Used to be walk in, dump 2,000 quid on the table in THB, buy insurance (700THB) walk out with a lousy insurance (i once used it for 25,000 THB in medical costs mind, they refused to renew) and a new bank account.Thank you sooooooo much for this lovely information from your experience @Reawake ! It makes good sense that someone can't just walk into a Bangkok Bank and open an account without proper documents. I would have be surprised if that would work.
Still using the bank account to this day well over a decade later.
For simpler openings, usually concentrate on some branch in somewhere like Tesco Lotus...
SCB is usually the easiest.