Singapore Expats

The business does online retail and sells mostly to the states. The income is solely in USD. I travel quite a bit for pleasure and so will be converting that USD to other currencies on a regular basis. Most of the income from the business will go to my personal account since the business is my sole source of income and it is a one-man show.

I also use many US-based services, and for many of them (ie. Amazon web store), they require a US-domicile bank account. This naturally leads me to think HSBC Premier as I can create US-domicile accounts but they would be personal accounts I think since the ease of creating foreign bank accounts with HSBC is only through their Premier programme.

Based on the above, which bank do you recommend?

EDIT: I also wanted to mention that I mostly use credit cards to pay for business expenses since that's the preferred payment method for internet services.

I don't own a business but I have a Citibank account. It allows me to withdraw monies from any Citibank ATM machine for free and I can transfer monies to another Citibank account (in another country) for free as well.

After many many hours of research, I'm leaning towards Standard Chartered for the following reasons:

- Tiered banking services for start-ups and growing businesses (Essential Lite and then BusinessOne)

- Easily attainable SME Business Debit Card that works the same as a MasterCard (other banks require at least 1 year of operations)

- Growing global presence although nowhere near the level of HSBC

- Free transfers between Standard Chartered accounts

- Linked USD account

- NETS (might come in handy)

What do you think?

That's the bank I'd probably pick as well.
Have a look at the bank account thread (sticky in this forum), there's a very interesting feedback from a SC customer about telegraphic transfers fees and currency exchange.