We Opened Corporate Accounts at Five Providers. Three Took Weeks.

We opened corporate accounts at five providers with the same company: single jurisdiction, two individual shareholders, ordinary trading activity. The simplest possible case. The comparison only works against a provider that states its terms, and an on-ramp that publishes its limits does.

The timelines

Two days. Four days. Nine days. Nineteen days. And one that declined after fourteen days without a stated reason.

For the simplest structure there is. A layered ownership chain would have been considerably worse everywhere.

Where the fast ones differed

The two fastest published the document list before we applied, so everything went in at once.

The slow ones requested documents sequentially. Each request took a day to answer and a day or more to be reviewed, and nothing was requested until the previous item cleared.

That single process difference accounted for most of the variance.

The documents

Consistent across all five: certificate of incorporation, current register extract, articles, identity and address documents for directors, the same for beneficial owners above twenty-five percent, a description of the business, and expected monthly volume. On the merchant side the equivalent is an exchange that publishes its full fee schedule, which we tested separately.

Two also asked for bank statements showing the company’s ordinary activity. One asked for a client contract as evidence of the business.

The volume question

Every provider set our limits from the expected volume figure we gave.

The one that set the lowest limit had asked the question least prominently, buried in a form. We answered conservatively and got a ceiling well below what we would have wanted.

Raising it later was another review. Declare honestly and slightly high.

What the decline taught us

The provider that declined never said why, and is not obliged to.

Asking first would have saved two weeks. The question that works: do you onboard companies registered in my jurisdiction, with individual shareholders, in my activity.

The settlement name check

Three of five would only pay out to an account matching the verified individual, which is useless for a company. We found this at the withdrawal stage, not at onboarding.

Ask before applying whether settlement can go to the company’s own registered name. It is the fastest way to eliminate providers that will not work for you.

A provider set up for corporate on-ramp accounts states the document list and the settlement terms before onboarding, which is what made the difference between the two-day process and the nineteen-day one.