Does anyone in the UK offer reasonably simple and cheap on-line dollar payments? I want to make payments to an E-Trade share account to buy some share options. This will happen maybe once or twice a year and I'm trying to find some way of doing it that doesn't involve visiting the bank, interminable telephone calls or similar 'jumping through hoops' to do it.
Of the accounts which I already have the easiest so far is HSBC who can do the whole thing by phone at a cost of £9 for transfers up to £2000. Does anyone else offer anything better than that, I'd much prefer to do it on-line as it seems to me that it would be much less error prone than reading out long strings of numbers and codes over the phone to someone.
I suspect that if more money was involved I could open an offshore account of some sort (and/or a dollar account with a UK bank) but the amounts involved are not enough for the costs of such an account to make sense.
Any ideas would be most welcome, I'm quite happy to open a new account somewhere to enable me to do this more easily as the hassle of once opening a new account would (for me anyway) be less than the repeated hassle of making payments.