Non-Resident Business Bank Account Canada: Opening Stages

What to take away

The short version

Canadian banks treat a non-resident owner as a higher-risk customer, and they do it slowly. The caution comes from the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act and the federal anti-money-laundering rules that FINTRAC supervises, not from the mood of the manager at the counter.

You prepare the corporate and tax documents. The bank then runs identity and source-of-funds checks on the owners. That second half takes longer, and being well organised does not shorten it.

Business deposits are covered by the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation (CDIC) when they sit at a member institution, and that coverage is calculated separately from an owner's personal deposits.

Stage by stage

The table below is the order most files follow. The durations suit a single-owner corporation in Ontario or British Columbia. They stretch with extra-provincial registration, more owners, or a trust in the structure.

Two stages can overlap. The business number and the document set run together, because the ownership chart is built from the registry extract rather than the tax file. At account opening the bank settles ownership first, so have that answer ready before you book anything.

Filing routes differ by province. An Ontario corporation registers through the Ontario Business Registry, a British Columbia one through BC Registries and Online Services, and a federal one through Corporations Canada — which still leaves extra-provincial registration in the province where the branch sits.

What has to exist before what

The business number is the hard gate. A branch will book the appointment, but the file does not enter compliance until the CRA business number — requested on the CRA's form RC1 — the articles of incorporation, and government photo identification for every owner above 25 per cent are on the desk. The CRA lists the registration steps on canada.ca.

The second gate is a Canadian address for service, or a resident representative holding a written mandate. A postal box rarely satisfies a chartered bank, which normally wants a physical address plus a lease or utility document in the corporation's name.

The third gate is name consistency. An owner's name has to match across the passport, the provincial registry, and the CRA record. A middle name present in one place and absent in another blocks the file.

The chartered banks that take most of these files — RBC, TD, BMO, Scotiabank and CIBC among them — decide branch by branch, and each adds its own document list on top of the federal rules. Provincial credit unions run a parallel route with a membership test of their own: membership normally comes first, through a membership share and a local connection to the credit union's area, and only then does a non-resident business file get a hearing. Credit unions requirements sets out what they check.

Where it stalls

The name-matching stall: the file sits untouched for six to ten weeks, the account manager stops calling, and the cause is a spelling difference between a passport and the provincial registry.

Branches do not chase it. The compliance queue answers to head office, not to the manager who took the appointment, and that manager often cannot see why the hold was applied.

A second failure surfaces later. The account opens, then the first large incoming payment triggers a review and a freeze, because source-of-funds evidence was requested and never supplied. The cause is silence on both sides. Fee timing also matters from the first month, and fees sorted by when sets out the order the charges arrive in.

What to do while waiting

The business checking checklist runs the same items in dependency order, so two documents that wait on each other are easier to see.

Common questions