Just opened a company in Estonia. The experience so far has been incredible. It's not quite the future - all the technologies should exist everywhere etc. It's the present that should have been, but somehow it's not.
Also the deposit insurance in my country is quite low, so saving money in Estonia is a good option for me.
I'm using the LHV Bank, they give you a multi-currency account, a great mobile application and also access to different worldwide markets (for investments, etc.).
If you don’t need a bank account and you can live with PayPal you don’t need to go there. I needed a bank account and credit card so I traveled to Tallinn and opened a bank account at LHV. You have to sign the documents at the bank office.
I think LHV Bank is working on a remote process with an interview using Skype, but it was not available several months ago.
Still, I have faced several issues setting up my small SaaS service: Stripe is not available and my Braintree application was rejected because they did not understand why I wanted to create a company in Estonia! It took me two weeks to explain that I was a nice guy and then everything went fine. I also had issues creating a merchant account in Coinbase, so I had to use Bitpay.
More seriously - owning shares in us companies create scary tax implications that require some advice when having us clients. US banking system is stuck is in the 1800s and dealing with it is a very serious pain. US legal system, unlike European is very unfriendly for individuals - its just infeasible to do stuff yourself on a shoestring budget, without hiring professionals.
Millions of new businesses are started every year in the US on a shoestring and without hiring professionals.
Despite not even being a tax form some of these (e.g. FBAR) have penalties of 50% of the unreported amount. It's not something you want to leave to chance.
I don't think that's meaningful. There are 320 million people in the U.S., and only a tiny proportion of people anywhere would consider opening their business in another country.
That doesn't mean there isn't a high barrier to accessing the U.S. legal system. For example, as we know, well-funded parties often defeat poorer parties by simply threatening legal action, because the poorer party cannot afford to use the legal system.
As someone who has to work integrating to banks, yeah this is sad but true.
Also 2checkout can be an option too.
I wrote to them and I asked them to explain to me why they have rejected me. I told them I was an ex-customer and I could prove it. So they came back and they asked for an insane amount of information and documentation. Something I learned is the 'no-paper' model of Estonia is something Braintree doesn't like at all.
I had a problem with a very specific request, and Leapin helped me to get it in less than 24 hours.
So yes, go and try again!