Opening a US business account for your LLC as a non-resident

“As an entrepreneur today, you have to spread yourself so wide and absorb so much knowledge that it sometimes makes you feel sick.” That sentence comes from the publisher of this magazine, looking back on his own US company setup — and it describes precisely the stage this article deals with. The company exists on paper, the EIN application is out the door — and now the LLC needs somewhere to actually hold and move money. For an owner sitting in Germany, this is where the project routinely stalls. Classic US branch banks tend to insist on a personal visit, and what they expect from non-resident aliens varies from branch to branch and from month to month.

What follows sorts this out: why the company’s EIN matters and your missing SSN mostly does not, which documents a realistic application needs, and what actually causes rejections. Just as important, we say for each claim how solid the evidence behind it is — because thin evidence is the defining problem of this topic.

One thing stated plainly before anything else: everything here is market information — not a recommendation, not legal advice, not tax advice. Providers are described neutrally, based on what they themselves publish. Nobody named below is a tip, no link earns us anything, and no bank owes anyone an account. The rest of this series is collected in the Emigration section.

Where the evidence is solid — and where it is not

Honesty first: this topic rests on three kinds of evidence, and they are not equally strong.

Regulatory sources — firm ground. The EIN side is governed by the IRS, which publishes the rules; we cite them below. On the banking side, two official anchors exist. First, US banks are legally required to run a Customer Identification Program: 31 CFR § 1020.220 obliges them to verify name, date of birth, address and an identification number for every account holder. Much of the document list further down is not provider whim — it is this rule flowing downhill. Second, the FDIC publishes what deposit insurance does and does not cover, and runs an official database to check any bank’s status.

Provider material — interested parties. No regulation spells out what fintechs may additionally demand from non-residents specifically. Everything known about that layer comes from the providers’ own marketing blogs or from commercial portals that earn money selling formation services — parties with skin in the game. We use these sources because nothing better exists, and we flag every claim that rests on them.

First-hand experience — one household’s worth. The publisher of this magazine has been through this process himself. His experience appears below, clearly labelled, with its limits stated. It is texture, not statistics.

Blur these three lines and you end up citing advertising as if it were regulation. We keep them separate throughout.

The EIN, not the SSN, is what the account hangs on

Start with the misunderstanding we encounter most: “No social security number, no US account.” For a company account, that logic is wrong. What the bank needs as the tax identifier is the LLC’s own EIN (Employer Identification Number) — a number belonging to the company, not to you. Your personal SSN or ITIN is a separate matter.

On the EIN itself, the ground is firm, because the IRS writes the rules. Three things follow from the official SS-4 instructions:

The number costs nothing. The IRS states that an EIN is obtainable “free of charge on IRS.gov”. Anyone invoicing you for one is charging for the errand, not the number.

The online route is shut for you. The instructions leave no room for interpretation: an applicant with no legal residence, principal place of business, or principal office in the US or its territories

“can’t use the online application to obtain an EIN.”

What remains is fax or phone. International applicants send Form SS-4 by fax to the dedicated international fax line, or call the IRS’s international EIN telephone line — a call the IRS notes is not toll-free and is answered only during the agency’s stated business hours. We deliberately print neither the numbers nor the hours here: they are exactly the kind of detail that changes silently, and a number that was correct when we wrote this may misdirect you on the day you apply. The authoritative, current contact details are always in the IRS Instructions for Form SS-4 — read them fresh on the day you file, and take the numbers from nowhere else.

This bottleneck is why the EIN, of all things, dictates the tempo of the entire undertaking. (Our German edition carries a dedicated piece on EIN and ITIN applications; an English version is in the works.)

One caveat to the EIN principle deserves its own sentence: a handful of providers also want a personal SSN or ITIN from the human behind the LLC. Relay documents this requirement in its own material. That does not overturn the rule — it is an extra bar that individual providers set.

The providers non-residents actually turn to

A handful of fintechs dominate this niche because they let you open remotely, without boarding a plane. The list below describes, it does not rank, and it certainly does not advise. Bear in mind: every single claim here traces back to exactly one commercial source — either the provider or a portal with its own sales interest. Independent confirmation does not exist, which is a structural weakness of this entire topic, not just of this article.

• Mercury — business banking, popular with owners abroad. A reported change: a plain registered agent address supposedly no longer passes as a business address; a genuine US street address or virtual office is said to be needed. Our only source is one commercial portal (LLC University); Mercury itself has, as far as we could find, not confirmed it. A pointer, not a rule — verify against Mercury’s own current terms before relying on it.
• Wise Business — provides US account details for USD receipts and is designed around cross-border cases; the non-resident process is described by Wise itself.
• Relay — business banking; demands an SSN/ITIN according to its own documentation. As with every claim in this list, the provider can change this at any time; only its current published requirements count.

Before signing up anywhere, settle one distinction: a genuine bank account and an e-money or payment account are not interchangeable — for your bookkeeping and for the protection of your funds, the gap is substantial.

And here, unusually for this topic, an independent check exists. Most platforms above are not banks — they sit in front of partner banks. The FDIC is explicit that deposit insurance belongs to the account held at an FDIC-insured bank, not to whatever fintech brand you see on the app. The right question is therefore never “is this provider insured” but “which bank holds the money, and is that bank on the FDIC’s books?” The FDIC’s official BankFind database answers exactly that — feed it the partner bank’s name. It is a verification that does not run through anyone’s marketing department. Use it.

Pure payment processors come up often in this context; we leave them out deliberately, because we found no citable source on their current requirements.

First-hand: what the publisher’s own paperwork looked like

Alongside the documented sources, we can add first-hand experience — one person’s, clearly labelled as such. The publisher of this magazine set up a Wyoming LLC himself, and his path traces exactly the pattern this article describes: the company was fast, the money was slow.

The formation was the easy part. He paid the formation service on a Wednesday; a few days later, the completed formation paperwork was sitting in his inbox. Compared to what a German GmbH formation demands, his verdict was blunt: the LLC route was, in his words, “a joke” — in the flattering sense. The LLC now handles his e-commerce operation’s international trade, with exceptions.

The account was not in the box. His plan had been to have the US account bundled into the formation package. That fell through: the service delivered the company, an account was not part of the deal. Anyone assuming “formation package = working account” should read their package description twice — his did not include it, and he only confronted the banking question after the company already existed. That is the wrong order, and he would tell you so himself.

The workaround ran through Revolut — where, crucially, he already held a customer relationship, which meant the provider was not starting from zero with him. Even so, what stood out was the depth of the review. Revolut demanded a granular account of the sales operation: what is sold, to whom, over which channels, into which markets — including his plans to start selling into the US. That squares with what the providers themselves document about their KYC checks, and it squares with the CIP logic described above; the anecdote does not prove the pattern, it merely matches it. The practical lesson he took from it: the business description is not a formality you improvise in a text box. It is the substance of the review.

A contrasting data point from the same desk: for unrelated diversification reasons, the publisher also opened an account at Bank of Georgia — entirely remotely from home, completed in about a week, debit card delivered by post. The friction there was of a different kind: the bank employee joined the first video call 45 minutes late, and the document signing could not be finished purely digitally after all — “too much and too little digitalisation at the same time,” as he put it. (That opening is a story of its own and gets its own piece in this series.) The comparison is instructive for one reason only: remote account openings are workable in more than one jurisdiction, but nowhere is the friction zero — it just sits in different places. In the US case, it sits in compliance; in the Georgian case, it sat in process.

And the honest limit, stated in the same breath: this is one person, a handful of providers, one moment in time — and for Revolut an unusually favourable one, given the pre-existing relationship. It carries no statistical weight, and “take Revolut” does not follow from it. The takeaway we do draw — and it stands on the documented requirements above even without the anecdotes — is this: treat the account as the bottleneck from day one, not as an afterthought.

The document list, realistically

Details vary by provider, but the pile on your desk ends up looking similar everywhere — and the core of it is not arbitrary: the CIP rule cited above obliges the bank behind your provider to verify identity, address and identification number. Assemble:

• The company’s formation paperwork: articles of organization or the state’s confirmation of registration.
• Evidence of the EIN. What this looks like depends on your application route: the CP-575 letter is the standard IRS confirmation, but a phone application means the number is given verbally on the call with the letter trailing by post, and a fax application is answered by fax. Non-residents therefore frequently hold something other than the textbook CP-575 — whatever the IRS sent, keep it exactly as it arrived.
• The operating agreement — routinely requested.
• A valid passport for each owner.
• Proof of your address in your home country — a recent utility bill or bank statement. Frequently forgotten, reliably checked.
• A US business address — with the reported Mercury practice in the back of your mind.
• A well-drafted description of the business: where revenue comes from, which countries you serve, which channels you sell through. Providers’ own documentation makes clear this is scrutinised closely, and the publisher’s Revolut review confirms the flavour of it: expect to explain your sales operation in detail, not in a sentence. Budget real effort for it.

The actual reasons applications die

Rejections are seldom mysterious. The same handful of patterns recur:

1. Registered agent address submitted as business address. Providers now screen for this; it has become a standard rejection ground.
2. Tax ID missing or mixed up. Without a valid EIN nothing moves; swap SSN for EIN, or cite a number not yet issued, and the application is dead.
3. A provider’s SSN/ITIN requirement you cannot meet. Documented at Relay — without the number, you need a different provider.
4. A business model compliance cannot place. KYC filters exclude whole sectors, opaquely and at the provider’s discretion. This is where a vague or hasty business description costs the most.
5. Details that do not line up. Passport, formation papers and address proof must agree on name, address and country to the letter. Mismatches produce queries at best, rejection at worst.

Set expectations accordingly: no application is guaranteed to succeed. A provider may decline a formally flawless file and owe you no explanation. Have a second provider in reserve instead of staking everything on one.

Timing: what actually eats the weeks

You will find concrete week-counts for the full path from formation to working account circulating online. We do not repeat any of them as general figures: they stem from anecdotes, and no official or systematically collected source backs any of them.

What we can offer instead are the timings from the one case we can vouch for, with the caveat that a single case proves nothing. In the publisher’s run: formation paid on a Wednesday, completed papers in the inbox within days. The account, by contrast, only moved after a detailed compliance review of his sales operation — and only at a provider that already knew him. His remote Georgian opening, for comparison, took about a week end to end. Take these as calibration, not as promises: your providers, your business model and your paper trail will produce different numbers.

What is demonstrable is which step structurally cannot be hurried: the EIN. Since the IRS closes the online form to applicants without an SSN, fax or telephone are your only options — and the agency’s internal processing time becomes an immovable block in your schedule. With the EIN in hand, the opening itself frequently takes days, though address or business-description queries can stretch it.

The practical takeaway holds no matter what the true average is: file the EIN application early and error-free. No other single decision buys you more time on this route.

Where this sits in the larger project

An account is a component, not a destination. Upstream sit the choice of state (which US state) and the registered agent; in parallel run the ongoing costs and obligations plus BOI/FinCEN compliance. (Dedicated pieces on the registered agent, compliance, and the Germany–USA tax question exist in our German edition; English versions are in preparation.)

And one point that gets suppressed too often: a US account alters your German tax position not one bit. An account in Wyoming, Delaware or anywhere else does not relocate you — and your residence, not your bank, is what decides. What you actually owe depends on your residence, substance and activity, is individual, and belongs in front of a qualified adviser — an LLC is not a tax arrangement by itself.

The short version

The number a US business account hangs on is the LLC’s EIN; your missing SSN is usually irrelevant, though individual providers do demand a personal SSN/ITIN on top. The EIN itself is free — but reachable for you only by fax or phone, which makes it the pacing item; take the current contact details from the IRS’s own SS-4 instructions on the day you apply. Bring formation papers, EIN proof, operating agreement, passport, home-address evidence and a genuine US business address — and above all a business description that a compliance reviewer can categorise on first read. The publisher’s own run confirms the shape of it: the company took days, the account took the work.

Everything we could pin to a primary source, we pinned; everything that lives only in provider blogs, we labelled; everything that rests on one person’s experience, we said so. Before any application, confirm the current requirements with the provider directly.