Opening a bank account in Vanuatu

Our experience was the opposite to Kevin's.  It was difficult to open an account and due to Vanuatu's strict anti-laundering rules, when we were transferring our money over from Australia, we needed to provide evidence of where the money came from (house sales, savings etc) before the transfer could take place.

Opening merchant accounts with one of the Australian bank branches was a nightmare as they treated us as though we were trying to borrow money rather than set up an eftpos facility for our business and wanted detailed financials about our income which we refused to provide as they were totally irrelevant to the service we required, they eventually "made an exception" in our case and set up the eftpos facility, the other Australian bank was easier.

We have dealt with all of the banks here and I would recommend Bred Bank.  When it came to borrowing with them we had no issues at all, the process was straight forward and painless.