I flew to Miami to open the account, and the rule I was obeying names opening it remotely as an ordinary case

In September 2019 I flew from Lisbon to Miami with a folder of documents, because I believed a US bank would not open an account for my LLC unless I stood in front of somebody. The flight cost about 600 euros. The appointment lasted 25 minutes, most of which the officer spent photocopying a passport she could have received as a scan, and I came home feeling competent.

I was wrong about the reason I went. Nothing in the rules required me to be there, and the rule that governs the whole process says the opposite in a sentence I did not read until this year.

So this letter is the one I wish somebody had sent me in August 2019. It covers what the bank is obliged to collect, what it is merely choosing to demand, whose passports get asked for, and the part of how to open a us bank account for an llc from abroad that nobody can answer for you.

What the rule actually asks for

The customer identification program requirements sit at 31 CFR 1020.220, and they are shorter than the folder I carried to Miami. Before opening an account, the bank must obtain the name, the date of birth for an individual, an address, and an identification number.

Four items, and that is the entire federal list. That is the federal minimum for anybody, resident or not.

The identification number is where a foreign owner discovers the rule is kinder than the application form. For a US person it is a taxpayer identification number. For a non-US person the rule accepts “a taxpayer identification number; passport number and country of issuance; alien identification card number; or number and country of issuance of any other government-issued document evidencing nationality or residence and bearing a photograph or similar safeguard”.

Read that list slowly, because I did not. A passport number with the country that issued it satisfies the requirement on its own. No visa, no social security number, no residence card, no utility bill in your own name in a US city. Everything beyond that list is the bank adding its own conditions on top of the rule, which it is entitled to do and rarely admits to doing.

The sentence that says you do not have to appear

Verification is separate from collection and the rule gives the bank a choice. It may verify through documents, through non-documentary methods, or through a combination of the two.

Then comes the sentence that would have saved me the airfare. The rule says a bank relying on non-documentary methods must have procedures addressing situations where, among others, “the customer opens the account without appearing in person at the bank”.

Opening remotely is not an exception carved out in some later paragraph for special cases. It is listed as an ordinary situation the bank is required to have a procedure for, in the same breath as an expired identity document or a paperwork set the officer does not recognise. I went looking for the rule itself in February, printed 1020.220 in full, and read that paragraph four times and then sat looking at the window for a while, thinking about my folder.

The non-documentary methods themselves are unglamorous and worth knowing by name, because when a bank offers you one you should recognise it rather than panic: contacting the customer, comparing what you provided against a consumer reporting agency or a public database or another source, checking references with other financial institutions, and obtaining a financial statement. That is all 4 of them, listed in the order the rule lists them. A video call and a request for last year's numbers are not the bank being difficult with you personally. They are the second column of the rule.

Can i open a us bank account without visiting, then? Under the federal rule the answer is yes. Under the policy of a particular bank, sometimes, and no regulator makes them tell you which before you apply.

The address belongs to the company

This is the part I explain most often on calls and the part that trips up almost everybody who has a good passport and a clean company. The address that 1020.220 asks for is not yours. For a customer that is not an individual, the address must be “a principal place of business, local office, or other physical location”.

My Lisbon flat is not the answer to that question. I had assumed for 2 years that it was, because the first form I filled in asked for my address and never asked for the company's. Neither, in the view of several banks I have watched people apply to, is a mailbox service in Delaware that forwards scans, although the rule itself says physical location and stops there. I cannot tell you where the line falls, because the rule does not draw one and the banks that decline do not explain.

What I have seen work is boring and consistent, and I have watched about 30 of these applications go through or fail. It is not written down in any of the 4 rules involved. A real office, even a small one, even a shared desk with a lease in the company name. What I have seen fail is an address shared by 4,000 other companies with no lease behind it. The frustrating part is that both of those addresses satisfy the words of the rule equally well, since the phrase other physical location carries no square footage with it and no lease requirement written into it, and the difference between an approval and a decline is therefore a judgement made inside a bank that will never be written down anywhere you can read it.

The note in the rule covers a case that catches sellers from outside the EU. When a foreign business has no identification number at all, the bank “must request alternative government-issued documentation certifying the existence of the business or enterprise”. Your certificate of formation is that document, and I would have it apostilled before you need it rather than during a week when somebody is waiting on you.

Whose passports the bank will ask for

The second rule that shapes your application is 31 CFR 1010.230, and it decides how many people have to send documents. A beneficial owner is each individual who directly or indirectly owns “25 percent or more of the equity interests” of the company, plus one individual with significant responsibility to control or manage it.

The beneficial ownership 25 percent rule has a ceiling that surprises people. The note in the regulation says that under the ownership test “up to four individuals may need to be identified”, while under the control test “only one individual must be identified”. So the worst case is 5 sets of documents, and the same person often satisfies both tests.

A single member LLC is therefore the simplest application in the world on this axis, and I say that as somebody who spent 2019 assuming the opposite. You are the owner under (d)(1) and the control person under (d)(2). One passport, one address, one set of answers, and the officer has nothing to reconcile. That took me an embarrassing while to notice. When I finally mapped my own company against the 2 tests on a sheet of paper, which took about 10 minutes, the answer was 1 person appearing twice, and every extra document I had assembled for 3 applications in a row was answering a question the rule had never asked.

The rule reaches your company by name even though it was formed abroad in some cases. A legal entity customer includes anything created by filing a public document with a secretary of state, and also “any similar entity formed under the laws of a foreign jurisdiction that opens an account”. If a trust holds a quarter or more, the trustee becomes the beneficial owner for this purpose, which is a sentence worth reading twice if you have been given structuring advice that involves one. A trust in the ownership chain changes who the bank writes to, who signs the certification, whose passport scan has to show a legible country of issuance and how long the whole application takes, and none of that is visible from outside the structure while somebody is designing it for you.

The number you may not have yet

There is a small door in the rule that almost nobody mentions. Instead of obtaining a taxpayer identification number before opening, a bank's programme may include procedures for opening an account for a customer that “has applied for, but has not received” one.

Paragraph (a)(2)(i)(B) says may, and it pointedly does not say must. It is a permission granted to the bank and not a right you can claim, so the way to use it is to ask early and in writing whether the bank operates that procedure, rather than to argue about it after a refusal. I have seen it work twice and fail three times, which is not a statistic and I am not going to present it as one.

Getting the number itself is a separate letter and a separate set of deadlines, so I will not smuggle it in here.

What actually goes wrong

The complaint database gives a rough shape of the failures without naming any of us individually. In the 12 months to 1 August 2026 there were 85,631 complaints about checking or savings accounts, of which 7,325 were filed under opening an account.

Searching the narratives is cruder and I will flag the crudeness rather than dress it up. These are phrase matches in free text rather than a category anybody curates. Treat all 6 figures as a shape and not a measurement. A complaint that never uses the word passport but describes 4 months of being asked for one is invisible to that search, and a complaint that mentions a passport in passing while arguing about an overdraft counts as a hit, so the ranking below is worth something and the absolute figures are worth rather less. Still, the ranking is informative: 794 complaints mention proof of address, 244 mention a passport, 96 say the customer is not a US citizen, 60 mention a foreign address, and 38 mention a non-resident alien.

Address beats passport by more than 3 to 1. I would not have predicted that ordering, and I told a founder in Bogota the opposite in March, warning her to prepare for questions about her nationality and to worry less about the office, which was exactly backwards and cost her about 3 weeks while she went and found a lease she could show. That matches what I see, and it is the reverse of what every forum thread worries about. People arrive braced to defend their nationality and get stopped by a question about where the company sits.

A digression about the word resident

An aside, and it has nothing to do with your application. The word resident is doing three jobs in this area and I have watched it cause more confusion than any regulation.

There is tax residence, which decides what you file. There is immigration residence, which decides where you may live. Those 2 senses already disagree often enough that an accountant and an immigration lawyer looking at the same person can give opposite answers in good faith, and then a third meaning arrives from the bank with no definition attached to it at all. And there is the banking sense, which is not defined anywhere in the identification rule at all, and which in practice means whatever a particular institution's risk committee decided it means this year. The rule I have been quoting never uses the word to gate anything. It says non-US person and then lists documents.

My instinct is that the banking usage drifted in from the marketing side rather than the compliance side, and I would not defend that as more than a hunch. Anyway, back to the folder and the flight.

What I send now, in order

I keep 1 folder and send it in a fixed sequence, because a complete first submission is worth more than a fast one. The documents to open a business bank account for a foreign owned company are short in the rule and long in practice, and the gap between the two is where applications die.

The formation document from the state, certified, with the file number visible and the date of formation legible on the same page, because an officer who has to ask for a second copy has already put your file at the bottom of the pile and will not tell you that either. This is the item the note in the rule names when there is no identification number, so it goes first even when nobody asked.

The passport of every person at 25 percent or more, plus the control person, with the country of issuance clearly readable. For a single member company that is 1 document doing 2 jobs, and I say so in the covering note to save the officer a question.

Evidence of the company's physical location, with a lease or an invoice attached to it. This is the one that decides most applications, in my experience, and it decides them quietly and early, before anybody has looked at the passport or the formation certificate or the description of the business that I spent the longest writing. I lead with this now rather than defending it later, since it is the item behind 794 of those complaints. That 1 change saved 2 applications last year.

A plain description of what the business does, who pays it and roughly how much moves each month. Nothing in the identification rule demands this, not one word of it. It is a supervisory expectation rather than rule text, arrived at through examination manuals and enforcement actions rather than through anything printed in title 31, and the practical consequence is that you cannot win the argument by quoting a paragraph number, because there is no paragraph number to quote. Every bank asks, and the ones that do not ask up front ask later, when a delay costs you more.

And a single question at the top of the email, which is whether they open accounts for companies whose owners are outside the United States. Ask that before you assemble a single document. I lost 5 weeks in 2019 to 2 banks that were never going to say yes. Neither of them ever said so plainly.

The thing I still cannot answer

Nobody publishes which banks accept a us bank account for non resident llc applications, and I have not found a single supervisor who collects it. No regulator collects it, no supervisor requires disclosure of it, and the marketing pages change without notice or dates on them. I have kept a private list for 6 years and it has been wrong at least 4 times, which is why I no longer share it.

What I can say is that the refusals I have watched were almost never about the rule. The rule asks for 4 items. It accepts a passport number for people like us. The refusals were about an address, or about a business description that could not be checked, or about a bank that had quietly stopped taking foreign owners in that quarter and told its front line to give no reason.

The detail I keep thinking about is my folder. It contained 11 documents in 4 plastic wallets. The rule asked for 4 pieces of information and named the situation of a customer who never appears in person, and I carried the other 7 across an ocean because a forum post told me to, and because it did not occur to me that the regulation might be shorter than the folklore around it.