Wise is great for money transfers, international payments, etc. The exchange rate is good but the monthly fee-free ATM withdrawal limit is pretty low.

I have a Canadian Tangerine Bank account. TB is owned by SB. I can withdraw from SB ATMs fee-free and get the interbank exchange rate.

I do a monthly withdrawal from Wise and for the rest of the month I withdraw from my TB account.

I opened an Intercam account at the time one could write a cheque on a Canadian account for deposit to the Intercam account. This option is not available under Kapital. You must transfer funds to an intermediary bank and then to Kapital which takes about ten working days. This is the major change.

My Kapital card works at local ATMs.

Scotia bank in Centro has an English speaking rep.

Have you investigated the services of Wise.com? It is a UK outfit that facilitates money transfers around the globe. You might be able to skip the intermediary bank and send the money directly to Kapital. Also, so far, I have not found anyone who gives a better exchange rate for U.S. Dollars to Mexican Pesos.

My Kapital card works at local ATMs.

Scotia bank in Centro has an English speaking rep.

Also, it appears that you can use the ATM's of Scotiabank without fees, although there are differing results from some Internet searches. Can anyone corroborate if you can use the ATMs of Scotiabank? Only having two ATMs, one in Zihua and one in Ixtapa, to freely withdraw cash would not be ideal, to say the least.

As always, thank you very much, Rob, for this excellent resource.

My husband and I own a condo in Zihua and were using Intercam as our bank until it changed to Kapital. We're now having significant issues accessing our account and are getting little help from the people there. Do you have another bank recommendation? Thanks for any help.

Humm, a little short on details. MANY of us have thought the bank has gone out of its way to work through issues.
Unless you are fluent in Spanish your nightmare will only increase especially if you are not in Mexico a large amount of time. No other bank in Ixtapa/Zih has English speaking reps at the bank or on the national call line. I have never worked with the Bank in Z, if you are try the branch in Ixtapa.

We also do our best to pay cash for most things. When we did a huge construction project we literally made a trip the ATM at Inbursa every day for several months. It gave us an excuse to get away from the construction, too.

We live here full time, no ties to the US. We still haven't had a reason to open a bank account here in Mexico. Between our credit cards being on auto pay and Schwab reimbursing all ATM fees, we do fine.

One very good perk from BBVA is that there are ATM machines everywhere in Mexico, even in the tiniest pueblito. Also, so far, all the merchants who accepts plastic seem to gladly accept the BBVA cards.

Last, are you aware of the dynamite deal from Schwab Bank? Schwab will reimburse you the ATM fees from an ATM anywhere in the world. I didn't believe it at first but it is true. I rarely use the Schwab card, but when I do, I try my best to use the Inbursa ATM machines. They only charge MXN$22 pesos. Someone of this forum said another U.S.-based bank (USAA?) also has the same deal. If you never need to move large sums of money, you could skip having a Mexican bank altogether and just pay with plastic when you can (hotels, airlines, etc.) and pull pesos out of the ATM machines. I try to pay in pesos efectivo whenever I can. The fees that the merchants pay in Mexico seem to be at least twice what the merchants pay in the States.