Cheapest way to credit dollar account

MadSage

I'm considering opening a dollar current account with Citibank. To avoid the £5 per month charge, I need to credit it with the equivalent of £2000. I'm not likely to be receiving $3200 from my US clients soon, so I was thinking of transferring £2000 in from my Halifax account. However, I know some kind of loss will occur in the exchange. I'm just not sure how much, and if there is a cheaper way? I guess there are a number of ways I could do this. Maybe it would be cheaper to transfer the £2000 to one of my other bank accounts first - Santander/Post Office/ING? Any advice would be appreciated.

benjus

If you have a Citi Sterling account as well, you should be able to get discounted transfers between the two accounts. However, I don't know what kind of exchange rate you get and the Citi website doesn't seem very helpful on the subject.

Alternatively, you could consider using an FX Broker.

MadSage

It seems like a bit of a mine field. Reading some more, if I understand correctly, whichever bank I send the sterling from will not charge me because the Citibank dollar account is in the UK. I will only make losses when Citibank do the conversion to dollars. Does that sound right?

I'm thinking I will be better off just paying the £5-15 worth of charges while I wait for my clients to top up the account. Otherwise I will almost certainly lose more than double that in the exchange.