly this when I moved from the UK to the US. As an existing Premier customer, I was able to open a bank account and provide the necessary verification at a later date.

AFAIK, it doesn't work for Santander (both in the US,UK and Spain, based on a colleagues account) as they treat each country and separate.

Wow, I'm from the UK but emigrated to Spain after Uni.

I never knew it was so hard for new arrivals in the UK - here in Spain it was pretty easy, the hardest thing was getting the appointment for the ID card.

I lived in Germany for a bit too and there it was also easy.

I really think we need some ID system like the NIE or Anmeldung in the UK as I can't drive and always had to use my passport as ID which is a massive pain - it'd make stuff like this easier too.

What worked for me was going to a HSBC branch in Australia and opening a Uk account before I left.

As of 2016, Lloyds bank offered a "Welcome to the UK" current account that you could open without proof of address.

Banks were surprisingly hostile, tried that with few branches but they first did not acknowledge the existence of the account and later they found a way to say that I do not qualify.

I had to make my agency write the employment letter multiple times because the banks always found something wrong. Finally, it was a week before Christmas and I had to beg the HSBC employee to accept the letter and open my account because I was running out of cash on Christmas.

A combination of the "hostile environment" and AML has probably ended this by now.

Open an account on new digital banks. Revolut kinda rocks

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