A corporate service provider forms a company for a client. The registered office is at their address, one of their people sits on the board as local director, the company secretary is theirs, and the engagement letter has one more line near the bottom: assistance with bank account opening.
The incorporation goes through in a week. The account does not. Two months later the bank writes, and the letter is not addressed to the client, who lives in another country and answers email once a week. It goes to the registered office. What will the company actually do? Who are its first customers? Where does the money for operations come from?
The provider has a complete KYC file on this client. It answers none of those questions.
Your file answers a different question
When a provider onboards a client, the question is who they are and who owns the company. Passports, proof of address, a declaration of beneficial ownership, sometimes a source of wealth statement. That is the right file for forming a company.
The bank is asking something else. Not who owns the company, but what the account is going to do, with whom, in which currencies and how often, and whether any of that can be checked. A shareholder register does not say it. A certificate of incorporation does not say it. And the client, who has just paid for a company, often assumes the provider has already said it for them.
You checked who owns the company. The bank is asking what the company will do.
Your name is already on the file
An accountant who introduces a client can at least step back. A provider usually cannot, because the provider is inside the structure.
The registered office is theirs. The local director is theirs. The documents are certified by them, collected by them and very often sent by them. When the file reaches the bank, it does not read as a client introduced by a provider. It reads as a company that the provider runs day to day, and every gap in it has the provider’s address printed on top.
This is also why a weak file costs a provider more than one lost account. A bank that has had to chase three applications from the same address starts reading the fourth one differently.
How the middle fills up
Nobody decides to become the channel between the client and the bank. It happens because it is faster.
The client is abroad, so the documents come to the office and go out from the office. A question about the business model arrives and somebody who knows the client a little answers it, to avoid another week of delay. The local director signs what needs signing, because that is part of the service. After a month the provider is the only party the bank talks to, and the client has not written a line about their own business.
Then the client goes quiet, and the bank keeps writing to the registered office.
What to put in writing
Most of this is avoided with half a page, prepared at the start and sent with the file.
What your onboarding covered, and when: identity, ownership, the documents you certified. What it did not cover: the commercial activity, the counterparties, the funding of operations. A short operating profile written and signed by the client, not by you: the first six months in real numbers, who pays, who gets paid, in which currencies. What the local director’s role is, and what it is not. And who the bank should contact for questions about the business: the client, directly.
It feels less helpful than answering everything yourself. It is received as the opposite. A bank trusts a provider that draws the line between administration and business far more than one that answers for both.
The best file from a provider is the one where the client speaks for the business and the provider speaks for the structure.
The line on your price list
Bank account opening is the one service most providers sell without controlling the result. The decision belongs to somebody else, the timing belongs to somebody else, and the client blames whoever sent the invoice.
What a provider can control is the file: what goes in, what is missing, and where it is sent. Selling that, instead of selling a result, is also the honest version of the service, and in our experience clients who hear it that way are the ones who stay.
Where Konfido sits
When a provider brings us a client, the account is opened with Konfido. The agreement is with us, the client opens it on our platform, and the regulated infrastructure underneath belongs to licensed partners working on a white label basis.
For the provider, that changes the part in the middle. We read the file before anything is submitted, including the structure, the countries and what the money is actually going to do. We ask the client directly for what is missing, so the registered office does not become the post room for every document. If the case does not hold as it stands, we say so early, to the client and to the provider, while the structure can still be adjusted. The client stays with the provider who formed the company. Our job is the account, not their client.
Nobody can promise that an account will be opened. What can be arranged is that the provider is not the one left explaining a business they were never asked to run.
One question for the providers reading this
When a bank account opening drags on, what costs you the most time: collecting the documents, explaining the structure, or chasing an answer that does not come? Tell me in the comments. I read all of them, and the next issues come from those answers.
What this newsletter is
Every two weeks I take one concrete piece of the operational side of cross-border and explain it plainly. For corporate service providers, advisors and the international clients they look after. No jargon dressed up as insight, no pitch.
If that is useful to you, the newsletter comes out every two weeks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7473721791639789568/
Mario Gesuè, Founder, Konfido
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Konfido Ltd is a financial technology company, not a bank. It coordinates banking, payment, e-money, investment and crypto-asset services provided by licensed and regulated partners under their own terms and conditions.
