Recent discoveries - Finally got all 3: Wise, Relay and Mercury, plus found good service

Apr 27 • Wins

Been a while since my last post. With the climate getting stricter in regards to compliance for US bank account openings for Non-Residents I wanted to share my recent experience:

I now managed to get:

Wise (most recently asked me to re-verify my personal address but not my business address)
Mercury (in good standing)
Relay (by far the hardest to get for me but it worked finally thanks to some new tactics that I came across, more on that below)

Planning to get two more Non Fin-techs (likely WF and BOA), plus a personal US bank account, just to be all covered.

I had struggled months getting all three accounts, especially in the beginning when I tried to do everything by myself. Also got semi-scammed by a Fiverr freelancer, but got my money back. My goal was to get all three because I wanted security / backup solutions in case one closed down or didn’t work.

So far now my main business account is Mercury (as the operational account for my business), I make use of Relay as my business savings account and Wise for transfers (owner distributions) to my personal accounts abroad. I have Belgian, German, Swiss, Czech, Singaporean and Georgian (Multi-Currency) accounts now for personal. Most of them free.

This setup works great for me.

Mercury rejected me once first. I then tweaked my application and it worked. Relay was the toughest, requesting: - All documents Mercury requested plus special proof of address, plus lease agreement and a lot of back and forth. I had bought a great info-product (playbook and video course and other materials like EIN guide) from a consulting / tax advice niche business called TaxProteX. Was a pier’s recommendation. They basically give all info from start to finish on how to successfully set up a US LLC for foreigners. Not like an agency but much more like an information resource. Highly recommend them. They helped me with Relay in the end, also connecting me with a real address service. I also followed their EIN guide when I set up the LLC and got the EIN. Went pretty lucky for me with the bank accounts sum total, since that (address) was the biggest hurdle for me. After Mercury and Relay WISE was easy (provided them with my Relay and Mercury statements).

Feel free to ask me anything. A bit short on time the coming week but I’ll try to answer.

My LLC is a single member NRA disregarded entity. I’m from Belgium but live in Singapore (Singaporean ethnically).

What I heard from a friend is that Wise for instance asks for updated Non-CRMA trading addresses now commonly. In my case they only asked me once since approval to re-verify my personal address. That’s it. Maybe because of the way I set everything up when I git the Wise account. My address never was CRMA.

Personally I now feel a lot of the fear about US banks suspending services for Non-Us clients with US LLC is just psychological / fear. From my info (and in real life from my experience now) once it works it works.

One tip that I have: For currency conversion: Move your business income (profits) to WISE business, then from there to WISE personal, then use Revolut Personal (if you have it) paying the Revolut Personal account charging the WISE Personal debit card in USD (on weekdays to avoid high weekend FX fees !). Then convert as necessary. Cheapest way to get my owner distributions now converted to the currency I want. WISE directly is a bit pricier.

Hope this helps!

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