Global Financial System? Whatever.

I find life in Singapore pretty easy. I think anyone who follows the blog has caught on to that sentiment. However, I currently have a thorn in my side and it involves financial institutions.

Accenture pays for almost every aspect of life here. They pay the rent, car, school tuition, fuel, utilities and each member of our family receives a per diem. They don't want to penalize expats for living in a more expensive country and I'm thankful for that. The problem is that aside from the rent and car payments, we pay the bills and Accenture reimburses us when Brian submits his expense reports. The expense check gets deposited in our Bank of America checking account in the US. This is the beginning of our problem.

Since we are incurring the expenses here in Singapore and using local credit cards, we need to transfer expense money from our US account to our Singapore account to cover the bills. We're not living in the backwoods. We live in a huge financial market. I know this because nearly everyone's husband works for a bank or investment firm here. So, it really shouldn't be difficult to get money from Point A to Point B, right? Wrong.

The money goes into our Bank of America account. Unfortunately, that bank offers horrible exchange rates when wiring money to Singapore so we avoid that simple route. Instead we set up a "bill pay" in BofA to send money to Smith Barney. BofA mailed a paper check. Otherwise, we would be charged a fee for transferring money. By the time the paper check got deposited into the correct little part of our Smith Barney account, at least 7 days had passed. The wire to Singapore was relatively quick, only about 48 hours. So, we had to plan for a 10-day turnaround time to move money. Someone could have mailed cash via USPS and it would have arrived about the same time.

When we tried to wire money directly from BofA one month, we ran into another problem. They wouldn't wire funds to an international bank without prior authorization from the account holder. Oops. We hadn't set up that function before we left Texas and they weren't interested in giving us permission from Singapore. They would let us wire money if we added the "SafePass" security feature to our account, which sends a code to your mobile phone whenever you try to transfer money or make any changes to your account that you then enter online. That would have been fine, except they won't send a text message to an international number. At this point, the name "Bank of AMERICA" seemed appropriate since it obviously does not recognize the outside world. So, the compromise was to have the SafePass code sent to Brian's brother's mobile phone instead. Thank goodness Brandon is a good sport when I call him to get permission to change the name of a payee or connect to online banking from my new laptop. It's ridiculous and gives me flashbacks of calling home from college asking my parents for money.

Earlier this year, we moved our investment account from Smith Barney to Ameriprise and I was thrilled that the new company allowed me to set up a transfer from another US bank with no fees. I could log on to the Ameriprise website and essentially grab money from our BofA account. No more paper checks seemed like a move in the right direction. Unfortunately the wire process to Singapore was no easier though. We couldn't set up an international bank online for wire transfers so we have to fax in a request each time we want to wire money. This week, I discovered our latest wire request did not get processed because my signature was exactly the same as the previous one. It has to be a new signature on the request each time. Good grief.

The world has become so much smaller in recent years with technological advances and globalization and yet it is painfully difficult for the Deans to move money from a US account to Singapore. It is baffling to me. And, in case you're wondering, we're not alone in our anguish. I don't know anyone here who has an easy time dealing with finances on the other side of the globe.

Finally, if someone from Accenture payroll is reading this blog, I'd like to point out that this entire situation could be avoided if the company would pay out expenses in the local currency where the expenses were incurred instead of depositing it on the other side of the world. Doesn't it seem odd that we pay school tuition in Sing dollars, expense it in Sing dollars, Accenture converts it to US dollars, pays it to our US bank and then we have to transfer money back to Singapore?

I realize that if this is my biggest issue, then I really have nothing to complain about. It's just frustrating that banks don't seem to have considered that there are people like us in the world who just want to be able to access their money in a timely manner. Besides, I don't really want to know what happens when we're late paying the government-owned utility company here.