Internationalwealth.info is the leading portal in the offshore industry. It is both a reliable source of information and your strategic partner in planning and implementing your offshore business endeavors, including the selection and set-up of your personal or corporate foreign bank accounts that will suit your specific needs. The portal belongs to Offshore Pro Group.
In the modern world, international businesspeople have to look for complex solutions building combinations of offshore – mid-shore – onshore companies and opening several bank accounts in different countries. Those who are after asset diversification and protection sometimes become legal residents of several countries at a time and set up accounts with more than one bank.
Banks all over the world are getting more selective when opening accounts for non-resident clients. Foreign banks prefer only high-profile non-resident clients who have perfectly transparent business structures and reputation.
Whether you are planning to set up a bank account in a tiny insular state or a reputable Old-World country, you have to take numerous aspects into consideration. We are in cooperation with more than 200 banks and payment systems all around the world and we know exactly what questions we need to ask you when helping you open a foreign bank account via the Internet. If we understand your needs and your capacity, concerns and opportunities very well, we can choose the bank or the payment system that is going to serve your purposes best of all.
In an ideal world that is governed by reason, the CLIENT chooses the bank where he or she wants to put the hard-earned money. Unfortunately, the reality is quite different when it comes to banking abroad. It is the foreign BANK that decides if it will or will not serve a non-resident client. Banks do not want to put their licenses, reputation, accounts and client bases at risk by letting in an unreliable customer. Bank Presidents and senior Compliance Department officers may even go to jail if they knowingly take a potentially unsafe client onboard.
We stay in close contact with all the financial institutions that we work with, to maximize the efficiency of our services. The process of opening a foreign bank account is rather sophisticated and time-consuming these days. As the banks experience high pressure on the part of various regulatory bodies, any inaccuracy or obscurity found in the application documents submitted by a non-resident applicant will automatically trigger service denial.
All foreign banks have lists of criteria that any prospective non-resident client must comply with. Offshore Pro Group experts will help you find out where you can set up a personal, corporate, investment, brokerage, or merchant bank account by examining your chances for compliance and success.
We invite you to book a FREE professional web-based consultation with our trusted experts. To appoint the date and the time of videoconferencing, please fill out the BOOKING FORM. It contains rather detailed questions that are relevant to the international banking standards and requirements. On the basis of your answers to these questions, we will prepare to discuss with you the most suitable financial institutions that will fit your purposes and that will be likely to approve your application.
Serious preparatory work is required if you would like to obtain services from a foreign bank or a PSP (Payment Service Provider). Before your account is activated, you have to make 4 steps:
- Choose the bank(s) that will meet your principle requirements. You can do this together with our experts. The list of aspects to discuss includes the size of the capital to deposit, the documents to submit to the bank, the type of business that you have and are planning to develop, many other important nuances. Having considered the possible options, you will make the final well-grounded choice of the shortlisted banks together.
- Obtain a pre-approval from the banks of your choice. Normally, there will be more than one bank that suits you. We will help you submit your file for a pre-approval to all of them on your behalf. This will narrow down your further focus, and the expert will guide and assist you in compiling the application portfolio for submission to the bank that has preapproved you as a client.
- Prepare the application documents that are required by the bank or the PSP where you are going to open the account(s). This is the most demanding and time-consuming stage. Much will depend on how soon you can supply all the necessary documents to us. We will carefully analyze the application documents that will include both personal documents and your company’s documents if you are opening a corporate account. If your company is (partially) owned by another legal entity, you have to be prepared to supply this entity’s corporate documents as well, plus the personal documents of its UBOs and directors. We will pre-inspect the application documents exactly in the way that they are going to be inspected by the bank Compliance Department officers. Different factors need to be taken into account such as the dates of issuance, the signatures, the legibility, the legalization of copies, the expiration dates, the terms of office that the authorized personnel has, etc.
- Complete the bank forms and send the application document package to the bank. It may sound easy but our experience shows that a great number of nuances play important roles. For example, some company owners confuse company shareholders and company directors when filling out the bank forms. If the bank officer is puzzled when inspecting the documents, services may well be denied to the applicant without any further explanations. For this reason, it is crucially important to work diligently on the application document completion. Sometimes even the print quality and color can make a difference and sometimes the signature on the document is not accepted by the bank as proper. We always meticulously check the scanned copies of the documents that the clients send to us. In this way, we save the client’s time and money because if you submit the wrong documents to the bank, you will have to resend them, thus wasting time and paying extra fees for courier service. Most banks will not start the application assessment until all the required documents arrive. If some of your personal or corporate documents are to be sent from a different place, it is important to make sure that all the application documents arrive at the bank simultaneously. We will make sure that the bank receives all the required documents and we will keep in touch with it on your behalf until your account there is (hopefully) set up and activated.
The above-said covers only a few issues of all that need to be taken into consideration when you are preparing the application documents. Opening a foreign bank account can be a challenge today. But with our assistance, you will be able to set up a bank account abroad and keep it active in the future.
You can rely on our experts’ 20-year professional legal, financial, business experience, our network of local associate partners, the accumulated knowledge base, and the most positive feedback from our clients. We will guide you step-by-step through the whole process. Some of our services are unique, and our rates are competitive.
Please remember, however, that the ultimate decision to open (or not to open) an account for you rests with the bank.
It will depend to a greater extent on the quality of your application documents that we will need to be exactly what the bank officers expect to get from a trustworthy customer.
The higher is the quality of the preparatory work, the fewer questions the Compliance Department will ask, and the sooner you will (hopefully) be able to use your foreign account.
Now, please fill out the online booking form given below. Your answers and extra notes will let us know you better and help our experts come up with the most beneficial suggestions.
The article continues below the form.
Please provide answers to the following questions so that we can suggest the most suitable offshore banks to you:
What type of foreign/ offshore bank account should you open?
There are some fundamental questions that we have to ask you when choosing the most suitable foreign bank for you. First of all, you have to decide if you need a personal bank account, a corporate bank account, or both. Setting up both a personal and a corporate account with the same bank would be a very good idea. The bank is going to love this.
A PERSONAL foreign bank account can be opened online and it can be used to keep and grow your personal capital, to pay the bills, and so on. You can also use it to make private investments into business projects that you are going to participate in.
Sometimes the client applying for our services does not really need a foreign bank account. When we understand that the way he or she wants to use it will only add confusion and can even entail fines, we try our best to talk the client out of opening a foreign bank account. Instead, we can always help with finding a more beneficial and simple solution.
Your booking form and our talk during the consultation is the first step towards our better awareness of your interests.
Please note that a bank account abroad always comes at a cost. You need to make the initial deposit and keep the balance on the account in the required amount. If you pay all the fees and dues on time, observe the bank’s policies, your foreign bank account (and better still, two or three foreign bank accounts) will serve the purpose of secure asset protection.
An account in a foreign bank can also make you start thinking about optimizing your tax planning by changing your tax residency. We will be glad to assist you with this matter too.
A CORPORATE foreign bank account is a mechanism that provides for the successful operation of your business company. When you open a corporate bank account abroad, there are numerous details that you have to take care of. One of these details is, for example, the necessity to know and meet all the relevant regulations on offshore businesses in the bank’s jurisdiction of residence. If you fail to comply with the requirement to pay the company registration renewal fee, for instance, your corporate account can be frozen until you submit a fresh Certificate of Good Standing to the bank administration. Please note that since 2017, banks have been asking clients to supply the financial statements for prior periods. Your compliance with the rules and procedures will improve the image of your company in the eyes of the bank administration and increase your chances for beneficial cooperation with the bank of your choice.
People often open corporate bank accounts in foreign countries to do business, protect assets, make investments, for many other purposes A corporate bank account abroad can be multifunctional indeed and it can be your efficient business solution and instrument
Keeping your bank account active
If you would like to set up a corporate account in an offshore bank for the sake of asset protection, that is fine. But what if you need it to ne able to carry out your business operations? Then the choice of the jurisdiction where the bank is stationed becomes very important.
If you are looking for a chance to optimize your tax planning in a legal way, you can consider both classical offshore jurisdictions and mid-shores. You should weigh all pros and cons that each jurisdiction has before you register the company and open a business bank account in the most suitable place. This is why we recommend that you apply for a FREE consultation on this matter to us before you begin further steps.
You are free to be flexible in building your business as a combination of an offshore company with an onshore bank or a mid-shore company with an offshore bank. In any case, all banks have standard and bank-specific requirements for their prospective clients. You will need to supply the most detailed information about your business activities when you intend to set up a corporate account in a foreign bank. Any bank will want to know from the very start who your main business partners are and what the expected account turnover will be. The initially declared types of business activity will be monitored and the bank will want to know the purpose and the destination of every payment that you make. Even a small deviation from the initially declared intentions may lead to account freezing or even termination if you fail to notify the bank about an out-of-the-ordinary payment in advance. The currency control may also be different depending on the account holder’s nationality, the country of the company domiciliation, and other factors. Banks normally do not disclose the criteria that they use for judgment. The company owner must be ready to supply confirmation documents such as agreements, invoices, etc. as soon as the bank administration requests them.
The same is true for a personal bank account abroad. For example, when you deposit money on your savings account the bank may request a confirmation of the legality of your sources of income. It can be a pay stub, a property sale agreement, a royalty payment, a loan certificate, a paid-back loan certificate, and the like. It would be wise to keep all the documents that confirm your money flows as these can help you a lot in case the bank becomes curious how you make and how you spend money.
Should you open an account remotely or on a personal visit?
Offshore Pro Group cooperates with a large number of banks that allow setting up an account remotely, without paying a personal visit to the bank. However, as the bank managers are not going to have the pleasure of meeting you in person, they will have to rely on your application documents alone to deliberate whether to open an account for you or not. For this reason, they are going to take more time to make the decision and may require more documents from you. Besides, they will expect the application documents to be properly legalized.
How long does it take to open a foreign bank account?
The majority of our clients would like to set up a bank account in a foreign country within a couple of days. Some of them want the account opened yesterday. Practice shows, however, that achieving this goal is going to take at least seven to ten days. There are several reasons for that.
First, you have to collect the required application documents, fill out the bank forms and send them to us. We will inspect them carefully and send them to the bank as soon as we ascertain that all the documents are in good order. We work fast but we never submit poorly assembled application document packages to the banks.
Second, every bank will take some time for due diligence checks and the periods can vary from one bank to another. Sometimes it is going to take only a few days while at other times you may have to wait for a couple of weeks. This largely depends upon the workload that the bank Compliance Department has at the time of your application for services.
Third, the account opening period will also depend on how exhaustive your application document package is. If you are applying for a corporate bank account, the information about the company and its prospective financial operations has to be complete. If the bank administration finds that certain documents are missing, they may ask you to supply those or otherwise provide some explanations. The exchange of messages and the delivery of additional documents may postpone the account opening.
Fourth, some banks require that you make the initial deposit before they even start assessing your application documents. All banks have their internal requirements as to the amount of the initial deposit and the kind of transaction that you can make. Sometimes the transaction has to be made from a SEPA zone bank, for example, or a SWIFT payment may be required, and so on. We will certainly tell you all the details related to making the initial deposit with the bank of your choice when you apply for our assistance with setting up a foreign bank account.
Finally, different banks set different requirements as to the submission of document originals. In most cases, the bank administration will start considering your application when it receives legalized copies of the documents. At the same time, you may not be able to start using your account until you supply some originals to the bank after your application for services is approved.
Now that you agree that opening an offshore bank account takes time and is quite challenging, you should not postpone your request for our services. Please write to info@offshore-pro.info and let us start straight away!
