Last night I spent around 30 minutes setting up my Revolut bank account and even for someone like me it was rather painless. There was only 1 tricky part and that was reading the NFC on your passport. I had no idea what an NFC even was and had to Google this and turns out to be a Near Field Communication chip which is on the front cover of some passports. They ask you to lie your smartphone down on the front cover of your passport and somehow your phone connects to the chip and reads the information.
I registered the bank account in the UK and I did not have to lie as it asked where you pay your taxes and my taxes are currently being paid in the UK. I see this Revolut as a temporary bank account whilst I find amore permanent solution whether it be the Isle of Man which requires 100K GBP or 75K GBP as a minimum amount held in your account or Dubai requiring $50K paid in over 5 years.
The crazy part about registering last night is I wanted to move funds from my UK bank account into my new bank account and this was denied from my current bank. You cannot make this up as I have been told they are shutting it down due to regulations and here they are blocking me doing a test run with my debit card even with all the security checks in place. I will do an EFT later this evening (successful) and start loading up the new account. The bank cards I will have next week once they are delivered to my brothers address in the UK and then couriered onto myself in SA. This should all happen before the back end of next week leaving a few days left before the other UK account closes.
Yesterday I was chatting with my business partner (packaging) about how bad it is now if you are a resident in SA trying to open a bank account abroad. He has been doing something similar in Mauritius and this is a process that has already taken him 2 months and still not finalised. We are also registering the business outside the country as there are tax savings when done correctly.
I mentioned we are seen as high risk and no better than the drug lords or money launderers from Columbia, Nicaragua and Venezuela. These were the exact words that were told to me by the bank operations manager in Dubai and was not painting a pretty picture. I get the bad name SA has now has due to the corrupt government and they have really not made things easy for those trying to do things legally.
I registered with the Ultra plan with Revolut which allows 4K GBP cash to be withdrawn via ATM's free of charge monthly anywhere in the world. The Ultra Plan is the top tier and costs the most being 45 GBP monthly, but like I said I am grateful for having this option and happy to pay for this now. I currently pay around 2GBP for every cash withdrawal and tend to draw more cash than required as it adds up quickly doing this multiple times weekly. Just on cash withdrawals I am saving 20 GBP monthly towards the bank account cost and dare say there are other savings elsewhere. There is an additional 4.5% APR on your account balance which is compounded and paid out daily which is actually pretty decent. There are some other perks like subsidised airport lounges which when paying with a Reveolut card you would have to pay 3.3 GBP per visit which is cheap considering how much they can cost.
I noticed an article today that Revolut has asked for a banking license in SA and I would never change from the UK option to the SA option for obvious reasons and would like it to remain that way until I have a more permanent solution elsewhere.