To begin with, I know that there are other threads about this, however, for the purpose of future searchers, I thought it might be useful to open a separate thread, so that people know about the fact that this provider is indeed troublesome. Admins, if you find this out of the context of the acceptable rules, please feel free to delete this as it is not my intention to "trespass".
I wanted to open a corporate account with
Bankera so that in order to interact with a
crypto exchange. I paid the 450 euros "account review fee" which was already suspicious and waited. And waited. And waited....
It took a bit over a month to get the account verified, not before I was asked for any possible invasive detail. From contracts, deliverables, to an audit about my personal professional experience. Now an interesting detail is that between every push-pull exchange of emails would pass at least 24 hours of delay. Whether during verification or other later part.
After getting the account verified, I moved some parked money to the newly opened account, and then tried to wire some to an exchange. The transfer got stuck in a pending state for a couple of days, then the "payment monitoring" crew got on my neck. I was then asked to show proof that I own the exchange account (OK), satellite
bank account statements (annoyance starting), proof of source of funds of the company, invoices,
crypto wallet addresses, and last but not least, I was asked to demonstrate the source of wealth/funds of
the company that I was billing with invoices.
Yes, I was asked to prove the source of funds of a company I do not own or have anything to do with.
Explaining that this is not possible nor reasonable requirements, they were eventually pleased to tell me that if I made the transfer again, they would approve it. And so I did. Guess? it bounced, with a message in Lithuanian saying the transfer bounced because of "reason: other". I tried to wire again lower sums and it happened again. Of course that they billed me a penalty for a bounced payment (w00t?) multiple times without explaining why. Trying to contact their support to investigate what happened, I was told that they will give me a response within 3 business days. Seeing that the communication pace was simply unacceptable and that no-one on their behalf was in any way forthcoming to help me sort out these problems, I resorted to close the account (extra 200 euros to pay, you thought closing an account is for free?). Oh, and they never even bothered to write me an email that the account was closed, I just simply cannot log into it anymore.
To conclude my experience with them: it appears that they are severely understaffed and have poor business standards with anything that has to do with a prompt reply. It is unreasonable that it should take over a month to open a bank account anywhere, and it is not reasonable to have to wait for days on end to get a simple answer to a simple problem. Also, the "account review fee" shows that they might be suffering from high client churn, at least for non-EU companies/individuals. The fact that I was interacting with an exchange might not have been in my favor, and in this regard I think they might be just tormenting clients so that they are pushed to use Bankera's crypto platform (
spectrocoin), which I am sure might have been more "friendly".
So long and thanks for all the fish (and good riddance, too!).