How to check if a bank is legitimate: Bank Index shows which US business accounts are banks, and which only partner with one

"It has no bank charter, and balances have no FDIC cover." That sentence sits on the Bank Index card for Payoneer, a Nasdaq-listed company that gives freelancers, marketplace sellers and small firms receiving accounts in more than 70 currencies. It describes a legitimate, licensed business with complete accuracy. It is also a warning to anyone who skims it.

Founders abroad ask me how to check if a bank is legitimate more often than any other banking question. My answer starts with the licence, not the FDIC sticker on an app. Then it moves to the type of licence, and it ends with where the money sits when it is not moving.

Bank Index, the directory of banks and financial companies run by BankStore, answers the first two on nearly every card, and on hand-reviewed cards it also names the bank that holds the dollars. Its home page counts "147,165 banks and financial companies in 196 countries, each listed in a financial register." The register is where legitimacy starts, and the card is a quick way into it.

How to check if a bank is legitimate in one minute

The fastest test is the line under the company name. Every card states an institution type and a licence status, in wording that leaves little room for spin.

Column, the Salt Lake City bank behind many Mercury accounts, shows "License confirmed on a regulator’s own list." Its card names the OCC, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC as its supervisors. That is what a chartered, FDIC-insured American bank looks like on paper.

Relay, a business banking app, shows a different status: "License listed in a register, with no license record yet." Its card is short and says so openly. The card adds that the depth of the offer is still unchecked.

Neither card calls the company good or bad, or promises that a founder’s dollars are safe there. They show how much has been confirmed so far.

Why does the directory cap unconfirmed licences?

The index turns that difference into a hard ceiling on the score. Its method lists the rule for a "Register-based profile whose license is not confirmed on the regulator’s own list" and sets the cap at 6.0, applied before the scores are rescaled.

A second ceiling sits a little higher for weak evidence. A register-based profile with no score backed by filings or the company’s own pages stops at 6.5. Thin evidence keeps a company in the lower half.

These ceilings work mechanically, and I like that about them. They do not depend on anyone’s view of the brand, and they stop a slick app with no confirmed licence from outranking a dull bank that has one.

What do the institution labels mean?

The label under the name sets out what the firm may legally do with a customer’s money, and that single line answers more of a founder’s worry than any score or star rating on the page. Bank Index sorts the whole register into broad families, and its summary table counts 41,225 banks and 9,987 payment and e-money firms.

A bank can take deposits and lend those dollars out. In America, deposits at an insured bank carry FDIC cover up to the legal limit, and the bank answers to a federal or state supervisor.

A money transmitter or an e-money firm can hold and move a customer’s money, but it cannot lend it. In America such a firm usually places balances at a partner bank, and in Britain and the EU it must safeguard them, a duty that protects the money in a different way from deposit insurance.

Some cards carry a vaguer label than either of these, and Relay is listed as "Financial, kind not established," a phrase that works as a prompt for more homework rather than as a verdict on the firm.

Does the country behind the licence matter?

It matters a great deal, because the index caps every score by the country of the licence, measured against the World Bank’s governance indicators. The method spells out the measure.

Country comparisons use "a percentile rank of countries based on the average of two World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators, Regulatory Quality and Rule of Law." A bank in a country at the 75th percentile or above can reach the full scale.

Lower down the scale, the caps bite hard on banks. A country between the 25th and 49th percentile holds every institution licensed there to 6.5, and a country below the 25th percentile holds them to 5.0.

That rule answers a question marketing pages avoid. A bank licensed in a small offshore jurisdiction may be perfectly real and still carry a low ceiling, because the rule of law around it is weaker. The United States sits at 87 on the cards cited here, and the United Kingdom at 91.

How to check if a bank is registered with a regulator

The card names the supervisor, and the supervisor gives the final answer. Registration checks therefore start with that name and end on the regulator’s search page.

For a US bank, the card usually names the OCC, the Fed, the FDIC or a state banking department. The FDIC runs a public search of insured banks called BankFind, and a chartered bank should appear there under the same legal name its card shows, in the same city and with the same main office.

Money transmitters answer to state regulators, register with FinCEN and carry no direct FDIC cover of their own. I wrote about checking MSB registration last month, since many accounts sold to foreign founders run on that licence type.

Britain has the Financial Services Register, and each EU country keeps its own list. A card that names its regulator saves a step. One that names none is a signal in itself.

When the app looks like a bank

How to check if a bank is real becomes a different question once the app turns out to be something else. Most of the popular accounts for foreign founders are not banks, and their cards say so in the first sentence.

Mercury’s card opens without hedging: "Mercury is a San Francisco fintech, not a bank." It then names Choice Financial Group and Column N.A. as partner banks and says FDIC sweep coverage "reaches up to USD 5 million." The deposits rest at FDIC-insured chartered banks. Mercury runs the product a customer sees.

Wise holds a different licence in each market. Its US line reads: "Licensed money transmitter in US states with USD account details and FDIC pass-through up to USD 250,000 via partner banks." The British line is shorter and states that "It is not a bank and has no FSCS cover."

Airwallex belongs to the same family of firms. Its card counts more than 85 licences worldwide, yet on the US line it notes that the company "has no bank charter." Payoneer has none either, as its own line made clear.

Every one of these four is a legitimate firm. The licence alone decides what protection a balance has, and that licence is rarely the one a customer guesses from a logo on a debit card.

When the company in the middle fails

Pass-through cover protects a balance if the partner bank fails. It does nothing if the fintech layer in front of that bank collapses, and 2024 showed what that looks like.

Synapse was a bookkeeping layer that linked consumer and business apps to banks. After it filed for bankruptcy, AP found that accounts belonging to tens of thousands of customers had been frozen. Evolve Bank & Trust said the shutdown had "needlessly jeopardized end users by hindering our ability to verify transactions, confirm end user balances, and comply with applicable law."

The AP report did not stop at the freeze. It also spelled out why deposit insurance stayed silent. "Synapse isn’t a bank, so its regulation is not handled by the Federal Reserve or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation," the agency wrote. No partner bank had failed, so there was "no eligibility for FDIC deposit insurance to be paid out."

After that case, the word insured on an app means less to me than an FDIC certificate number on a bank’s own site. The money was safe in law, and for many people it was still out of reach for weeks.

Is a pending charter the same as a charter?

Several fintech firms now hold conditional approvals, and the cards treat them with care. An approval in principle promises a bank. It is still short of a bank, and the cards say so.

Mercury received a preliminary green light from the OCC in April 2026. Its strength line says the new bank must open "with at least USD 300 million of paid-in capital" and keep a strict leverage ratio for its first three years. Mercury’s strength score stays at 4.5 meanwhile, since today it holds no charter.

Revolut is further along in Britain than in America. Its card says the PRA lifted the restrictions on Revolut Bank UK Ltd in March 2026. In the US, Reuters reported in September that Revolut had won conditional OCC approval and "now expects the green light from the FDIC and Federal Reserve for the banking operations."

Until those steps finish, a US balance at either firm sits at a partner bank, so I would check the account terms to see which legal entity holds it today and which bank’s FDIC cover applies.

Strength and reviews: the second check

A licence answers whether a company may hold customers’ dollars at all. The strength line answers how solid the company itself looks, and the review line shows how it behaves when something breaks.

Payoneer scores a middling 5.5 on strength. One part of its reason is reassuring for a founder with a balance there, since the company keeps "liquid assets held at 100% of customer funds." Wise scores 6.0 as an unrated, profitable and listed firm.

Airwallex scores 5.0 on the same line. Its card records a large funding round in June 2026 and an order from AUSTRAC, the Australian regulator, to bring in an outside auditor for its anti-money-laundering program. A legitimate firm can still sit under a regulator’s order.

The review lines tell stories of their own as well. Payoneer’s reads: "Trustpilot rating withheld for a guideline breach after fake reviews were removed." Airwallex shows 35% one-star reviews. Neither fact makes a firm illegitimate, but both belong in the file before a company moves money.

No card at all: a reason to pause

Absence from the directory proves nothing on its own. The index is built from registers and grows every day, so a young firm or a firm in a small market may not be there yet.

Still, a provider that claims a US banking licence and cannot be found on any card, on BankFind or on its state regulator’s list deserves a long pause. A legitimate bank usually makes its licence easy to find. It prints the licence number in the footer, names the regulator on the same page and links straight to the register entry, because doing so costs it no effort and saves its support desk the same question every day.

The directory also takes corrections from readers who find a gap. Its page invites a note from anyone who has "spotted an outdated fact or know a bank that should be listed," and says that note goes straight to the team that maintains the index. A missing licence is a gap worth reporting there, alongside the regulator’s complaint line.

Limits of a directory for a founder abroad

A card cannot confirm that the website in front of a founder belongs to the company on the card. Fake banking sites copy real brands, so the web address on the card and the one in the browser should match letter for letter before a single dollar moves.

The index is open about what its scores are. Its method says: "Scores are editorial judgments based on those facts and on the BankStore team’s aggregated experience." It also states that "Bank Index provides information, not financial advice."

A card also cannot say whether a provider will accept a particular company. Ownership and the countries involved decide that. A lawyer or an accountant who works with foreign-owned US companies can test the points a public card cannot reach.

A short routine before opening an account

The routine I would follow takes a few minutes per provider. Find the provider’s card and read the label under the name, then the licence status and the regulator.

Next, read the first sentence of the summary. If it says the firm holds no bank charter, find the partner bank and look that bank up on the FDIC’s BankFind, then read the strength and review lines and finish on the provider’s own account terms.

The ranking of banks and account providers folds all of this into one number. For this question the labels matter more than the number. A company can be legitimate, well run and popular, and still hold a customer’s dollars under a licence that protects less than its customers assume.

That gap is what the cards close, and Payoneer’s line shows it in eleven words. The matching line is worth reading on every card before opening anything.