We moved to London, UK in August for my wife's PhD program. Part of getting settled is to get the essentials: bank, phone, credit card. After putting in the research, I decided I wanted:
- Starling for bank (mobile bank)
- EE for phone (traditional phone company)
- American Express for credit card
- most UK banks use Mastercard for debit
- I still have my no Foreign Transaction Fees USA AmEx + Chase cards
Well turns out there's a series of problems here.
- We didn't yet have a permanent address, which was needed for the Bank. Most people don't have a long term let when they move, so they don't have a proof of address.
- EE, and all major phone providers, do a credit check on you, which requires a UK bank account.
- UK credit cards require you to have a UK bank account.
To make matters worse, Starling's app supports international phone numbers for authentication, but this functionality broke on their end after I started the application with my US phone number and wasn't fixed 2 weeks later.
In other words:
- To get a UK bank account, you need a UK phone number.
- To get a UK phone number, you need a UK bank account.
- To get a UK credit card, you need a UK phone bank account.
MVNOs to the Rescue!
Luckily, there happened to be an easy solution to this. Instead of using EE, we signed up for Lebara, a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that uses Vodafone's network. Additional perks of this are that it's pay-as-you-go (no contract), significantly cheaper, they don't credit check, and you can order a SIM card from their website. You can also get a SIM card at the airport if you know better (now you do, unlike me).
Post Brexit, all traditional UK mobile no longer give free roaming in the EU; they have a roaming pass you can pay for or "get" (pay) as a perk in your bundle. MVNOs still have free roaming in the EU, so I can travel Europe without paying extra.
We also happened to finish our long term let contract around this time (we were able to do this with USA accounts).