I have a friend who was working in France for 3 years but moved back to India and does not intend to live in France again. He had a bank account with Societe Generale that he now wants to close because they are taking 8 euros/month for an account that’s not being used. He doesn’t have the online login information anymore, though. How does he go about closing the account?
This gives you the model letter to send to the bank.
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After the letter has gone to the bank, your friend will possibly need to empty the account him/herself - when I had an account with Societe Generale, I closed it but couldn’t work out why it was still active. I was able to go to them and ask the question and they told me the account was still alive if it had money in it. This was quite a while back so, hopefully, they are more on the ball nowadays and transfer any balance remaining to somewhere else.
I have a friend back in the UK who faced the same problem with BNP. She is unable to come back to France to close the a/c in person.
She drafted me a letter in English which she emailed me plus a photo of her signature. The letter told the bank she wanted to close the account and that she was authorising me to handle this.
I translated it to French, inserted her signature and went to the bank with it. I explained her circumstances and gave them the letter.
They told me she needed to email them at the branch (named individual) with her RIB (IBAN) number where she wanted any residual monies to be sent and a jpg copy of her pièce d’identité (passport).
Based on the two pieces of correspondence they closed the account and she received her money in her UK bank a/c in about a week.
May not always be this easy, but worked for us.
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I closed an account in a similar way. I sent a tracked & signed for letter from the UK (in French of course) and they sent me an email asking for the IBAN number of my UK bank account and, shortly afterwards, I received the contents of my French account into my UK account. It wasn’t a lot of money but the rate was reasonable and there were no charges on either side. The French bank was LCL.
Izzy x
Hi, can you please share the email address on which I have to send email to the societe general’s bank. Thank you
Sorry M_Mazher, but I do not have the email that you need for your bank. If you are banking with Société Générale, you need THEIR branch email. My friend’s bank was BNP - quite different. Good luck on getting this sorted.
Thank you SuePJ.
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Hi, any update on your process? I am also trying to close my account with SG and am wondering how your recent experience was?
Hi @J_Baker and welcome to the forum…
What have you done so far… in your attempts to close your account with SG ???
Welcome to the Forum @J_Baker !
When I closed my account with SG I found that nothing I wrote to them worked so I went to the branch to talk to someone. I found that, in addition to writing them to close it, I needed to empty it as well - as long as there was money in the account, they kept it open.
Oh no, well I have actually moved abroad and found that my online space is blocked because of some phone security measure step that it seems I can’t complete from abroad. So I was hoping I could then close my account from abroad and get them to transfer my money to a new account.
A friend of mine had the same problem. She contacted her bank to explain that she could not come back to France and that she was authorising me to act on her behalf. She then sent me a formal letter authorising me to go into her bank to close her account and provided all the necessary info what to do with the residual money. I went into the branch with all my details and the letter. They were expecting me and it worked fine. Might be worth a try if you have someone who can act on your behalf.
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