You opened a company in France from abroad, everything worked for months, and then one Monday morning the bank app stops responding. A transfer to your foreign parent is rejected, the branch talks about a compliance review, and by Friday you cannot pay wages. For a foreign founder running a French SAS or SARL from London, New York, Dubai or Singapore, a frozen or closed business account feels like the company has been switched off. This article explains what French banks are legally allowed to do, where the limits are, and the practical sequence that gets your money back, keeps the company alive and reopens an account while you stay abroad.

A French business account is not a favour granted by the bank. It is a contract governed by the Monetary and Financial Code, supervised anti-money-laundering duties, and court decisions that punish banks that close accounts without notice and clients who cannot prove their loss. The pages below walk through both sides: first what the bank was entitled to do when it froze your transfers or shut the account, then the exact recovery path from abroad, from getting the balance back to forcing a new bank to take you through the Banque de France designation procedure. Every French acronym is explained on first use: the Kbis extract is the official identity card of your company issued by the greffe, which is the registry office of the commercial court; URSSAF is the agency that collects employer social charges; the BODACC is the official gazette where company events are published; the INPI Guichet unique is the single online portal where companies are registered; and TRACFIN is the French financial intelligence unit that receives suspicious-transaction reports.

I. Your French company account was frozen or closed: what the bank was legally allowed to do

Before reacting, a foreign owner needs an honest diagnosis, because a frozen transfer and a closed account are two different legal events with different remedies. A freeze is usually temporary and tied to a verification duty. A closure ends the account contract and triggers notice and restitution duties. Confusing the two leads to the wrong letters, the wrong deadlines and lost leverage. The first part of this article separates them.

A. The bank blocked your transfer or froze the account for compliance checks: what the law requires of the bank

French banks carry heavy anti-money-laundering duties, and foreign-owned companies trigger them more often than domestic ones: capital wired from abroad, a director who lives outside France, invoices paid to unfamiliar jurisdictions, and a beneficial owner, meaning the natural person who ultimately owns or controls the company, whose identity documents are foreign. When any of these signals appear, the bank must identify and verify, not simply execute and ask questions later.

The starting point is the identification duty. The statute provides that the persons subject to these duties, in the French text, “Identifient leur client et, le cas échéant, le bénéficiaire effectif au sens de l’article L. 561-2-2”, and that they “Vérifient ces éléments d’identification sur présentation de tout document écrit à caractère probant.” In practice this means a certified passport of each director and each beneficial owner holding more than 25 percent, a Kbis extract of less than three months, the articles of association, and the register of beneficial owners. A second provision adds the ongoing monitoring duty: “Avant d’entrer en relation d’affaires, les personnes mentionnées à l’article L. 561-2 recueillent les informations relatives à l’objet et à la nature de cette relation et tout autre élément d’information pertinent.” The bank therefore asks what the company actually does, where its clients and suppliers are, and why a given transfer fits that business. A holding company that suddenly pays a supplier invoice, or a consulting SAS that receives funds with no contract behind them, will be questioned.

When the bank cannot satisfy these verification duties, the law orders it to stop. The key sentence reads: “Lorsqu’une personne mentionnée à l’article L. 561-2 n’est pas en mesure de satisfaire aux obligations prévues à l’article L. 561-5 ou à l’article L. 561-5-1 , elle n’exécute aucune opération, quelles qu’en soient les modalités, n’établit ni ne poursuit aucune relation d’affaires”. That single sentence is the legal basis for most freezes foreign founders experience: as long as the file is incomplete or a transfer looks inconsistent with the declared business, the bank must not execute, whatever the commercial urgency. Complaining that the bank is slow misses the point. The bank is obeying a statutory freeze order addressed to itself, and it can also file a confidential report with TRACFIN without telling you.

Courts accept that banks may delay and question transfers for these checks, but they draw a line at causation when the client sues for the commercial fallout. In a leading commercial decision, a bank had held up an international transfer after asking for explanations: the facts record that “après avoir sollicité des explications concernant la justification de cette opération, le CIO a informé la société KZ qu’il ne pouvait y donner suite”. The client blamed the bank for the collapse of its underlying sale contract. The Cour de cassation upheld the rejection of the claim because, in its words, “les fautes commises par les banques n’étaient pas en relation causale avec la résiliation du contrat, la cour d’appel a légalement justifié sa décision”. The lesson for a foreign owner is direct: even if the bank handled the freeze clumsily, damages require proof that the freeze, and not your own late documents or an already impossible deadline, caused the loss. Keep every email showing when you supplied each document, because that timeline decides causation.

If your account is only frozen, not closed, and the freeze followed a foreign takeover with a request for updated KYC or beneficial-owner documents, start with the companion guide on that narrow unfreezing path: Your French Bank Froze Your Company’s Account After the Foreign Takeover: KYC, Beneficial Owners and How to Unfreeze It. This article takes over where that one stops: closures, balance recovery, payroll continuity and forcing a new account open.

Concretely, a freeze letter or a phone call mentioning verification, conformity review or updated KYC, meaning know-your-customer file refresh, calls for one response: send a complete file within days, not explanations. The file that unblocks foreign-owned accounts contains the Kbis extract, the articles, the beneficial-owner register, passports, proof of address of the director, the contracts behind the blocked transfer, the invoice, and a one-page note describing the economic purpose of the payment. Send it by email and by registered letter, keep the receipts, and ask in writing for a dated answer and the list of any missing items. If the bank keeps the funds without answering for weeks, that silence becomes evidence for the next steps described in the second part of this article.

B. The bank closed the account outright: the two-month notice rule and the narrow exceptions

Closure is different from a freeze. When the bank terminates the account agreement of indefinite duration, it must give notice, and the notice period is set by statute, not by the mood of the branch. The rule, stated identically in the code and repeated by the courts, is: “L’établissement de crédit résilie une convention de compte de dépôt conclue pour une durée indéterminée moyennant un préavis d’au moins deux mois, fourni sur support papier ou sur un autre support durable.” For business accounts this is the provision that matters. A letter that announces immediate closure of a long-standing company account, with no notice and no written reasons, is presumptively irregular. The general contract law background confirms the same logic for open-ended contracts: “Lorsque le contrat est conclu pour une durée indéterminée, chaque partie peut y mettre fin à tout moment, sous réserve de respecter le délai de préavis contractuellement prévu ou, à défaut, un délai raisonnable.” Your account agreement may add its own notice clause, but it cannot go below the statutory two-month floor for the bank.

The courts apply this rule to companies, not only to individuals. The Montpellier Court of Appeal restated it in a business-account dispute in these terms: “l’établissement de crédit résilie une convention de compte de dépôt conclue pour une durée indéterminée moyennant un préavis d’au moins deux mois, fourni sur support papier ou sur un autre support durable.” In that case the company complained that the sudden closure had paralysed its activity and claimed a full year of turnover. The court recalled the notice duty but rejected the damages because the company proved neither the payments it claimed to have made nor the link between the closure and the shutdown of its business, and the decision ends with the dry holding that the claimant “sera déboutée de sa demande indemnitaire”. A Paris decision on an individual account completes the picture: closure without the required notice was sanctioned in principle, with the court recalling that “Un délai minimum de deux mois de préavis est octroyé au titulaire du compte, sauf dans les cas mentionnés au 1° et au 2°.” Those numbered cases are the narrow exceptions: deliberate use of the account for suspected illegal purposes and false information given by the client. Anti-money-laundering termination under the freeze provision can also justify action, but the bank must still notify in writing, and the closure must be reasoned except where secrecy duties forbid it.

Closure also has an immediate financial consequence that many foreign owners miss: the balance becomes due. The Paris court put it in one sentence that every owner should know: “cette résiliation entraîne ipso facto clôture du compte, ce qui a pour effet de rendre le solde exigible.” A credit balance must be returned to you, by bank cheque or transfer to an account you designate, after set-off of genuinely due fees and authorised overdrafts. The bank cannot keep your money as leverage to force you to sign a release, nor park it indefinitely while invoking unspecified checks. If the balance is a debit, the bank will demand repayment, and this is where the grace-period provision of the Civil Code can help an owner who needs months rather than weeks, as explained below.

Check your closure letter against three points the moment it arrives: written form on paper or another durable medium, a notice period of at least two months running from receipt, and stated reasons unless the bank invokes a secrecy exception in precise terms. Photograph the envelope, keep the registered-letter slip, and note the date you actually received it, because notice runs from receipt. If any of the three points is missing, write back within days contesting the irregularity, demanding restitution of the credit balance to a designated account, and reserving all rights to damages with a quantified loss. That letter, sent before you sue, is what later turns an irregular closure into compensation rather than a moral victory with no euros attached.

II. How a foreign owner recovers the money, keeps the French company alive and reopens an account from abroad

Knowing the bank was wrong, or partly wrong, does not pay wages on Friday. The second part turns to the recovery sequence that works from abroad: get the money out, keep the company compliant while it has no account, and force a new account open through the official designation route with a file that survives foreign-owner scrutiny. Do these in the right order, because suing for damages before securing the balance and a new account leaves the company bleeding while the case runs.

A. How to recover the frozen balance and keep paying wages, URSSAF charges and suppliers

Start with the balance. After a closure, the credit balance is due as recalled above, so demand it in writing to a specific destination account, with your company name, SIREN number, which is the nine-digit company identifier, account number, and a rib, meaning the French bank-details slip, or IBAN of the receiving account. Give a ten-day deadline, send the demand by registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt and by email, and state that default interest and costs will follow. If the bank answers that it is setting off fees or an overdraft, ask for the detailed statement and the contractual basis of each charge, because only regularly charged fees survive closure, in proportion to the elapsed period. If the bank stays silent or refuses without reasons, the next step is a formal notice from counsel followed by summary proceedings before the commercial court, where the sentence making the balance due carries real weight and judges understand that a company without its cash is a company at risk.

While the balance is stuck, protect the payroll first, because wage claims destroy foreign owners who thought the freeze paused their duties. French labour law does not suspend pay when the employer’s bank misbehaves: “Le paiement de la rémunération est effectué une fois par mois.” Late wages trigger penalties, employee claims before the prud’hommes, which is the labour court, and in serious cases a ground for the employee to have the resignation reclassified as a dismissal at the employer’s fault. From abroad, open within days a transit solution: a second company account if one exists, a payment-institution account in your home country that handles SEPA transfers, or a short-term shareholder advance documented as a compte courant d’associe, meaning a shareholder current-account loan, so the company can pay net wages and the corresponding URSSAF declarations. File the DSN, the monthly online payroll return, on time even if the cash arrives a few days late, and tell employees in writing what happened and when they will be paid. Silence produces resignations and lawsuits; a dated written plan usually buys the two weeks you need.

Treat URSSAF and the tax office as parallel emergencies. URSSAF contributions are declared and paid monthly or quarterly through the DSN channel, and late payment brings surcharges even when the bank caused the delay, subject to possible remission on reasoned request with proof of the freeze. Corporate income tax instalments, VAT returns and wage withholding follow their own calendars and do not wait for your banking dispute. Write to each body before the deadline, attach the bank’s freeze or closure letter, pay whatever you can through the transit account, and ask for a payment schedule. Where a supplier sues or a contractual debt falls due while cash is trapped, remember that a judge may grant time: “Le juge peut, compte tenu de la situation du débiteur et en considération des besoins du créancier, reporter ou échelonner, dans la limite de deux années, le paiement des sommes dues.” That two-year scheduling power has saved many companies whose cash was frozen through no fault of their operations, but it must be asked for with accounts, bank letters and a realistic repayment plan, not with general complaints about the bank.

Document loss from day one if you intend to claim damages for an irregular closure, because the Montpellier lesson is that courts reject unproved turnover claims. Build a simple evidence file: the closure letter and envelope, the account statements showing the prior flow, the rejected transfers with dates and counterparties, the contracts lost with the cancellation notices from clients, the payroll and URSSAF surcharges paid late, and the cost of the replacement banking solution. Ask your accountant for a one-page note tying the closure date to the drop in activity. Then quantify: lost margin on identified contracts, not total turnover; surcharges actually paid; and the extra cost of emergency payments. A claim for the credit balance plus a documented, quantified indemnity, filed after a formal notice, settles far more often than a dramatic claim for a year of revenue with no papers behind it.

B. How to force a new account open through the Banque de France and file a clean application from abroad

A foreign-owned French company that has been closed, or that cannot get any bank to open an account, is not left to beg branch by branch. France runs an official right-to-an-account procedure, and companies are covered through the professional track described on the official service-public pages for business-account refusal and the general right to an account. The mechanism is simple: after at least one documented refusal, you ask the Banque de France, the French central bank, to designate a bank that must open you an account with basic services. The statute states the core of the procedure in these words: “En cas de refus de la part de l’établissement choisi d’ouvrir un tel compte à l’une des personnes mentionnées au I, celle-ci peut saisir la Banque de France afin qu’elle lui désigne un établissement de crédit situé à proximité de son domicile ou d’un autre lieu de son choix, en prenant en considération les parts de marché de chaque établissement concerné, dans un délai d’un jour ouvré à compter de la réception des pièces requises définies par arrêté.” Designation within one business day of a complete file is the speed this procedure promises, which is why the file must be complete on arrival.

The designated bank must provide the basic services defined by regulation, and the list is more useful than many founders expect: “Les prestations de base mentionnées au II de l’article L. 312-1 comprennent :” “L’ouverture, la tenue et la clôture du compte”, monthly statements, collection of cheques and transfers, SEPA direct debits and transfers, remote balance access, cash deposits and withdrawals at the account-holding bank, bank-identity slips on request, and a payment card for internet payments and EU withdrawals. This is a functioning operating account, not a symbolic one: wages, URSSAF debits, supplier transfers and client receipts can run through it from day one, which is exactly what a company emerging from a closure needs.

The refusal certificate is the key that starts the procedure, so manufacture it cleanly. Apply to one bank of your choice with a complete professional file, and when it refuses or stays silent, demand the written refusal certificate, which the bank must deliver free of charge and without delay, on paper and on another durable medium if you expressly request it. Then file with the Banque de France online or at a branch counter with a person holding authority: the refusal certificate, the Kbis extract of less than three months pulled after INPI registration, the articles, the beneficial-owner information, valid passports, proof of the registered office such as a domiciliation contract, and the activity description with the first contracts or letters of intent. From abroad, give a French correspondence address, your email and phone, and a power of attorney if a local contact files for you. An incomplete filing is the main cause of delay, so treat the checklist as blocking, not indicative.

Make the new application closure-proof by fixing whatever the old bank used against you. If the freeze came from unexplained transfers, attach the contracts and invoices behind the next three months of expected flows and name the countries involved. If the closure invoked outdated identification, bring fresh certified passports and an updated beneficial-owner register. If the registered office moved, align the Kbis, the articles and the utility or domiciliation proof before filing, because mismatched addresses scream shell company to a compliance officer. Ask the new bank in the cover letter for written confirmation of the notice clause, the fee schedule and the contact for future verification requests, and keep that letter with the account agreement. Founders who arrive with this file usually open within weeks; founders who arrive to explain verbally usually collect a second refusal.

Foreign founders often ask whether the Paris region changes anything. A Paris or Ile-de-France registered office does not change the statutes or the designation procedure, but it changes practical facts: more branches to apply to, Banque de France counters with heavy company traffic, and commercial courts in Paris, Nanterre, Bobigny and Creteil that hear these banking disputes every week. Mention your operating address consistently across the Kbis, the lease or domiciliation contract and the bank file, because interbank compliance teams check that triangle first. For the broader formation picture, from capital deposit to Kbis to VAT, the firm’s pillar guide for foreign founders remains the companion to this crisis article: Setting Up a Company in France as a Foreign Founder: Bank Account, Kbis, VAT and Your First Hire.

Conclusion

A frozen transfer calls for documents, not for shouting: identify the missing verification item, send the complete Kbis, beneficial-owner and contract file by registered letter and email, and demand a dated list of anything still missing. A closure calls for three checks in the first hour: written form, two months of notice, and stated reasons, followed by a quantified demand for the credit balance to a designated account. In both cases, pay wages and URSSAF through a transit solution, warn the tax and social bodies before deadlines, and build the loss file day by day so that any later damages claim survives the causation test the courts apply. And when no bank wants you, use the official route: one documented refusal, a complete filing with the Banque de France, and a designated account with basic services that puts the company back in operation. Handled in that order, a banking crisis becomes an administrative episode. Handled backwards, with a lawsuit before cash and compliance, it becomes the event that kills an otherwise healthy French subsidiary.

Need a quick opinion on your case

Your French company account is frozen or closed and payroll is near. Get a telephone consultation within 48 hours with an attorney of the firm. Call +33 6 46 60 58 22.

Contact the firm through the contact page and describe the freeze or closure letter, the balance at stake and the next payment deadline.