Setting up local accounts where your business operates
Setting up local accounts where your business operates seems as though it should be a very, very simple concept. But it can—and does-pose significant business challenges.
My intention is to make this comparatively straightforward.
The challenge is this: Opening and managing foreign currency accounts in foreign jurisdictions is actually really, really hard. It is a very difficult process and to some extent, getting harder as anti-money laundering regulations become more complex and onerous by jurisdiction.
Opening an FX account in today's economy is more challenging than it has been historically. Setting up an account outside of North America is especially difficult for a US or a Canadian business.
First, you need to prove that you are who you say you are. Oftentimes it comes down to the fact that you need wet signatures on the account opening documents. You actually need to sign a piece of paper and then courier that document across the ocean to be received by a foreign bank. Another challenge is that these documents could be in a foreign language, or, depending on the jurisdiction, the documents may need to be notarized.
In some jurisdictions, outside of the NATO countries or Commonwealth effectively, you might need a separate process beyond notarization, called an Apostille. If you've ever tried to open a bank account in the Middle East or Africa, you may have heard that term. Apostilling can be very cumbersome. Oftentimes people actually have to get on a plane, fly to another jurisdiction, and show themselves in person, face-to-face, to open an account. It can be a very challenging process at best, very daunting.
Our simple concept is to find a way to make opening FX accounts in other jurisdictions easier: easier to open accounts, easier to utilize those accounts, with less ongoing administration, less burden, to simply give our clients the ability to move faster.
So that’s the concept behind our Multi-Currency Accounts: to help you open foreign-denominated accounts more quickly to support your business and help your business operations become more global.
Learning from our own experience
I’d like to add some context as to why we are getting into this space.
It’s part through necessity and need: we experience the pain directly ourselves.
As a director of our business in 16 countries around the world, every time we open a bank account, I have to sign documents myself, or one of my counterparts in our organization has to do it.
What we have found, in managing the more than 1,500 bank accounts all around the world that make up our network, is that this is incredibly burdensome process just to open up the bank account, to maintain that bank account, to do the KYC /AML process, and to manage multiple banking relationships.
Having lived through the process and its challenges ourselves, we wanted to find a better way—a way to make this easier for our customers.
What we are attempting to do is to improve that experience for our customers. We’re taking our network of more than a hundred banking partners around the world, and packaging their capabilities and services, and making transactional account access available on our network to all of our customers, enabling them to access the currencies we support from a payments perspective.
That’s become our mission with our Multi-Currency Accounts: to provide transactional account access to all of our customers in foreign jurisdictions with the end goal of making it easier for them to do business globally as a customer of Corpay.
We want you to think of us as your international transactional partner of choice whenever you operate or do business outside of your home jurisdiction. So if that’s North America, Europe, UK, Australasia or APAC, Latin America, South America, wherever the case might be, we help you grow your business.
What is the MCA?
The product that we have deployed in-market is effectively a transactional account, in your business’s name, supporting 25 different currencies, that you can access on our transactional platform.
This allows you to send and receive payments and manage those accounts all on our one tech stack, one platform. So wherever in the world those accounts may sit, you have one single point of access to send and receive payments—to act like a local in terms of how you actually transact business in that particular market.
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