US bank for foreigners: I read the non-resident score on 10 Bank Index cards, and the only real bank near the top is in Illinois

Every few weeks somebody writes to ask me which US bank for foreigners actually says yes. I used to answer from memory and from my own applications, which is a sample of one. This week I tried something less personal. I opened Bank Index, a public directory that scores banks and account providers from 0 to 10 on what a business needs, and read 1 line on 10 cards: the score it calls Foreign-owned and non-resident companies.

I had assumed the big names would sit at the bottom. They do, but not for the reason I expected. None of them says no to foreigners. They say come in person, and that is a different kind of refusal when you live 5,000 kilometres away.

The 3 largest banks all score 4.0

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo get exactly the same mark on this line. The reasons are different, and the difference is worth reading slowly.

On the Chase card the reason reads: “Chase requires an SSN or ITIN and a residential address for every owner, and multi-member LLCs and entity-owned businesses must apply at a branch.” So Chase is among the banks that accept ITIN in place of a Social Security number. What it does not accept is a company owned by 2 people abroad applying from their sofa.

Bank of America is almost the opposite. Its card says non-US citizens need a physical US address and must open the account by appointment at a financial center, “though no SSN is required.” No number, but a flight.

Wells Fargo sits somewhere in between the two. Online opening needs an SSN or ITIN and a physical US address. Without a taxpayer number, a non-citizen can still open, with government ID showing nationality or residence, at a branch.

So if you are hunting for banks that accept ITIN, 2 of the 3 giants do, on paper. The ITIN gets you past the form field. It does not get you past the address field, and it does not help a company with 2 foreign owners, which Chase sends to a branch whatever numbers the owners hold. I had assumed the number was the obstacle, because it is the first thing every form asks for, and it took these 3 cards side by side to show me that the address is the part nobody can solve from abroad.

I find it hard to read past how ordinary this is. Nothing on any of the 3 cards is hostile. It is simply a bank built around branches, applying a branch rule to a customer who has none nearby. The score of 4.0 is the index telling you that the door exists and is on the wrong continent.

Who scores highest, and what they are

The front page of Bank Index shows a top 3 for each common need. For non-resident owners, on the page as updated at 18:15 UTC on 23 September, it was Mercury at 8.5, then Wise and Payoneer at 8.0 each. Airwallex and Revolut follow on their own cards at 7.5.

Not one of those 5 is an American bank. Mercury describes itself on its card as a San Francisco fintech, not a bank, that holds deposits through partner banks. Wise and Payoneer are licensed money transmitters. That matters, and I will come back to it.

The Mercury card says “US-registered companies with founders living abroad apply fully online”, and that refusals follow a published list of prohibited countries of residence, such as Afghanistan, Belarus, Indonesia and Iraq. Indonesia on that list surprised me. I would not have guessed it, and I would not have found out until an application failed.

Wise scores 8.0 because registration is online from most countries and it publishes the list of places it does not serve. Payoneer scores 8.0 because it offers online registration in over 150 countries and activates receiving accounts after a one-time document check. Airwallex gets 7.5 with a catch that its card spells out: applications come only from companies registered in 73 listed countries and territories, and individuals cannot open accounts at all.

Revolut gets 7.5 too, with the tightest condition of the group. The company must be registered in the UK, the EEA or the US, and the applicant must live in the UK, the EEA, the US, Australia, Singapore or India. Everyone else goes on a waiting list.

The one real bank near the top

I went looking for a chartered US bank with a non-resident score above the big 3, and the first one I found on these cards was a surprise. First American Bank is an Illinois state-chartered bank founded in 1901, with 8.63 billion dollars of assets and 58 offices in Illinois, Florida and Wisconsin at 30 June 2026.

It scores 7.0 on this line. The reason: “A dedicated page and a Business Global Checking account exist for foreign corporations, international subsidiaries and overseas investors, with named contacts.” The card also notes an entry business checking account at 5 dollars a month, waived on a 500 dollar balance, with 250 free transactions.

I had never heard of it before this week. That is not a criticism of the bank. It is the reason a directory like this is useful, because nobody finds a Midwestern bank with a foreign corporations desk by asking around in Lisbon.

I should say what the score does not tell you. It says a route exists and is published. It does not say the route works for a single-member LLC owned by a freelancer in Porto. A desk built for international subsidiaries may expect a parent company with audited accounts, and I have not tested that.

How I would use it now

Open the front page and pick the need called non-resident owners. The ranking recalculates for that need, with the same ceilings as the overall list. Read the top 5. Open each card rather than trusting the number.

On each card, read 3 lines: the non-resident reason, which tells you whether the door is online or in a branch, the strength reason, which tells you what stands behind the door, and the United States reason, which is where the partner banks and the insurance cover are named, usually with a dollar limit and the name of a bank you have never heard of. Follow the source link on the non-resident line. For Mercury it lands on the prohibited countries page. For Chase it lands on the account information page that lists what every owner must bring.

If you are comparing a non resident business bank account with a branch bank, check the branch rule against your ownership. The Chase card is explicit that multi-member LLCs apply in person. A single-member LLC with an ITIN is a different case. For some founders that difference is the whole plan. The Miami letter on this site is the expensive version of learning it.

The trade you are actually making

Here is where the non-resident line stops being the only line that matters. Every card also scores financial strength and stability, from filings, ratings and the balance sheet where one is published. Read the 2 lines side by side and the table turns upside down.

Chase gets 10 for strength, Bank of America 9.0 and Wells Fargo 8.5. First American Bank gets 7.0, on a tier 1 risk-based capital ratio of 13.77 per cent and a return on assets of 1.52 per cent. Wise gets 6.0, Payoneer 5.5, Airwallex and BlueVine 5.0. Mercury, top of the non-resident list, gets 4.5, because it is not a chartered bank and carries no agency rating.

So the easiest door is the one with the thinnest wall behind it. An 8.5 on access and a 4.5 on strength describe the same company, and for a founder abroad it may still be the only realistic choice. That is not a verdict on Mercury. It is what the arithmetic says, and the card gives its reasons in the open: the OCC granted preliminary conditional approval in April 2026 for a Mercury Bank charter with at least 300 million dollars of paid-in capital.

The other question is where your dollars physically sit. The cards answer that too. The answers vary more than I expected, and they matter more to a founder abroad than to anyone else, because if something goes wrong you cannot walk into a branch and ask, you can only write to a support address and wait, and the waiting is easier when you know which bank holds the money and under what cover.

Mercury holds accounts through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., with an FDIC sweep up to 5 million dollars. BlueVine offers FDIC pass-through cover up to 3 million dollars, held at Coastal Community Bank. Wise offers pass-through up to 250,000 dollars via partner banks. Payoneer, its card says, has no bank charter or FDIC cover on balances. It holds liquid assets at 100 per cent of customer funds instead, which is a different kind of promise.

BlueVine is worth a separate sentence. It has a dedicated page for international owners and still scores only 6.0, and the reason line quotes the catch: Bluevine “states that not all features are available to international customers.”

A short digression about the word foreigner

An aside, since it trips people up in every search box. For a bank, you are not a foreigner because of your passport. You are a non-resident because of where you live and a foreign-owned company because of who owns the LLC. A US citizen living in Lisbon runs into the same address rules, and a Brazilian living in Miami, with a US address, clears the ones that stop most founders abroad. It has nothing to do with nationality and everything to do with addresses, which is odd when the application form asks for your passport first.

Back to the point. When you search for banks for non residents, the results mix these up freely, and the cards keep them apart.

What I still cannot tell you

I cannot tell you how often these published routes fail in practice. The cards describe what each provider says on its own pages, dated and sourced, and they cannot show refusal rates, because no provider publishes them and I have not found a regulator that collects them in a form anyone outside can read. Refusals leave no trace in public.

I cannot explain why the First American Bank page exists at all. A 58-office bank in the Midwest building a desk for overseas companies is either a smart niche or a legacy of some old client, and the card does not say which. I suspect the first, and I would bet it is tied to the same treasury team that banks money services businesses, which the card also mentions. That is a guess, and nothing on the card settles it.

I have thought about that bank more than is reasonable this week. I had assumed there was no ordinary American bank that would talk to a founder abroad. There was one in Illinois the whole time, with a named contact on a public page.