Another Newbie Moving to Chengdu

[Graham]

Welcome. In response to your question, I use ICBC these days, which has a passable English interface. Its also very easy to set up online banking and receive a dongle to authorise everything. Just don’t use anything other than Internet Explorer for your banking needs as pretty much all bank software uses that and will get screwed eventually by Chrome or Firefox. Best advice is to take a Chinese friend along who understands what you need, and focus on detail like exact spelling of your name on your account – they will not tolerate any variations when you need to pay for stuff or use the online banking later. Suggest you also exactly match that name to your Paypal later. So get your passport copied 2 or 3 times and go along to your local branch with the original too. As I say I use ICBC, but each bank has its own strengths and weaknesses.

[Joerg]

Graham: Thanks for the detailed tips, I am going to look into it.

Some good news! Strong VPN was able to set up an account for me using my US info. I appreciate all the support I got on this topic.

[Author]

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