Bill Pay in HK and Abroad

[Submariner]

If I open a checking account with a local HK bank and sign up for their Bill Pay feature, can they pay bills to recipients in the US? Since many of our creditors are not signed up for electronic bill pay, our current US institution mails out a physical check. Will HK banks do this? If so, will they charge fees for the additional postage (for the US address)? If anyone has experience with this, I'd be very thankful for some input.

[KnowItAll]

HK Banks will not send checks to the US companies.

You'd have to transfer funds in bulk to your US bank and then use their bill payment feature.

By the way, we pay most of our bills through this service ( http://www.ppshk.com/hkt/revamp2/English/main.html ) which is free to use and transparent of whichever bank you use in Hong Kong. They service a much larger list of businesses than the banks -- who usually need the business to have their corporate banking with them, in order to list them for their bill payment service.

[Submariner]

Thanks, K.I.A. As I still need to maintain my Bill Pay in the US, I guess I'll need to find a way to transfer funds to the US account while minimizing exchange fees.

[nina_70]

Submarina - that's what we did. We maintained our account and bill-pay in the USA so we could easily pay what we needed to over there. For salary we get our company to split-wire our salary to USA and Hong Kong (a 20-80 split or something like that). Not sure if your company will do it, but it's worth asking.

For money transfer the lowest rate I've found is from USA to HK (so other way around from what you're looking at) using check. We simply write a US$ check to our HK (US$) Citibank account...for some odd reason Citibank doesn't charge any fees for US$ checks so we deposit for "free" and only have to deal with the bank exchange rate when we transfer to HK$ (and of course we have to wait the madatory 1-month for the check to clear). You might be able to do the same the other way around (i.e. write a HK US$ check to your US bank account)...you'd have to check that one out since I'm not certain about it.