Help ..., especially friends from London

As most of you know that I'm living in Indonesia, and I have some technical problems on having my earnings transfered from Ciao to my local bank account.

Finally I've found out that my local bank BNI has established its branch in London. http://www.bni.co.id/jaringan/jr_cabang.asp?nid=2

Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI)
Pinners Hall 105/108 Old Broad Street London EC2N 1EN
Phone : 001-44-207-638-4070 Telex : 887758 NEGAA G

My only problem now is just about the SORT CODE which I should fill. I have contacted the Customer Service in my local bank asking them about the SORT CODE (Note: In our normal transactions, we don't use any Sort Codes). The code sounds strange to us, even the CS does not know about it.

Who would kindly help me contact the bank asking them about the Sort Code? I have a common personal bank account here.

Thank you.

Best Regards,
djohan.

I'm not sure that's going to help. Essentially, your bank account is still an offshore one and while the sort code will identify the branch of your bank, you do not actually have an account with that branch into which Ciao could process any payments.

To get payment you will need to open a UK bank account with the UK branch of your bank.

A sort code is a unique identifying number made up of 6 digits which identifies the branch - ie:

XX-XX-XX. ie the Abbey has a universal sort code of 09-01-26. RBS sort codes start 83-xx-xx in Scotland, and 16-xx-xx in England. Halifax? 11-xx-xx. The x's will be numbers that identify the actual branch. An example? The Glasgow Parkhead branch of RBS is 83-21-27. (the 83 is the bank, and 21-27 is the actual branch of the bank) Paisley Road West Glasgow branch of Bank of Scotland is 80-47-03, where the 80 denotes the bank (ie Bank of Scotland), and the other numbers the branch.

Your bank may well have an operation in the UK, and in fact a branch. However, unless you actually open an account with that UK branch of your bank, it will make no difference to getting your money from ciao as I am pretty sure it states that the bank account would have to be in your name.

Under UK law, unless you have proper identification to open a UK account, you aint gonna get one.