Published on Wednesday, March 18, 2026 by Chittorgarh.com Team
A Wyoming LLC costs $100 to form. A US bank account to go with it-if you’re applying from India-can take three months and multiple rejections to open. Sometimes it doesn’t open at all.
That gap between formation and a functioning bank account is the part of the US LLC process that changed most in 2025, and the part that formation guides still skip over. Mercury-the fintech platform that became the default for Indian-owned US LLCs-no longer approves accounts listing a registered agent as the principal business address, per its published eligibility requirements. No announcement. No blog post. People in Pune and Hyderabad just started getting rejection emails, or worse, approvals followed by account freezes a few weeks later.
By late 2025, the pattern was all over founder communities: banking, once the easy step, had become the hard one.
LLCBuddy's formation cost tracker - updated constantly, covering every fee and filing requirement across all 50 states - puts 2026 state filing fees between $35 (Montana) and $500 (Massachusetts). Clean, predictable numbers. Everything after that filing fee? That's where your budget starts lying to you.
This was not a Mercury-only problem. The entire US fintech banking sector shifted. Banks and their fintech partners operate under Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering rules enforced by FinCEN and federal banking agencies, and for years those rules were applied loosely to foreign-owned LLCs. A passport, an EIN letter, formation documents-that was enough to get in.
Not anymore. Mercury’s eligibility page now explicitly requires a principal place of business that is not a registered agent address, PO box, or UPS mailbox. The platform partners with Choice Financial Group and Column N.A. for FDIC-insured banking services. If your entire US presence is a registered agent in Wyoming, Mercury’s address requirement effectively rules you out. Wise Business tightened its verification too. Relay started restricting applicants from certain countries.
The result: a growing population of Indian entrepreneurs holding valid LLCs, valid EINs, and no way to receive a dollar.
Under current IRS rules, non-US residents without a Social Security Number or ITIN cannot apply for an EIN online. The alternatives are fax (Form SS-4), mail, or phone at the IRS international line (267-941-1099). Officially, the IRS quotes four business days for fax. In practice, non-residents routinely wait several weeks to two months, sometimes longer-particularly during heavy filing periods. Mail takes four to five weeks under normal conditions, per the IRS instructions for Form SS-4.
The confirmation letter-the CP575-arrives by mail at the US registered agent address. Lose it, and you’re calling the IRS at 800-829-4933 for a 147C replacement, which adds more time.
Banks want that letter before they’ll open an account. So an Indian entrepreneur who files formation documents in January might not have a working bank account until April or May. That’s if the first application goes through. A rejection means starting over with a different platform.
As Steve Goldstein of LLCBuddy puts it, the gap between how simple formation is and how complicated everything after it gets is where most of the pain concentrates. Filing the LLC is the easy part. What comes next is not.
As of early 2026, a handful of fintech platforms still onboard Indian-owned LLCs. None guarantee approval. Policies change without notice. But these are the options people are actually using.
Wise Business has been the path of least resistance. It accepts a registered agent address as the LLC’s registered address and lets you list your Indian home or office as the “trading address.” Approval tends to come in 24 to 48 hours. The trade-off is real, though: Wise is not a bank. It’s an Electronic Money Institution. Deposits are not FDIC-insured. Customer funds sit in segregated accounts at partner banks, which is a different protection structure than a traditional US bank account. For anyone who just needs a US routing number to plug into Stripe, Wise does the job. For anyone parking significant cash, it’s not enough on its own.
Relay works differently. It partners with Thread Bank (Member FDIC) and, as of early 2026, offers up to $3 million in FDIC coverage through Thread Bank’s IntraFi deposit sweep program-money gets spread across multiple FDIC-insured banks automatically. The onboarding process accepts international applicants, though certain countries are restricted. India is not on that list as of this writing. You need the LLC’s formation documents, the EIN letter, and a passport.
Mercury is the wildcard. It continues to approve some non-resident applications, but rejection rates have climbed by all accounts. Coverage is the highest of the three-up to $5 million in FDIC insurance through its sweep network-but coverage is irrelevant if you can’t get in the door. People who can show real US business activity-active clients, a real website, revenue through US payment processors-tend to fare better. But BBB complaints, NerdWallet reviews, and industry reporting from 2024 and 2025 all document cases of Indian-owned accounts being approved and then frozen or closed, with requests for additional documentation that sometimes drag on for weeks.
Airwallex has entered the picture too. Founded in Melbourne in 2015, now co-headquartered in Singapore and San Francisco as of 2025, it offers multi-currency accounts and FDIC insurance through US partner banks. It’s newer to this particular use case, and long-term reliability data for non-resident LLC owners is thin. Worth researching. Not yet worth relying on exclusively.
The people who avoid banking disasters are the ones who open accounts at two or three platforms before they need them. Same principle as not putting your entire portfolio in one stock.
A common sequence: Wise first, because it approves fastest and gives you a routing number for Stripe and PayPal. Relay second, for FDIC-insured operational funds. Mercury third, if it approves. Run expenses through one, hold reserves in another, keep the third as backup. When one platform freezes an account-and this does happen, sometimes without warning-the business keeps running on the others.
These closures are not theoretical. BBB complaints, NerdWallet reporting, and founder forums all document cases of platforms including Mercury shutting accounts with limited notice, holding funds during compliance review. A single fintech banking relationship is a single point of failure.
LLCBuddy publishes per-state breakdowns of formation fees, registered agent costs, and annual report obligations. The banking layer sits on top of all that, and almost nobody accounts for it upfront.
A US phone number-sometimes required during onboarding-runs $3 to $10 a month through OpenPhone or Google Voice. A virtual office address (not a registered agent, but a real commercial address that satisfies Mercury’s requirements) costs $15 to $50 a month depending on the state. A professional website, which noticeably improves approval odds, costs whatever it costs. Stack those on top of $100 to $200 a year for a registered agent and $60 for Wyoming’s annual report license tax (as of 2026), and the banking overhead alone can double the total annual cost of maintaining the LLC.
At $5,000 or $10,000 a month in revenue, these are rounding errors. At $1,000 to $2,000 a month, they eat a real share of what the LLC earns. That’s the dividing line: the banking layer is where people earning modest freelance income discover the structure costs more than it returns.
Formation hasn’t changed. An Indian resident can still legally form a US LLC from a laptop. Banking has changed. Anyone forming a US LLC in early 2026 should expect the bank account to take two to four months to become operational, and should budget for multiple fintech applications-at least one of which will probably be rejected.
One question worth asking before filing: does the expected revenue justify the formation cost, the annual compliance, the banking overhead, and the weeks of dead time between formation and the first received payment? For many Indian entrepreneurs, the answer is still yes-Stripe access, Western client credibility, and cleaner payment infrastructure are genuine advantages. For others, the numbers don’t add up yet.
Forming a Wyoming LLC on Monday and collecting Stripe payments by Friday-that era is over. Plan for months, not days. Open multiple accounts. Budget for the real cost, not the formation page cost.
The LLC is a tool. It works when you account for what it actually demands-not just what the formation page promises.
