Opening a bank account in Poland – Why and how?

Living in Poland as a foreigner often means working in Poland, and thus, earning money in the local currency: PLN. To avoid encountering issues with receiving these payments, the easiest thing to do is to open a Polish bank account. The process is very easy and fast, you can check our article about the 3 best banks for foreigners in Poland.

So let’s see why and how you should open a bank account in Poland.

1) Why opening an account in your home currency in Poland?

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If you are not going to stay long in Poland, or for some reason, you do not want to open a bank account in Polish currency, you still may be willing to be able to make bank transfers in your home currency. So you would be able to make transfers from your local bank account to the Polish one in your home currency without getting any extra fee.

Then you just need to withdraw this amount of money freely in an ATM and exchange it in a currency exchange office into PLN.

So you save a lot of money by not getting charged everytime you make a bank transfer or you withdraw money.

Concrete example

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Let’s take a simple example when you want to withdraw 2 000 PLN. To simplify the example,  let’s say your home currency is euro. The example has two scenarii:

• In the first scenario, you do not have a bank account in Poland. You will withdraw 2 000 PLN in an ATM. Icluding the exhange fees, it will approximately equal 520 € (with the exchange rate = 4,3).
  
• In the second scenario, you have a bank account in euro in Poland. You can make a money transfer of 500 € (2 000 PLN) from your home account to your Polish account, without any fees! Then you are able to withdraw those 500 € in your Polish bank without any fees neither. Final step is to go to an exchange currency office (Kantor), and you will get approximately 2 150 PLN for 500 €.

In the end, you earn 150 PLN more than in the first scenario, plus the 20 initial euros, which means you save more than 50 €!

To learn more about how to choose the right currency exchange office, just click here.

  2) How to open your account?

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The process is pretty easy since almost every bank in Poland agrees to open an account to a foreigner if he shows his valid passport. You just need to visit one bank so you are present physically and that’s it. Conditions may differ depending on the bank you choose, but they are pretty similar to each other’s.

Once your account is open, you can make money transfers in your home currency without any fee, and withdraw this money in your home currency in ATMs of your Polish bank without being charged. So this permits you to save a lot of money in the long-run since every single fee you may receive for withdrawing money in Poland, even if they are small, then accumulate. And it would be a shame to lose money like that.

Finally, you can go to a currency exchange office (“Kantor”) and exchange your home currency money into zloty.

And that’s it! You will not get any fee from the Polish bank by opening the account, nor maintaining the account, if you detain a minimum amount of money in it each month.

And now all you need to do is save some money! 😉