Just a few years ago, at USD1 = RM3.8, life was great. However, since the Malaysian Ringgit was un-pegged from the US dollar, Internet marketers like me have been losing out. This got even worse recently as the US Dollar started to depreciate drastically, and at the moment for each US dollar I can only get about RM3.10. That sucks.

So what if you made money in US Dollars, and you want to keep that money in US Dollars until the exchange rate was favorable enough? Is there a bank that allows you to do this?

The answer is yes: HSBC Bank of Malaysia.

As long as you have RM10,000 to open an account, and your company is at least a Sdn. Bhd. with a one year operating history, you can get a US Dollar HSBC bank account easily. Just visit any HSBC bank and tell them that Gobala Krishnan sent you.

(Just kidding..)

Anyways, with your HSBC bank account you actually get two separate but connected accounts – one is in US dollars and the other is a regular business account in Ringgit Malaysia. Plus, you also get access to their online banking system that is user-friendly and makes your life much easier.

Here’s the catch – Your US dollar bank account cannot be used to make payments in US dollars. It’s just an account where you can store your cash in US currency, but it’s not an account that you can issue checks from. You can however, transfer from the US account to the Ringgit account easily.

But in any case, this is useful if you want to hedge the damn currency market and get a better return for your online business.

Although many Malaysians use Maybank2u for personal banking, the truth is Maybank’s business banking sucks big time. You have no way to check your balance except via phone banking, and no way to make a payment except via check. Plus the people in Maybank are so lazy that they will always tell you to go back to your home branch for almost anything related to your account.

(They do have a Maybank2e.net service which I use, but that’s just expensive, bulky and very frustrating.)

With the HSBC bank account however, you get two accounts, and online banking interface, phone banking and even a business ATM card that you can use in any local ATM machine to withdraw cash.

I got this account by applying for a POS (credit card swipe machine), so if you apply only for the account the rules may be different. In fact, they may have stopped the US Dollar bank account by the time you’re reading this, so please ask them for details.

If you’re from Malaysia and want to learn how to use PayPal, here’s the best place to get video tutorials: PayPal Malaysia