Ask HN: How to open a U.S. bank account without stepping foot in the US | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to open a U.S. bank account without stepping foot in the US

4 pointsandreshb8 comments

There are endless benefits of having a U.S. bank account, but not everyone can fly from wherever they are in the world to the U.S. to open one.

So I was thinking of ways to open one without necessarily having to be in the U.S. and my hypothesis is that:

1. You can incorporate in a state online and get an EIN or FEN (you just need a Registered Agent) 2. Take that EIN/FEN and open a business account online (with WaMu it used to be possible, not sure which banks now though) 3. Have any additional paperwork sent via DHL 4. Get debit card mailed from bank, and start using your account in your country.

I ask because I am increasingly partnering up with entrepreneurs and freelancers in Latin America, and the whole payment situation is a mess, with a combination of wiretransfer, xoom, paypal, and even mailing cashier's checks.

I was wondering if any HN entrepreneurs had any experience doing this

Your main hurdle is a regulation called Know Your Customer, which requires banks to have some idea of the actual identity of folks who bank with them. However, banks have wide latitude in satisfying KYC. Some will accept a faxed passport/driver's license combo, for example, others can direct you to an affiliate in a foreign country. CitiBank, for example, will happily open an American CitiBank account for a Japanese citizen who walks into a Japanese CitiBank and asks for help with their international banking needs.

There are other ways. One which used to work but which I haven't tried recently is to open a brokerage account -- which have very lax verification requirements -- with ETrade or one of the other international low fee brokers. They're quite used to having folks abroad open accounts to invest in the US markets. After you have a brokerage account, ETrade knows you for the purpose of KYC, by reference to your "pre-existing business relationship". Then you call up ETrade and say "Hey, you're also a bank. I'd like a checking account tied to my brokerage account." Bam, done.

After you have one American bank account getting a second one is a cinch, incidentally. (cough ING Direct cough.)

Thanks for the insight into the KYC regulation. I think so far, CitiBank/HSBC seems the most practical option.

As a Canadian I found that Harris Bank is great -- when you sign up for a bank account online, you can check a "I am a Canadian" box and everything Just Works. (I'm guessing this is because Harris Bank is owned by Bank of Montreal.)

I don't think Harris Bank does this for other countries, though, so if you're not Canadian this won't help you.

Thanks for the tip, I got a few Canadian entrepreneurs whome this could be useful to, but as you said, if you are not canadian, this wont help much.

I'm a Canadian and I have a US business chequing account with my local bank (BMO).

All my Canadian and US accounts are managed under the same login.

See if your local bank does this.

Apparently, with Citibank, HSBC and Wachovia, you can do this onlinem via the phone and e-mail.

what about the tax laws? Say I am in India and have a UK bank account(I was studying there).If somebody pays into my UK bank account for a project I have done, wouldn't I be taxed twice--first in UK and then in India when I transfer the money to India.

Anyone successfully opened a US bank account with Citibank in the UK?

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