Guys, yesterday I was personally in Armenia and visited
AMERIA bank, which is said to be easy to open an account with and now I am in Georgia and visited
VTB.
Unfortunately, unless you have some business activity in these counties - you won't be able to open an account for your company. So if you have a pure
offshore company, without any office in the country of the
bank account - IT IS NOT POSSIBLE. Don't waste your time... It seems like now there is a really huge fight with money laundering.
So unless you have an old company with good history etc and or unless you are presented on the market of these countries there is no other way to open an account for a pure
offshore company.
And it would be probably same with the rest of the countries who are in
CRS agreement. There is a huge pressure from the corresponding banks in EU and USA. They would not let the payment go though and will cause many problems... So its not that Armenia or Georgia don't want to open an account. They just realize that if the company is not somehow showing that is a real "white" company with strong business intentions the will have many problems with the Central Bank and with the Corr banks. They can even get banned and lose their banking license like the Latvian ABLV. So everyone now is really paranoid here...
So either you show a ton of documents to prove that you are real and serious (contracts with partners and subcontractors, rent agreements, labor contracts... prove the structure and the show that your business is real and profitable)... Thats really sad... because if you are just a new start up its almost impossible to have all that documentation... Thanks to the money laundering business now we have this pain in the a*s..