I just phoned up HSBC to close my UK bank account. As useful as it may have been having an account there, it’s a pain trying to manage an account in a country where you’re not living, and the fact that I had my credit card attached to various web sites for automatic payments had caught me out once when I thought that I’d cleared the account.
I thought it was going to be an arduous process, I couldn’t imagine a bank letting go of business easily, at least not easily for me. Amazingly it took me a grand total of 7 minutes on the phone, and most of that was getting through there initial card authentication process, the rest of it was absolutely painless. What a nice surprise.