Since we are "affluent" clients, we get an appointment at our location. A manager and an assistent manager come traveling over an hour to talk to us about our options. Of course they start off by telling us about their most awesome (and expensive!!) account option, which in the end is just too over the top for us. So we decide on opening an "expat-account".
The forms you usually get send home to fill out and send back are getting filled out by the assistent manager. Meanwhile we get the documents and photographs ready. Photo's to open a bankaccount you ask? Yes, in India they LOVE photographs! You need them for pretty much anything!
One of the required documents is an official paper stating our address in The Netherlands... But we don't have an address in The Netherlands anymore; we moved to India remember??? Then we need one with your previous address (which was a holiday park with rental bungalows...). My husband was able to produce a letter from the town hall stating we were going to be living there. But this was received with sour faces...
About 90 minutes and many signatures later we should be good to get a bankaccount in the coming week. Again just like anything else this takes several days to get processed.
On Monday I get a call; the bank really needs something else stating our Dutch address in order to process our submission, because the previous paperwork was no good. I was able to dig up some papers from the same town hall, this time stating we were leaving said address and moving to India (the exact same format, same paper, same everything but with a little tweak), and this did gets accepted right away as being the right document!
So why do you need our OLD address anyway, since we don't live there anymore? Oh, it just a requirement for the expat-bankaccount-file, we won't really DO anything with it... WHY???? WHY????