I’m a sort-of employee for a US-based company, who pay me by cheque in dollars.
I’ve just been sent a large-ish amount and would like to avoid the usual hoorendous conversion rates & charges that I usually get from my own bank, NatWest.

Does anyone know of a better way of converting US$ cheques into ££££ ?
Thank you!

It’s been a while since I looked at it but a Citibank acc used to be the way to go if you regularly got $US cheques

And don’t forget to tell the tax man as well

Do you visit the US often/ever?

If so, and if this is an ongoing thing, I would open a checking account with Capital One (high street bank). There are no account fees and it has free ATM withdrawals and online banking. You can send a check to the processing centre by mail. Once it’s in your account, you can either just withdraw it via ATM (when all is said and done, with no fees and no commish and a decent rate, it’s OK) or if you have more time you can transfer it to your UK account using something like http://www.xe.com/trading.php or its many competitors.

Alternatively, you could open a USD-denominated account in the UK or in Jersey etc. Citibank used to do them but their shopfronts disappeared – don’t know if they still have a retail business like that. Avoid RBS International like the plague.

Cheers, KB.
I’m only in the US every 6 months, and even that might drift to nothing.
I’ll look at xe.com though.

If it will be a regular thing try and open two accounts with one bank (I use HSBC Premier). You end up with two accounts, a UK current and US checking account, and they are linked together which allows you to easily and quickly transfer money between the two accounts, which is all done online.

So ask your US company to pay you electronically into your US account, then you can either transfer it straight to your UK account or if you are feeling brave then keep it in the US for a little while to see how the exchange rates fluctuate?

Talk to a bank.

Otoh, we use paypal to transfer money TO the US.

Talk to a bank.

But if you do that, you might end up talking to the inept monkeys at the branch who have never seen a cheque from “in abroad” before, or the inept monkeys at RBS International who have seen a cheque from overseas and ought to know what to do with it, but don’t, the useless, instruction-losing tossers.

I meant talk to their international team on the phone…. Or rather, the team from a bank who know what they are doing 🙂

Have I mentioned what inept numpty **** RBS International are?

Can’t remember which bank I used when I lived there – think it was Chase – but you could deposit cheques by iPhone simply by taking a photo of it.