[Silhouette]

Having just switched business banks in the UK, it appears that the rules have become a bit stricter in recent years. At minimum, you're now going to require the basic business details (registration number with Companies House, etc.) and the same standard of personal ID for all the people involved as for any of the other areas now covered by the anti-laundering rules (government-issued photo ID, recent proof of current address). We also got asked a variety of basic questions about the nature of the business and its finances, including things like where we did business and how we got paid. I don't know how many of those were strictly necessary and how many were this particular bank doing its due diligence, but other banks we've used have also asked broadly similar questions in the past.

In short, starting a limited company in the UK still seems to be fairly easy, but getting access to other facilities such as banking may be a different story if you're doing something unusual.

[cajdavidson]

Check out Tide[0], I use them for my business banking and have had nothing but great experience with them. Had my account setup in ~10 minutes after being made to jump through all sorts of hoops to get a high-street bank business account setup.

[0] https://www.tide.co/

[Silhouette]

Thanks. We did take a look at them before, but unfortunately they appeared to have a few significant disadvantages for our situation (fees would have worked out very high, they seem to be very phone/app/online-centric in their access and security arrangements, missing some basic banking features).

I'm also not quite sure how they get around the anti-laundering rules that everyone else has to abide by. They mention checking various possible IDs, but what they say they need doesn't meet the standards that every other bank and financial service we've ever worked with would require, which makes me a bit suspicious about corner-cutting.

[cajdavidson]

Fair enough, I'm essentially a contractor with a Ltd company so my use case is fairly simple and I'm the only one with access, I appreciate for larger organisations it may not be quite where it needs to be yet. Probably one to keep an eye on though.

[pjc50]

It's a strange business. AML is pretty tight on regular businesses, but the UK still has opaque structures like the Scottish Limited Partnership (may be fixed in a few years) and the various Crown dependency islands are extremely secretive.