You live in London, New York, Dubai or Singapore and you are setting up a French company. The articles of association (statuts) are ready, the registered office (siège social) is sorted, and then everything stalls at the bank. The bank asks for one more proof of address, then another, then stops answering. Or it refuses the cash deposit outright because you are not resident in France. Meanwhile the company cannot be registered, the Kbis (the official registration certificate issued by the commercial court registry) cannot arrive, and your launch date slips away. This situation is common for foreign founders, and French law provides a precise path through it, with documents, deadlines and remedies that work even when you never travel to France.

This guide explains the two stages that unlock the deadlock. The first stage is the deposit of the share capital on a blocked account and the certificate that proves it, which opens the door to registration. The second stage is what to do when a bank refuses to open an account or closes one without warning, including the designation procedure before the Banque de France (the French central bank) that forces a bank to open an account with basic services. Each French acronym is explained the first time it appears. The legal references below link to the official Légifrance database, the service-public.fr entrepreneur portal and the Banque de France, so you can check every rule yourself. Readers who have not yet chosen their vehicle should start with our overview of how a foreign company chooses between an SAS, a SARL, a branch and a subsidiary in France, then return here for the banking steps that follow that choice.

I. Depositing the Share Capital and Getting Registered Without Travelling to France

A. Where and How Non-Resident Founders Deposit Cash Contributions and Obtain the Blocked-Funds Certificate

French company law makes the deposit of cash contributions (apports en numéraire) a precondition for registering a commercial company. The entrepreneur portal states the rule plainly: the deposit of the share capital on a blocked bank account is a mandatory step for registering a commercial company, including the SAS (société par actions simplifiée, the simplified joint-stock company favoured by foreign investors) and the SARL (société à responsabilité limitée, the limited liability company), while it remains optional for civil-law entities such as the SCI (société civile immobilière, the property-holding company). The funds sit on a blocked account, described in French practice as funds placed under sequestration (mis sous séquestre), and they become available only after the company is registered. The bank or the notary (notaire) holding the funds must then issue the blocked-funds certificate (attestation de dépôt des fonds), the document the registration file cannot do without.

The amount you must actually pay on day one depends on the vehicle. In an SARL, Article L223-7 of the Commercial Code provides that “Les parts représentant des apports en numéraire doivent être libérées d’au moins un cinquième de leur montant”, which means that cash shares must be paid up for at least one fifth of their amount on subscription, with the balance payable within five years of registration on the decision of the manager (gérant). In an SAS, the applicable SA rule, recalled through Article L227-1 of the Commercial Code which states that “Une société par actions simplifiée peut être instituée par une ou plusieurs personnes qui ne supportent les pertes qu’à concurrence de leur apport”, combines with Article L225-3 of the Commercial Code, under which “Les actions de numéraire sont libérées, lors de la souscription, de la moitié au moins de leur valeur nominale”, so at least half of the cash shares must be paid up immediately, with the remainder due within five years. Contributions in kind (apports en nature), such as equipment or patents, must be fully paid up at once in both vehicles. Choosing a low nominal capital to limit the immediate transfer is lawful, but the entrepreneur portal warns that a higher capital reassures future lenders and suppliers and cushions the procedure triggered when equity falls below half of the share capital, so the figure deserves real thought rather than a symbolic one euro.

The deposit itself must go to an authorised holder. In practice the founder, called the depositor (déposant), pays the funds to a credit institution (établissement de crédit) or to a notary, who acts as depositary (dépositaire). For founders living abroad, three practical routes exist. The first is a French bank that accepts non-resident files, often through its international or non-resident desk, by video identification and certified documents. The second is a notary in France, who receives the funds, verifies the origin and issues the same certificate; this route is frequently faster for non-residents because notaries are used to handling foreign buyers and foreign documents. The third, for founders who already bank with an international group, is a transfer routed through the French branch of their banking group, provided the French entity issues the certificate in the required form. What matters is not the route but the resulting document: the depositary must give the depositor a certificate bearing its stamp and signature and listing the subscribers, the amounts paid by each of them and the company in formation, because the registry (greffe) checks these details against the articles.

Two timing rules protect the file. First, Article L225-5 of the Commercial Code provides that “A l’exception des dépositaires visés par le décret prévu à l’alinéa précédent, nul ne peut détenir plus de huit jours les sommes recueillies pour le compte d’une société en formation”, which means that anyone who collects money for a company in formation, such as a founder gathering contributions from co-founders, may not hold those sums for more than eight days and must pass them to the depositary at once. Second, the subscription list (liste des souscripteurs) showing who paid what must be deposited together with the funds under conditions set by decree, and the founder should keep a complete copy, because the registry and later a tax inspector may ask who contributed which amount and when. Founders who collect money from several countries should therefore centralise the transfers first, document each one, and deposit the total without delay.

Transfers from abroad raise the questions banks ask most: proof of identity, proof of address and proof of the origin of the funds. Under Article L561-5 of the Monetary and Financial Code, banks and other covered institutions must, before entering into a business relationship, “Identifient leur client et, le cas échéant, le bénéficiaire effectif au sens de l’article L. 561-2-2” and “Vérifient ces éléments d’identification sur présentation de tout document écrit à caractère probant”, which means they identify the client and, where relevant, the beneficial owner (bénéficiaire effectif, the natural person who ultimately owns or controls the company) and verify those details against written evidence. For a foreign founder this typically means a passport, a recent proof of address with a certified translation where needed, the draft articles, and bank statements showing the origin of the transferred sums. Preparing this file before the first contact, in one indexed PDF set, shortens the process considerably. Where the founder is a foreign company subscribing to the French vehicle, add the foreign company’s registration extract with an apostille where required, the resolution authorising the subscription, and the ownership chart down to the natural persons, because the bank must identify the beneficial owners at the end of the chain. The beneficial-owner declaration will later be filed at the company registry as well, so the same chart serves twice.

B. From the Certificate to the Kbis: Filing With the Guichet Unique, the RNE and the Greffe, Then Unblocking the Funds

Once the certificate is issued, registration runs through the Guichet unique (the single online company-formalities window operated via formalites.entreprises.gouv.fr), which forwards the file to the Registre national des entreprises (RNE, the national business register kept by the INPI, the National Institute of Industrial Property) and to the greffe (the registry office of the local commercial court, tribunal de commerce) for entry in the Registre du commerce et des sociétés (RCS, the trade and companies register). Article L123-1 of the Commercial Code states that “Il est tenu un registre du commerce et des sociétés auquel sont immatriculés, sur leur déclaration” the companies and traders it lists, which confirms that registration follows the founders’ declaration as checked by the registry. The file includes the articles, the certificate of deposit, the proof of the registered office, the identity documents of the officers, the beneficial-owner declaration and the publication notice in a legal gazette (journal d’annonces légales). A founder living abroad signs electronically or through a power of attorney (pouvoir) given to a person in France; no personal trip is legally required at any point in this chain.

The Kbis is the reward at the end of this chain: an official extract, signed by the greffe, proving that the company exists, naming its officers and showing its SIREN number (the unique nine-digit identification number issued by INSEE, the national statistics institute). Under Article L210-6 of the Commercial Code, “Les sociétés commerciales jouissent de la personnalité morale à dater de leur immatriculation au registre du commerce et des sociétés”, so the company acquires legal personality only on registration, and acts signed beforehand remain, unless taken over, the personal liability of those who signed them. This is why landlords, suppliers and early hires should be told in writing that contracts signed before the Kbis are signed for a company in formation and will be taken over after registration; a short takeover clause (clause de reprise) in each pre-registration contract avoids later disputes about who owes what.

Unblocking the funds is then a mechanical step: the founder sends the Kbis to the depositary, which releases the sums to a current account opened in the company’s name. The entrepreneur portal confirms that once registration is proved, the money moves to a company current account and can be used for the company’s needs. Two practical points matter for non-residents. First, the unblocking can take several business days, so the founder should keep a small operating buffer outside the blocked amount to pay the first bills, such as the legal-gazette invoice and the registry fees. Second, founders registering in Paris should expect the Paris greffe, one of the busiest in France, to examine foreign documents closely; filing early in the week, with translations and apostilles already attached, avoids a rejection notice that would cost another round trip of messages. If the registry rejects a document, it says so in writing, and the founder corrects only that document rather than rebuilding the whole file.

Companies sometimes discover at this stage that the depositary bank refuses to open the continuing current account even though it accepted the blocked deposit. The two decisions are legally distinct: accepting a one-off blocked deposit does not oblige the bank to keep the company as a client, and keeping the blocked funds does not create a permanent account relationship. The refusal of the current account must then be treated exactly like any account refusal, through the remedies described in the second part of this guide, while the blocked sums themselves remain the company’s property and must be released on proof of registration. A founder who senses this risk can split the strategy from the start: deposit with a notary, whose certificate any bank must respect for registration purposes, and separately apply for the operating account with the bank of choice, so that a refusal on the account never blocks the registration itself.

II. When the Bank Says No: Refusals, Closures and the Remedies That Work From Abroad

A. Why Banks Refuse or Close Accounts: Identification Duties, Beneficial Owners and Anti-Money-Laundering Checks

A bank in France is generally free to refuse a new client: no statute forces a bank to accept every applicant, and commercial freedom remains the starting point. The refusal becomes actionable only through the specific procedures described below, which is why the founder’s first reflex should be to secure written proof rather than to argue on the phone. Since silence also counts, the service-public.fr page on account refusal recalls that a bank that does not answer an account application within fifteen days is deemed to have refused, with time running from the signed acknowledgement of receipt or from hand delivery at the counter, and that the bank must then provide a written refusal letter stating the reason and informing the applicant of the right to apply to the Banque de France. From abroad, the founder should therefore send the application by a traceable channel, keep the acknowledgement, calendar the fifteen-day point, and request the refusal certificate (attestation de refus) in writing as soon as the deadline passes.

Understanding the bank’s stated reason shapes the response. The most frequent reasons for foreign files are incomplete identification of the beneficial owners, documents the bank cannot verify, transfers from jurisdictions the bank treats as high risk, and inconsistencies between the declared activity and the first announced transactions. Each of these maps to the identification duties of Article L561-5 of the Monetary and Financial Code: the bank that cannot identify the client and the beneficial owner, or verify the evidence, must not enter into the relationship, and it may freeze the file until the missing piece arrives. The founder’s answer is therefore documentary: a complete ownership chart down to the natural persons with percentages, certified identity documents, proof of the origin of funds such as sale deeds, payslips or prior bank statements, and a one-page business description consistent with the articles’ corporate purpose (objet social). Where the bank invokes an anti-money-laundering alert without detail, which it is often entitled to do, the founder completes the file, asks in writing which category of document is missing, and in parallel starts the Banque de France procedure so that the two tracks run together instead of in sequence.

Closure of an existing account follows different rules from refusal of a new one. A bank may close a deposit account on notice under the account agreement, but it must respect the contractual notice period, provide the requested reasons in writing where the law requires, and leave the client able to recover the balance and redirect payments. Abusive closure, closure without the agreed notice, or closure accompanied by a disproportionate reporting measure can engage the bank’s liability before the commercial courts, and the founder should preserve every notice, statement and message from the day the first warning sign appears. The BODACC (Bulletin officiel des annonces civiles et commerciales, the official gazette where company registrations, insolvencies and similar notices are published) plays no role in an ordinary closure, but founders should check that no erroneous filing, such as a strike-off request the founder never signed, accompanies the banking difficulty, because a registry anomaly and a banking alert sometimes share the same administrative root, such as an outdated officer address.

Founders who are natural persons facing a personal-account refusal sometimes discover products marketed as accounts for excluded clients, such as payment accounts with an IBAN offered by licensed payment institutions. The Versailles Court of Appeal addressed this argument in a judgment of 21 December 2023, RG 22/05426, concerning a refusal to open a deposit account after a Banque de France designation. The court noted that this category of account makes it possible to obtain a statement of identity, transfer funds online, receive money and pay by card, and it weighed that fact when assessing the claimed loss of use, while confirming the lower court’s award of 2,000 euros for the moral harm caused by the bank maintaining its unjustified refusal to this day. The court held that the bank was at fault for persisting, without a lawful reason, in refusing to open a deposit account for the claimant even though the Banque de France had designated that bank in November 2017 to do so, confirming that a designated bank which keeps refusing without a lawful reason commits a fault, even where substitute payment products exist. For a company founder, the lesson is twofold: a substitute payment account can keep the business running during the dispute, but it does not erase the designated bank’s fault, and the 2,000-euro award shows that courts compensate the harm of being left without a real bank, document by document.

B. The Right-to-Account Procedure Before the Banque de France and the Protection Against Brutal Termination of Credit

The right to an account (droit au compte) is the founder’s main remedy against refusal. Article L312-1 of the Monetary and Financial Code opens with the principle that “A droit à l’ouverture d’un compte de dépôt dans l’établissement de crédit de son choix, sous réserve d’être dépourvu d’un tel compte en France” every “Toute personne physique ou morale domiciliée en France”, which covers a company whose registered office is in France and which holds no such account there. The service-public.fr guidance and the Banque de France right-to-account page describe the sequence in plain terms: collect the written refusal or let the fifteen-day silence operate, then apply to the Banque de France with identity documents, proof of address and the refusal certificate. The statute adds that the applicant “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”, with designation coming “dans un délai d’un jour ouvré à compter de la réception des pièces requises définies par arrêté”, so the designation itself is fast once the file is complete. The designated bank must then open the account with the basic banking services defined by decree (services bancaires de base), which cover the essentials for running a young company: receiving transfers, paying by transfer and direct debit, and operating with a card.

Three details decide success from abroad. First, the refusal certificate must name the right applicant: for a company in formation, the application is best filed in the name of the future company as represented by the founder, with the draft articles attached, so that the designated account matches the registration file exactly; a parallel application in the founder’s personal name can secure personal banking but does not replace the company’s designation. Second, the file sent to the Banque de France must be complete on arrival, because the one-working-day clock runs from receipt of the required documents, and an incomplete file restarts the wait. Third, the founder should choose the location strategically: the statute allows designation near the registered office or near another place of the applicant’s choice, so a Paris-registered company run from abroad can request a bank near the registered office or near the founder’s French representative, whichever promises smoother day-to-day contact. The detailed refusal rules are restated on the service-public.fr page on refusal to open an account, and the deposit and certificate mechanics on the entreprendre portal page on depositing share capital, both worth keeping open while preparing the file.

Once the account exists, a second shield protects the company against a sudden cut of financing. Article L313-12 of the Monetary and Financial Code states that “Tout concours à durée indéterminée, autre qu’occasionnel, qu’un établissement de crédit ou une société de financement consent à une entreprise, ne peut être réduit ou interrompu que sur notification écrite et à l’expiration d’un délai de préavis fixé lors de l’octroi du concours”, and adds that “Ce délai ne peut, sous peine de nullité de la rupture du concours, être inférieur à soixante jours”, which means that an open-ended facility such as an overdraft (découvert) cannot be cut without written notice and a notice period of at least sixty days agreed when the facility was granted, failing which the termination is void. The bank must also give its reasons on the company’s request, and only serious misconduct by the borrower or a hopelessly compromised situation dispenses with notice. The Cour de cassation applied this framework in a commercial decision of 3 April 2019, appeal No. 17-22.067 (ECLI:FR:CCASS:2019:CO10150), where the plea reproduced the sixty-day rule and the court, ruling by a non-specially-reasoned rejection, dismissed the appeal against the Nîmes Court of Appeal judgment ordering repayment of the credit. The decision does not create new law, but it usefully shows how the sixty-day notice operates in real litigation: the borrower invoked the missing notice, the court checked the written notifications and the agreed period, and the outcome turned on documents rather than on rhetoric.

For a foreign-run company, this protection has concrete uses. An overdraft attached to the new current account, a revolving facility for paying suppliers, or a bank guarantee line (ligne de cautions) each count as facilities whose brutal interruption can paralyse the business, and the founder should therefore keep the facility letters showing the agreed notice period from the first day. If the bank announces a cut, the founder replies in writing within days, recalls the sixty-day minimum, requests the written reasons the statute provides for, and moves sensitive payments to the substitute account while the notice runs. URSSAF (the network of agencies collecting social-security contributions) direct debits, VAT (TVA, taxe sur la valeur ajoutée) payments and payroll transfers should be mapped in advance, so that a banking incident never becomes a tax or social-security default by contagion. None of this requires presence in France: notices, reasons and designations travel by email, registered electronic letter and the Banque de France online channel, and the founder’s French representative or counsel can hand-deliver what must be filed at a counter.

Conclusion

A French company run from abroad stands or falls on two banking documents: the blocked-funds certificate that proves the capital was really paid, and the operating account that receives revenue and pays tax, social charges and salaries. The deposit follows a fixed sequence of authorised holder, eight-day transfer discipline, exact certificate and registration through the Guichet unique to the Kbis, after which the funds are released on proof of registration. Refusal and closure are answered with the same discipline in reverse: written proof, a complete identification file down to the beneficial owners, the Banque de France designation within one working day of a complete file, and the sixty-day shield against brutal cuts of open-ended credit. Foreign founders who work through these steps in order, keep every acknowledgement, and run a substitute payment account in parallel, register on time and keep control of their cash even when the first bank says no.