Show HN: Banking Access Index – 19 US banking providers, 8 countries, CC-BY

Which US business banking providers actually accept founders who live outside the US — documented from provider-published sources, not anecdotes. 19 providers, 239 claims that survived independent re-verification against the original source pages. Where a provider publishes nothing, the cell says so instead of guessing.

Last verified: July 2026CC BY 4.0 — cite with attribution239 verified claims

How to read this table

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Explicitly accepted

The provider publishes an acceptance statement covering founders resident in this country.

Explicitly restricted

The founder is barred — but by three different kinds of evidence, from a named prohibited list down to a blanket rule that names no country at all. Every restricted cell says which; see below.

○

No published restriction

Not on the provider’s published restricted list, but no explicit acceptance statement either. Absence of restriction is not acceptance.

—

No published policy found

No citable provider-published policy found either way.

“No published policy found” is four different situations

39 of the 152 country cells resolve to unknown. Reviewing them together showed they were not one state but four, and the difference changes what you should do next — so every unknown cell now carries a second field naming which one it is, and a citation recording where we looked. “We could not find it” is only useful to you if you can see where we searched.

—

No policy published

The provider publishes no country-of-residence policy anywhere we looked. The citation on this cell is the page such a policy would live on.

—

Named, but not as residency policy

Provider material names this country — as a wire destination, for spend-management support, in marketing, or as a country of incorporation. None of those is evidence about founder residency.

—

Absent from a non-exhaustive list

The provider publishes a supported-country list that is explicitly non-exhaustive, so this country’s absence from it carries no information in either direction.

—

Provider pages conflict

Two live provider pages disagree and the provider publishes no single verdict. This is an unresolved conflict, not an absence of information.

“Explicitly restricted” is three different situations

61 cells resolve to restricted, and only 9 of them name the country on a published prohibited list. In 40, the provider names no country anywhere — the bar comes from a blanket rule such as “US citizens or permanent residents only”. The answer you get is the same in both cases, and it is correct in both. What differs is how much is published about you specifically, which is what you need if you plan to ask the provider or appeal. So each restricted cell now names its evidence type too.

Named on a prohibited list

The provider publishes a prohibited or unsupported country list and this country appears on it by name. This is the strongest form of restriction evidence in the index.

Absent from a closed eligibility list

The provider publishes an eligibility list that its own wording makes exhaustive — residence in a listed country is stated as a requirement, not an example. Absence from a closed list is a deduction from what the provider stated, not an inference from silence.

Derived from a blanket rule

The provider names no countries anywhere. The restriction follows from a blanket rule — US citizens or permanent residents only, or foreign business customers cannot apply. The conclusion holds for the reader, but no country-level source exists behind this cell.

Acceptance by country of residence

Provider	Non-resident stance	India	China	UK	Canada	Pakistan	Nigeria	Turkey	Brazil
Mercury	Accepts non-resident founders	○	○	○	○	✕	✕	○	○
Relay	Conditional	○	○	✓	✓	✕	✕	○	○
Wise Business	Conditional	✕	✕	✓	✓	✕	✕	✕	✕
Payoneer	Accepts non-resident founders	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	—	—	—
Brex	Conditional	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Novo	US residents/persons only	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕
Bluevine	Conditional	✓	—	✓	✓	—	—	—	—
Found	US residents/persons only	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕
Lili	Conditional	✓	✓	✓	✓	✕	✕	✕	✓
NorthOneSuperseded	US residents/persons only	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕
Airwallex (US)	Accepts non-resident founders	○	○	○	○	✕	✕	✕	○
Slash	Accepts non-resident founders	○	—	—	—	✕	—	—	—
Meow	Conditional	✓	○	✓	✓	○	—	✓	✓
Rho	Conditional	○	○	○	○	○	○	○	○
Revolut Business	Conditional	✓	✕	✓	✓	✕	✕	✕	✓
Grasshopper Bank	US residents/persons only	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕
Chase Business Banking	Conditional	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Bank of America Small Business	US residents/persons only	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕
Wells Fargo Business Banking	US residents/persons only	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—

Hover any cell for the underlying note. Country columns describe the founder’s country of residence, not the LLC’s state of formation. Full evidence quotes are in the JSON download and in each provider’s detail card below.

Details column — one icon per dimension of the provider’s card: owner ID, account rails, receiving from abroad, card issuance, onboarding, phone & 2FA. Color tracks the published state: green = published positive, amber = conditional or partial, red = published restriction, gray = no published statement. Hover for the value; click to jump to the cited sources.

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Provider details and sources

How this index is built

Every claim starts as a verbatim quote from a fetchable source — the provider’s own help center, terms of service, or published country list (tier T1), an official provider blog or support statement (T2), or a dated user report (T3, labeled as such). A separate adversarial verification pass then re-fetched every source and discarded any claim whose quote was absent, misread its context, or overreached — 239 of 268 mined claims survived. Country cells are deliberately tri-state: a country absent from a provider’s restricted list is reported as “no published restriction,” never converted into “accepted.”

Rows marked †(receiving from abroad, card issuance, phone & 2FA) were added after that pass by single-pass primary-source research — same quote-and-cite standard, but not yet through the adversarial re-verification the core went through, so they are excluded from the verified-claim count until the next quarterly release re-verifies them.

Provider policies change without notice, and application outcomes also depend on provider-side review of each business. This index documents what providers publish, as of the verification date — it is a map of published policy, not a prediction of any individual application outcome. Source pages are snapshotted to the Internet Archive at verification time. Full methodology: evidence basis.

Published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Cite as: Global Solo Banking Access Index, globalsolo.global/data/banking-access-index, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21336393. If a claim conflicts with what you observe, write to jett@globalsolo.global with specifics — the index updates when new ground truth surfaces.

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*Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC. FDIC deposit insurance covers the failure of an insured bank. Deposits in checking and savings accounts are FDIC-insured through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A. and their Sweep Program Network Banks. Certain conditions must be satisfied for pass-through FDIC insurance to apply.

Some providers in this index (including Mercury and Wise Business) have affiliate relationships with Global Solo on other pages of this site. Links in this index point to provider homepages and source documents only — no affiliate parameters. Inclusion, ordering, and cell values are determined by the published-evidence methodology above, not by commercial relationships.