You can name a few of these bunch of banks that are ready to open an account for a company resident there?
UOB, OCBC, Standard Chartered, etc. etc. etc. Then you can bank with that company in
Singapore or elsewhere as well. Labuan as far as I'm concerned currently has some of the best banking options going for a country with very low tax.
Consider what are your alternatives going to be?
HK has some good banks but it's hard to open there (though getting easier at the moment).
Singapore is super hard to have very low tax.
Dubai suffers from troubling banking these days and is also super expensive to set up and maintain (though I do like their included residency scheme but dislike the IT infrastructure).
Georgia is decent, though beware growing substance requirements.
Malta is utter garbage for banking so you need to bank elsewhere.
Gibratlar has no local banking to speak of so you need to bank elsewhere.
Estonia banking has gotten much tougher.
Latvia banking has gotten worse.
Isle of Man you basically need local fiduciaries. Jersey and Guernsey are basically the same.
Mauritius is mostly crap options.
Barbados is changing their rules to be less compelling and you'll probably require someone local.
Bahamas etc. all have the Caribbean work ethic and weather issues to consider.
Cayman is very tough and again options aren't amazing.
Bermuda you'll require someone local and is super expensive.
All the small islands in the Pacific and Indian ocean offer nothing for local banking and create reputational concerns.
The US is good if you have no connections to there but their support for other currencies is almost non-existent.
Cyprus is sketchy when it comes to banking at best and regulations are getting worse so it's harder to set up there and lots of accounts are being closed down so it's not a sustainable reliable solution.
Andorra good luck getting an account opened and companies there cost a fortune and take forever to get formed.
Bulgaria is ok if you're ok with 10% tax and poor write offs.
Romania is ok if you're not making much money.
Hungary is ok if you're ok with 9% tax.
Montenegro I wouldn't touch.
Puerto Rico is alright if you're willing to spend the money on the set up and being connected with the US doesn't have negative consequences for you.
I might have missed a couple but more or less that should pretty much cover the world.
The goal used to be when building a structure to have banking in a different country from the company to help with liability issues but increasingly this has gotten tougher and riskier from a sustainability standpoint because it's far more likely to get denied or have your account shut down if you're operating via a foreign company than a local company so usually we're now looking for places we can both form a company and open a
bank account. There's still options of course and EMIs are adding more but then you've got to trust EMIs, which I mostly don't and usually they are more expensive to operate with than regular banks. Some major banks will still take you depending on their compliance cycle and that's great but more and more I'd expect them not to if you don't have a local business and be planning for that eventuality (Malta and Gibraltar are the two really sad ones here because they both have super valuable use cases so you need some alternative banking options).
Substance is coming in as some people noted and anyone who is thinking long term should be thinking to operate within this not against it. The trend is for countries and banks all over the world to demand substance. Until maybe a year ago we could get pretty good banking options in Czech, now it's essentially impossible without local substance and I don't see that trend reversing. This is accompanied by tougher tax rules and policing though so thinking in terms of not avoiding substance but using it as a competitive advantage I think is the way to go. It's certainly how I'm building advantage is traveling to these countries, checking out what I can get in terms of team, infrastructure, etc. and using that to differentiate and add value. Good chance 3 years from now anyone who isn't thinking that way will be at a significant disadvantage.
