If you do get an American bank account keep a close eye on their exchange rates. A lot of American banks aren’t so enlightened to the world at large and tend to charge very bad exchange rates. Compared to Wachovia, for example, HSBC’s rates are a bargain.

The whole PKI model is busted – certificates merely mean that a payment was successfully processed by one of 50 or so dubious certificate authorities at some point (probably within the last 2 years).

It is a lock without a door.

“secure, encrypted comms”

and

“secure, encrypted, authenticated comms”

?

The obvious answer I thought of was just that you’re then giving a false sense of security to people who don’t understand the concept of a man-in-the-middle-SSL attack. At least with the “all or nothing” GUI approach, you’re not risking misunderstandings.

Oh. Crap. Except … there was the random guy who bought the mozilla.com SSL cert, because they didnt bother checking he even had a valid email address let alone DNS ownership – and yet the cert was valid in the FF client-side cert chain! – around the start of this year. So, in fact, it’s all ****** already :(.

I still can’t believe they do this, but when we take out cash here (anywhere in the world actually) they don’t charge a fee. And if the local bank does, and they always do, then Schwab will refund that fee back at the end of the month. We’ve been getting $10-20 back a month so far in fee refunds from Schwab for fees charged by the local banks in Perú. Every single time I’ve gotten this refund my mind has been blown. They do it because they are 100% virtual – no store fronts, no ATM’s. Works out for them I guess.

Schwab has free wire transfers either outbound or inbound, I can’t remember which way. And of course ACH transfers are free.

Their customer service people are very nice and helpful too. Again, I couldn’t believe it, but I called their customer service # because we were stuck in Bolivia with no money and a lost card and got right through to a person. No automated switchboard or waiting on hold. That never happened with Wamu.

I used to have HSBC but got really tired of their horrifyingly bad web site. Got locked out of the stupid thing more times than I can recall. But perhaps you could open an HSBC in the UK for local transfers with your real bank, and then ACH through the HSBC to Schwab in the US?

[Note of course that I'm a US citizen, so I have no idea what the options are with Schwab as a non-resident. But we've loved them so far down here, they've been really great.]

You might want to investigate some of the European banks, some will denominate accounts in Pounds or even hold joint balances.

Anyway;

I pay my web hosting using paypal. Why? Because unlike the other payment options they offer, the fees for doing that are pushed onto them, not onto me. I’d move webhost, but they’re reliable and I have an excellent package with them.

(The one time they did breach their SLA? They not only sent me a refund but moved my hosting up a tier package for free. Heck, how many $10/month services have a deacent SLA?)

One bank you’ve missed out that’s another ‘international’ bank is citibank, although given their ineptitude and general state of affairs I can understand why ;-)

Nice coverage. I’ve been concerned about this issue going the other way. Let me know if you need some research on the ground here.