I get a lot of emails every week from those of you asking if you’re able to open a Thai Bank Account and if so, what the best way to go about it is. First off, you’ll likely need some sort of a long-term visa if you want complete flexibility (ie. Non-B, Retirement, Education, Elite, etc.). Yes… it is possible to open a Thai bank account without any sort of visa, but it’s hit or miss… especially here in Bangkok. I spent my first 6-months in Thailand without a bank as I wasn’t able to find a branch that would allow me to open an account up on the short term visa that I was on at the time. There’s definitely cases where you can get lucky and strike gold right off the bat (mostly at rural bank branches), but this probably isn’t the easiest approach.

As far as banks go, you’re likely going to want one where you can transfer in more than 50,000 THB at a time through TransferWise (a service that many foreigners use to convert currencies and send money to international bank accounts). As of right now, the only banks that allow this are Bangkok Bank, Kasikorn Bank, and Siam Commercial Bank. To illustrate, if you’re someone that uses TransferWise and opt for a Krungsri account, you’d need to make 4x separate transfers to bring 200K Baht in to your Thai bank account. A bit of a pain. I personally use SCB and love it. They have a solid mobile banking App and good customer service from what I’ve experienced, so as far as any recommendations go… that’s the one I’d suggest.

Hope that little tid bit of banking info helps! If you ever have any Q’s, feel free to reach out and I’ll do my best to get you an answer.