Does anyone offer reasonably simple/cheap on-line dollar payments?

Does anyone in the UK offer reasonably simple and cheap on-line dollar
payments? I want to make payments to an E-Trade share account to buy
some share options. This will happen maybe once or twice a year and
I'm trying to find some way of doing it that doesn't involve visiting
the bank, interminable telephone calls or similar 'jumping through
hoops' to do it.

Of the accounts which I already have the easiest so far is HSBC who
can do the whole thing by phone at a cost of £9 for transfers up to
£2000. Does anyone else offer anything better than that, I'd much
prefer to do it on-line as it seems to me that it would be much less
error prone than reading out long strings of numbers and codes over
the phone to someone.

I suspect that if more money was involved I could open an offshore
account of some sort (and/or a dollar account with a UK bank) but the
amounts involved are not enough for the costs of such an account to
make sense.

Any ideas would be most welcome, I'm quite happy to open a new account
somewhere to enable me to do this more easily as the hassle of once
opening a new account would (for me anyway) be less than the repeated
hassle of making payments.

--
Chris Green

.

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