The company was incorporated three weeks ago. The director is appointed, the first contract is ready to be signed, and a client in another country is waiting for an invoice and an account to pay it into.
The bank asks for six months of statements and copies of recent invoices. There are none. There cannot be any, because nothing can happen until the account exists. The client is asked to prove an activity he is not allowed to start.
Most people read this as bad luck or as a bank being difficult. It is neither. It is a question that has been asked badly and answered worse.
The bank is not asking for your past
What has to be decided is not whether the company existed last year. It is what this account is going to do, and whether the answer can be checked.
History is simply the cheapest evidence of that. Six months of statements answer the question without anybody having to think: this is what the money did, so this is probably what it will keep doing. When the history exists, nobody asks for anything else. When it does not exist, the question does not disappear. It only becomes more expensive to answer.
So the file of a new company is not a weaker version of a normal file. It is a different file, and it has to do the work that the statements would have done.
What replaces the history you do not have
The material exists in almost every real case. It just sits in drawers and inboxes instead of in the application.
Signed contracts, or letters of intent, or an order that has already been placed. The name and the country of the first client, not the category. Quotes that have gone out. The track record of the people behind the company, which is the part that is almost always thrown away: a founder who has run the same business elsewhere for ten years is not a new client, he is an existing business in a new wrapper, and nothing in the form ever asks him to say so. Where the initial capital comes from, and where the working capital will come from until the business pays for itself.
Then the part that costs an hour and changes everything: the first six months written down in real numbers. Not “international consultancy”. Five clients in Germany and Austria, invoices between twenty and forty thousand, one or two a month, paid in euro by bank transfer, one supplier in Poland paid monthly. That paragraph is the baseline, and once it is in the file every payment that follows is read against something instead of against nothing.
And the structure has to explain itself in one sentence. A UK company, owned by an Italian resident, selling to Germany, is perfectly ordinary and perfectly unexplained until somebody writes down why it is built that way. Whoever has to guess the reason will not guess in your favour.
What makes a new company look worse than it is
Almost all the damage is self inflicted, and it comes from trying to look bigger or more flexible than the business actually is.
Describing the activity broadly, to keep options open. “Consultancy and trading, worldwide” reads as nothing at all, and a company that could do anything anywhere is a company nobody can predict. Inflating the forecast to look serious, which sets a baseline the account will never live up to. A registered office that turns out to be an address shared with four hundred other companies. A name containing capital, invest, finance or trust when the company does none of those things, which makes the first question a regulatory one. A shareholder register left blank, or filled in and never signed, on a document that is supposed to prove who owns the thing.
And the most expensive one: applying to four institutions at the same time, on the theory that one will say yes. They rarely say yes in parallel, and a refusal follows the company to the next application. The first attempt is worth more than the other three.
The order that nobody tells you
Banking is treated as the last step after incorporation. It is the step that should be decided first, because it decides the ones before it.
Where the company is registered, what it is called, which activity codes it carries, who is on the register and who signs: each of those makes the account easier or harder to open, and each of them is trivial to change before incorporation and slow and visible to change afterwards. Choosing a jurisdiction because it was quick and cheap, and discovering later that almost nobody will bank that combination of country, owner and activity, is not a fee. It is months, and it is months spent with an invoice outstanding and a client waiting.
The question to ask before the company is formed is not what it costs to set up. It is who is going to hold the account, and what they will want to see.
Where Konfido sits
The account is opened with us. The agreement is with Konfido, the client opens it on our platform, and the regulated infrastructure underneath belongs to licensed partners and works on a white label basis.
For a company with no history, what matters is what happens before anything is submitted. We look at the case first: the structure, the countries, who owns it, what the money is actually going to do. Then we say what will be asked, what is missing, and what has to be written down before the file goes anywhere. Sometimes we say that the structure as it stands is going to be hard to bank, and it is better to hear that while the company can still be changed than to hear nothing for five weeks and then a refusal with no reason attached.
Nobody can promise that an account will be opened. What can be arranged is that the case is looked at by somebody before it is submitted, and that nothing goes in half explained.
What this newsletter is
Every two weeks I take one concrete piece of the operational side of cross-border and explain it plainly. For advisors who want a clearer view of the part that sits next to their work, and for the international clients living it. 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.
