Corporate banking
What a UAE bank account application must contain
Corporate documents are the easy half. The half that decides it is the narrative and the source-of-wealth evidence, and neither appears on the bank's own checklist.
The reality
What the bank is actually deciding.
Every bank publishes a document list and every list looks similar: trade licence, memorandum and articles, certificate of incorporation, share certificates, board resolution authorising the account and appointing signatories, passports and Emirates IDs of shareholders and signatories, proof of address, and the tenancy or Ejari. Where a shareholder is a company, the same set is required for it, and for its shareholders, and so on until the chain reaches natural persons. Add certificates of good standing and incumbency for offshore entities, attested and in date.
What the published list does not tell you is that this material only establishes who you are. It does not answer the question compliance actually has to write down, which is what this company does and why its money moves the way it does. That answer comes from a set of documents nobody asks for and everybody should supply: a short business description, signed contracts or letters of intent with named counterparties, invoices or a pipeline, a projection of turnover by currency and country, and evidence of the shareholders' own wealth. Applications that include these clear compliance markedly faster, because there is nothing left to ask.
What gets asked for
- Corporate
- Licence, MOA, incorporation certificate, share certificates
- Authority
- Board resolution appointing signatories and authorising the account
- Individuals
- Passport, Emirates ID, proof of address for every UBO and signatory
- Chain
- Repeated for corporate shareholders until natural persons are reached
- Offshore layers
- Certificates of good standing and incumbency, attested
- Not on the list
- Business narrative, contracts, projections, source of wealth
Where the time goes
Proportions indicative — they shift with visa count, premises and activity.
The file
What to put in front of them.
- Build the ownership chart firstOne page, every layer, every percentage, ending in named individuals. If it takes you an hour, it will take a compliance officer three.
- Collect the corporate set for each entity in the chainIncluding dormant intermediate holding companies. They are part of the chain and cannot be omitted because nothing happens in them.
- Check every document is in dateCertificates of good standing expire. Proof of address is usually required within three months. Expired documents are the most common cause of a second round.
- Write the two-page narrativeActivity, customers, countries, currencies, expected volumes, and why the structure is shaped as it is.
- Attach commercial evidenceContracts, letters of intent, invoices, a website that matches the licensed activity. This is what turns an assertion into a file.
Related
Questions
The corporate set — licence, MOA, share certificates, board resolution — plus identification for every beneficial owner and signatory, and the full ownership chain where corporate shareholders are involved.
Most banks want to see premises evidence. A flexi-desk is not disqualifying but should be explained rather than left to interpretation.
The same document set is required for it, usually with a certificate of good standing and incumbency, attested. It adds weeks, so start early.
More than people expect. A site that describes activities the licence does not cover is a direct contradiction in the file.
One question
Where will the money actually come from?
Then the account is a cross-border file, and the compliance question is which countries and in which currencies. Name the corridors in the application rather than waiting to be asked — an unexplained payment from a jurisdiction the bank did not expect is what freezes accounts in month three.
What the file has to containOr just ask usThen substance is the question rather than geography. A local trading history, an Ejari and a customer list make this straightforward; a flexi-desk with no domestic contracts yet is where onboarding slows, and the fix is evidence rather than a different bank.
Why applications get declinedOr just ask usThen source of wealth carries the file, and 'savings' is not an answer. A share sale agreement, a property disposal, audited accounts from an overseas company or a series of tax returns are. Assemble that before the first meeting, not after the first question.
Evidencing source of fundsOr just ask us