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).

Hi everyone, Rodrigo here — based in Colombia, running AVW, a nearshore bilingual virtual assistant company serving US SMBs. 20+ years in SaaS sales & marketing before going all-in on this 3 years ago. We're currently pushing for 5x growth in 2026 — building out our sales system, sorting internal ops, and (like a lot of you probably) navigating the fun world of foreign-owned LLC compliance. Looking forward to learning from this group — especially around structuring international operations the right way. Happy to help anyone here who's exploring the staffing/outsourcing space too. Where's everyone else building from?