A small money in Panama update: bank deposits

Cash here, as I noted in an earlier post, is the same as U.S. dollars, plus a couple of Panamanian coins.  We mostly use credit cards to pay for stuff, though.

However, a bunch of times here in Panama, people have indicated that one way to pay them (or their business) with a four-line description, something like

• Banco General
• Cuento Ahorros
• 123456789
• Maria Persona Apellido

I've *finally* figured out what to do with this information.  Within Panama, people do ACH transfers all the time, and that's what that information is for.  In the U.S., we'd typically need a routing number, too, but nobody seems to use that here.  And because I don't have a Panamanian bank account, my response to that information was to stare blankly, and then try to find a different way to get the money to the right place.

But my AirBnB host told me a way to deal with this.  We did bring a bunch of spending money in cash with us, and since the Panamanian currency is the U.S. dollar, what we did to pay Maria was to bring cash to the nearby Banco General (a 20 minute walk from our AirBnB, just past the airport).  

I filled out a deposit slip with the information above, and handed it to the teller. 

The deposit slip comes double-layered, with a carbon copy underneath, so I automatically had my "receipt".  And that's how I paid Maria for our upcoming snorkeling trip.  Super easy, provided we had enough cash at hand!