Offshore bank accounts
Nov 16, 2022
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Can You Open a Foreign Bank Account Remotely? Yes, You Can!A few years ago, you could drop by a Swiss bank, open an anonymous account, and put as much cash there as you wanted. Later on, you could transfer money to your Swiss bank account from another bank located, for example, in Argentina and no one would ever ask where you got the money. Those times are gone now. It is true that setting up an offshore bank account has become a much more challenging task these days but the good news is that it’s possible to do it anyway. Moreover, you can open an account with a foreign bank without leaving the comfort of your home.
The benefits of having an offshore bank account are obvious indeed. Keeping part of your money in a foreign currency (or two) protects you from exchange rate fluctuations, you can make investments in foreign countries, you can pay for goods and services there drawing on your foreign bank account, and so on and so forth. What is especially important today is that you can protect your financial assets from expropriation should your home country Government go wild. If you are engaged in international business, you often cannot do without a foreign bank account: you have to have one to deal with your foreign partners.
Why has it become difficult to open an offshore bank account? Mainly because the banks now have to be careful who they take onboard. The KYC (Know Your Client) requirements have been introduced that make the banks implement serious due diligence procedures when someone is applying for their services. International financial and fiscal organizations are spending great effort on combating tax evasion. To facilitate the achievement of these goals, they have made it obligatory for the banks to make sure that the money their clients bring are of legal origins. The banks are not to blame for making the task of opening accounts with them so challenging. Rather, the national and international law-makers have made life harder both for the banks and for their clients.
At the same time, banks need clients anyway! If they didn’t have depositors, whose money could they use for giving loans and making investments? Who would they charge for transactions? It is true that banks have to comply with strict regulations when taking clients onboard. They will face huge fines if they fail to implement all the KYC requirements. However, they naturally do their best to attract new customers because they have to survive and make some profit too. For this reason, many banks (though not all of them) still offer an opportunity to open accounts with them remotely.
How can you open an offshore bank account from your home country? It would be a very good idea to apply for foreign account opening consultancy services. You need professional assistance in the matter for several reasons. First, many banks are reluctant to deal with foreign customers directly. To be frank, they cannot be blamed for that, as a foreign customer is more likely to mix things up as quite a lot of paperwork is involved in establishing a bank account. Banks often insist that a professional agent act on the applicant’s behalf, which reduces the chance for various blunders to appear in the process of bank account opening. Second, those banks that do offer the possibility to open accounts with them remotely often do not advertise this possibility to the general public. At the same time, a qualified bank account opening consultant will know where you can establish an account remotely and where you cannot do so. Third, the information found on the bank’s website is often incomplete and the application form completion instructions are unclear. This may sound strange but this is the truth of life.
Please bear in mind, however, that no consultant can do the entire work involved in foreign bank account opening for you. He or she can help you fill out the application form in a proper way and tell you exactly what other documents you have to submit. But collecting these documents is going to be your task. We are talking, first of all, about the documents that confirm the legality of sources of the money that you are planning to transfer to your foreign bank account. Different banks will have different requirements as to the form in which the documents have to be submitted. Some banks will be satisfied with scanned copies that you can send by email. Others will ask you to send them notarized paper copies of the documents. Still others will request document originals that you would have to send with a courier.
In addition to that, you will most often have to have a personal interview with a bank manager via a videoconferencing application. It’s not going to be a problem if you are fluent in English as your consultant will carefully instruct you and tell you, in particular, what you shouldn’t ever say at the interview. If your English is poor, we especially recommend that you turn your eyes to Swiss banks. Many bank managers in that country are multilingual as Switzerland is located at the very center of Europe and it is surrounded by countries where different languages are spoken.
As you can see, opening an account in an offshore bank takes some preparation and some serious effort. The process can sometimes be extended in time, as they say. Normally, however, setting up a foreign bank account takes about a week or two. If you apply for professional assistance in the matter, you will have a fully functional bank account in a foreign country after the application process is over. In today’s world, foreign bank accounts can be fully managed online, which is very convenient indeed.
Tags: English