Global Custody and Banking

Why Global Banking Is Harder Than It Sounds

Opening a bank account sounds like a simple errand. For families with substantial wealth spread across multiple countries, it is often anything but. Regulatory frameworks put in place over the past two decades — aimed at combating money laundering, tax evasion, and financial crime — have made banks worldwide far more cautious about onboarding customers who are not straightforward domestic residents with straightforward domestic income.

A family with a U.S. trust, a British property-holding company, a Swiss brokerage account, and a Singaporean family member can easily find that each institution treats every other piece of the structure as a complicating factor — one that requires additional documentation, committee review, or outright declining of the relationship. Understanding this dynamic is the starting point for thinking about global banking realistically.

KYC and Onboarding: The Reality on the Ground

Know Your Customer — usually called KYC — is the bank's legal obligation to verify who it is dealing with before accepting a new relationship. For a single individual with straightforward residency and income, KYC is a paperwork formality. For a family with layered entities, multiple beneficial owners, and cross-border connections, it becomes a substantial undertaking.

Banks typically need to identify every beneficial owner above a certain ownership threshold in each entity seeking an account. A family limited partnership, for example, may require the bank to document the general partner, the limited partners, the ultimate individual human beings behind any corporate limited partners, and potentially the advisers or trustees acting on the account. Gathering and certifying that documentation across multiple parties and jurisdictions can take weeks or months.

Non-residents face a particular challenge. Many banks — including some well-known ones — have quietly restricted or closed their non-resident business lines because the compliance cost of maintaining them exceeds the commercial benefit. Families sometimes find that a bank they have used for years declines to open an account for a new holding entity simply because that entity is domiciled in a jurisdiction the bank no longer supports. This is not a personal rejection; it is a regulatory economics problem.

A hypothetical family — a founder who sold her logistics company and relocated from Germany to Singapore while retaining European real estate through a family holding structure — might need to approach five or more institutions before finding one willing and equipped to bank the full set of entities involved.

Account Structures Across Jurisdictions

Families sometimes maintain accounts in multiple countries for legitimate operational reasons: paying local property expenses, meeting payroll for household staff, holding proceeds from a local business sale, or satisfying local regulatory requirements for an operating entity. Private banking relationships can sometimes span borders — a private bank with offices in multiple countries may be able to consolidate some of this, though even large institutions have jurisdictions where their reach is limited.

Custody — the safekeeping of securities — is a related but distinct function from deposit banking. A custodian holds financial assets on behalf of the owner, settling trades and providing statements. Families with investment portfolios in multiple countries may maintain separate custody relationships at local institutions, at global custodians with broad reach, or some combination. Each arrangement has implications for consolidation reporting and tax documentation.

Common account structures families evaluate across jurisdictions include:

• Personal accounts for resident family members in the country where they live — generally the most straightforward to open and maintain.
• Corporate or entity accounts for holding companies, investment vehicles, or operating subsidiaries — subject to full beneficial-ownership KYC on all underlying owners.
• Trust accounts opened in the name of the trustee for the benefit of the trust — often requiring documentation of the trust deed, the grantor's identity, the trustee's authority, and the identities of beneficiaries.
• Custody accounts at global or regional custodians to hold securities portfolios in specific markets.

The Reporting Knock-Ons of Every New Account

This is the dimension that surprises many families: opening an account in another country is rarely a private act. Most developed countries — and many developing ones — participate in automatic exchange-of-information regimes. Under frameworks like FBAR, FATCA, and CRS, foreign financial institutions are required to identify account holders who are tax residents of other countries and report information about those accounts to the relevant home-country tax authority.

For a U.S. person (a category defined broadly by U.S. tax law to include citizens, green card holders, and certain residents), virtually every foreign financial account carries disclosure requirements, including the obligation to file annual reports detailing the account's existence and, in some cases, its balance. Similar obligations exist in many other jurisdictions. A qualified CPA or international tax attorney must evaluate any particular family's specific reporting requirements — these rules are detailed, the penalties for non-compliance can be severe, and the analysis depends heavily on the family's residency and citizenship facts.

The practical implication is that the banking map and the tax-reporting map cannot be designed independently. Every time a new account is opened, the question "what does this require us to disclose, to whom, and when?" should be asked before the account is established — not afterward.

Coordinating Into One Reporting Picture

A family with accounts at eight institutions across five countries, denominated in four currencies, will receive eight sets of statements — formatted differently, using different date conventions, arriving on different schedules, and requiring currency translation before any meaningful consolidated view is possible. This is not a hypothetical inconvenience; it is the lived reality for many internationally active families.

Consolidated reporting technology can aggregate data from multiple custodians and banks into a single report, translating currencies, calculating performance, and organizing assets by class, geography, or entity. Some families build this capability inside a family office; others rely on their primary private bank or wealth manager to provide it; others engage specialist reporting platforms. The quality of the underlying data feeds matters enormously — a consolidated report is only as accurate as the raw data coming in from each institution.

Currency translation is its own discipline within consolidated reporting. The same portfolio can look meaningfully different depending on the reference currency used for reporting, particularly in periods of exchange-rate volatility. Families and their advisers typically agree on a reference currency for consolidated reporting purposes while remaining aware that actual purchasing power in each jurisdiction depends on local currency balances.

Practical Considerations and Questions to Ask

Families navigating global banking arrangements — and the professionals who advise them — often find it useful to ask:

• Does the family genuinely need accounts in each jurisdiction, or have some accumulated historically and could be rationalized?
• Is there a primary banking or custody relationship with sufficient global reach to consolidate some functions?
• Has the reporting obligation triggered by each account been evaluated by a qualified international tax professional before the account was opened?
• How does information from each institution flow into the consolidated reporting picture, and how frequently is it reconciled?
• What happens if a key bank or custodian exits a market or declines to maintain the relationship — is there a contingency?
• Are all KYC documents current? Banks conduct periodic re-verification, and outdated documentation is a common cause of account freezes.

Families considering major structural changes — relocating to a new country, reorganizing holding entities, or adding a new jurisdiction — are generally well served by thinking through the banking and custody implications alongside the legal and tax implications from the outset. These decisions are deeply interconnected, as explored further in Cross-Border Families and Complexity, Not Net Worth, Drives Structure.