You have the visa in your passport, the keys to a flat in Lyon or a cottage in the Dordogne, and a letter from your new employer asking for one thing you cannot yet produce: a relevé d’identité bancaire, the slip — universally known as a RIB — that carries your French IBAN. Without it, no salary can be paid, no prélèvement SEPA (SEPA direct debit) can leave your account for the electricity bill, the taxe foncière (local property tax) or the top-up health insurance every resident ends up buying. So you walk into a high-street bank, passport and tenancy agreement in hand, and the adviser smiles, takes photocopies, and never calls back. Or worse, the answer is a flat no. Since Brexit turned British citizens into third-country nationals, this scene has become one of the most common — and most misunderstood — administrative shocks of settling in France. The misunderstanding runs in both directions: some banks still behave as though a British applicant were a compliance risk to be avoided, while many British newcomers do not know that French law gives every person domiciliée en France (domiciled in France) a genuine right to a deposit account, backed by a public procedure run by the Banque de France and enforced by judges who do not hesitate to order a bank to open an account under a daily financial penalty. This article explains, in order, what a French bank is entitled to ask you before Brexit or after, which queue you stand in depending on whether you live in France full time or visit your second home, how the droit au compte (right-to-an-account) procedure works day by day, and what happens when a bank closes an account or refuses the one the Banque de France told it to open.

I. Opening a French current account as a British resident after Brexit

A. What the bank is allowed to ask a British applicant to prove

Start with the principle, because it settles most arguments before they begin. Article L312-1 of the Code monétaire et financier (the Monetary and Financial Code, the statute book that governs banks) provides 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 : 1° Toute personne physique ou morale domiciliée en France” — that is, any natural or legal person domiciled in France is entitled to have a deposit account opened at the bank of their choice, provided they hold no such account in France (Article L312-1, Code monétaire et financier, on Légifrance). A British citizen who lives in France, pays tax there and holds a residence permit is domiciliée en France exactly like a French national, and Brexit changed nothing about that sentence. The same article extends the right to persons legally resident in another European Union member state acting outside any professional need, and to French nationals living outside France. The single statutory condition that matters for most readers is negative: you must not already hold a deposit account in France.

The second thing to understand is that the bank is not only allowed but obliged to check who you are, and British paperwork sometimes slows that check down. Before entering into a business relationship, banks must identify their client and, where relevant, the beneficial owner, and they must verify those details against a probative written document: the Code states that banks “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” (Article L561-5, Code monétaire et financier, on Légifrance). In practice, expect to be asked for three bundles of proof: a valid identity document, which for a British applicant means a passport in date; proof of address less than three months old, such as an electricity or landline bill, a recent rent receipt or the title deeds to your main home; and proof of your right to live in France, typically your Withdrawal Agreement residence permit or your long-stay visa with its validated vignette. Holders of a Withdrawal Agreement card who need to renew it will find the renewal route described in our guide to renewing a Withdrawal Agreement residence permit and challenging a refusal. A bank that asks for these three bundles is doing its job; a bank that keeps inventing new documents every fortnight, or that goes silent after taking your file, is a different story, and the law has an answer for it.

That answer begins with two short deadlines most applicants never hear about. Once you have supplied everything the bank needs, the bank must open the account within six working days at the latest: the statute says “l’établissement procède à l’ouverture du compte de dépôt demandée par les personnes mentionnées au premier alinéa du présent II au plus tard dans les six jours ouvrés à compter de la réception de l’ensemble des pièces qui lui sont nécessaires à cet effet” (Article L312-1, Code monétaire et financier, on Légifrance). And if the bank refuses, it owes you a written explanation, free of charge, mentioning the safety net described in part II below: “Si l’établissement refuse l’ouverture du compte de dépôt, il fournit au demandeur gratuitement, sur support papier, et sur un autre support durable lorsque celui-ci en fait la demande expresse, les motifs de ce refus en mentionnant, le cas échéant, la procédure prévue au III” (Article L312-1, Code monétaire et financier, on Légifrance). Always ask for that refusal letter. It is the key that opens the Banque de France procedure, and a bank that will not put its reasons in writing is already telling you that you should use it.

B. Newly arrived, second-home owner or long settled: which queue are you in

Not every British reader stands in the same queue, and the queue decides which rights apply. The first profile is the newcomer who has just moved to France with a long-stay visa or who has arrived to take up a job. You are domiciled in France from the day you genuinely settle, and the right to an account described above applies to you in full, even if your French administrative file is still thin. Open the account as early as you can, because everything else in French administrative life assumes the account already exists: employers pay salaries only by transfer to a French IBAN, landlords expect rent by direct debit or transfer, and the tax office collects income tax through monthly prélèvements (deductions) taken from a declared account. Bring your passport, your visa or residence permit, your tenancy agreement or hosting certificate (attestation d’hébergement) with the host’s bill, and, if you have one, your employment contract. A contract helps the adviser tick the boxes, but no statute makes having a job a condition for opening a basic deposit account.

The second profile is the second-home owner who spends a few months a year in France without being domiciled there. French banks are free to open so-called non-resident accounts for you, and most high-street branches do, but the relationship is a purely commercial one: the statutory right to an account belongs to persons domiciled in France, and a holiday-home owner living in Kent cannot invoke the Banque de France procedure on the same basis as a Lyon resident. That distinction bites in two practical places. First, if you already hold any deposit account in France, even a nearly empty one opened years ago for paying the taxe foncière, the droit au compte safety net is closed to you, because the statute reserves it to applicants without such an account — so think twice before letting an old account drift into dormancy, and close or keep it deliberately. Second, British owners who rent their French second home out as a holiday let should keep that rental income strictly separate from any future right-to-an-account file: the procedure is for personal, non-professional needs, and a stack of furnished-letting receipts invites the bank to reclassify you as a professional client, which is a different regime with different paperwork.

The third profile is the long-settled resident who has banked in France for years and suddenly receives a letter closing the account — a letter this article returns to in part II. And across all three profiles runs one duty that surprises British readers every year: money kept in the United Kingdom does not become invisible once you live in France. The British government’s own guidance for its nationals living in France warns that assets held outside France — bank accounts alongside securities, insurance, annuities and property — must be declared, in a declaration that is separate from the annual tax return (Living in France guidance, GOV.UK). So declare each British current account, savings account and investment account on the French foreign-accounts form every year, even if the balance barely moves. An undeclared HSBC or NS&I account discovered during a later audit costs far more than the ten minutes the declaration takes, and it has nothing to do with whether your French bank likes you: it is a freestanding obligation that follows from French tax residence itself.

II. When the bank says no: the droit au compte and fighting back

A. The Banque de France designation procedure step by step

The droit au compte is not a slogan. It is a short administrative procedure, free of charge, in which the Banque de France — the French central bank, acting here as a public referee — orders a bank near your home to open an account for you with basic services. It starts the day a bank refuses you. And a useful detail many applicants miss: a bank that simply stops answering counts as a bank that refused. The official service-public guidance states that a bank which has not answered an account-opening request within 15 days is deemed to have refused, with the fifteen days running from the acknowledgement of receipt of your registered letter or from the date you handed the file in at the counter (Refusal to open a bank account: the right to an account, service-public.fr). From that moment, the refusing bank must give you a written refusal letter stating its reasons and must tell you that you can apply to the Banque de France: it must also tell the applicant about the possibility of applying to the Banque de France for the right-to-an-account procedure (service-public.fr, Fiche F2417). Send every application by registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt (lettre recommandée avec accusé de réception) or deposit it at the counter against a receipt, so the fifteen-day silence rule can be proved with a date on it.

Your application file to the Banque de France contains six items, and preparing them carefully is what makes the procedure move in days rather than weeks: the official application form, a valid French or foreign identity document, proof of address, the bank’s refusal letter — or, where the bank went silent, the acknowledgement of receipt of your registered letter or the counter receipt, dated more than fifteen days earlier — a sworn statement (déclaration sur l’honneur) that you hold no personal or professional deposit account in France, enclosing any account-closure decision if one exists, and, only where relevant, a sworn statement of legal residence in another EU member state (service-public.fr, Fiche F2417). Note what the list does not require: no minimum income, no employment contract, no French co-signatory. Being registered as interdit bancaire (banned from writing cheques after a bad-cheque episode), listed in the FICP credit-incident file, or even going through a surendettement (over-indebtedness) procedure does not bar you — the same official page confirms that applicants in each of those situations, and holders of a joint account, can still use the procedure (service-public.fr, Fiche F2417). You can file online through your personal space on the Banque de France website, hand the file in at the counter of any Banque de France branch, or post it to the dedicated postal address in Paris — Banque de France, TSA 50120, 75035 Paris Cedex 01. A consumers’ association, your Caf (family benefits fund), your département or your municipal social action centre can help you assemble the file if French forms defeat you.

Once the file lands, the timetable is strikingly fast, and every step carries its own deadline. The Banque de France designates the bank that must open your account within one working day of receiving your documents: within one working day of receiving the documents, the Banque de France designates by letter the bank tasked with opening the account (service-public.fr, Fiche F2417). The designated bank must then write to you within three working days with the list of documents it needs and the address of the branch to attend: that information must reach the applicant within three working days of the bank’s designation (service-public.fr, Fiche F2417). And it must open the account within three working days of receiving those documents: the bank must open the account within three working days of receiving the necessary documents (service-public.fr, Fiche F2417). If the refusing bank drags its feet on transmitting your file, you can also simply ask that bank to forward your application to the Banque de France itself — the official page says so expressly (service-public.fr, Fiche F2417). Readers based in Paris and the Île-de-France have a practical advantage here: the Banque de France counters and the designated branches are densest in the capital, so in-person filing and the follow-up branch appointment can usually be arranged within the same week.

The account you receive is deliberately basic, but basic in France still covers everyday life. The decree listing the basic services provides for “L’ouverture, la tenue et la clôture du compte”, monthly statements, cheque and transfer deposits, SEPA direct debits and transfers, remote balance consultation, cash deposits and withdrawals, the issue of bank identity slips on request — “La délivrance à la demande de relevés d’identité bancaire” — and a payment card that works online and for cash withdrawals across the European Union: “Une carte de paiement permettant notamment le paiement d’opérations sur internet et le retrait d’espèces dans l’Union européenne” (Article D312-5, Code monétaire et financier, on Légifrance). What you will not get is an overdraft, a chequebook as of right or a premium gold card — and that is the point: the procedure guarantees inclusion in the payment system, not credit. One more protection matters for readers whose finances are fragile: the law caps the fees banks can charge for account irregularities, and holders of a basic-services account opened through this procedure benefit from specific lower caps, while banks must offer struggling customers a dedicated low-cost package (Article L312-1-3, Code monétaire et financier, on Légifrance). Full details of the designation route, including the online application, are set out on the Banque de France’s own right-to-an-account page.

B. Living with a designated account, closure notices and going to court

An account opened through the procedure is a real account, but it lives under two sword-of-Damocles rules you should know from day one. The first concerns closure. A bank is allowed to end an open-ended deposit-account agreement without giving any reason, provided it respects a notice period of at least two months on a durable medium: the Code states “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” (Article L312-1-1, Code monétaire et financier, on Légifrance). The Paris Court of Appeal applied exactly that rule to a customer of more than fifty years whose bank had closed his accounts after a dispute over a large cheque deposit: it recalled that banks enjoy a discretionary power to terminate an open-ended deposit-account agreement provided they give at least two months of notice on paper, adding that, apart from a closure decided without respecting the statutory notice, a bank is not obliged to give reasons for a decision the law allows it to take discretionally (Paris Court of Appeal, Pôle 5, Chamber 6, 10 May 2023, RG 22/05206). The court dismissed the customer’s claim because he could not prove that the bank had abused its discretion — bad faith or intent to harm must be demonstrated; disagreement with the bank’s commercial choice is not enough. For British readers, the practical lesson is narrow but important: a closure letter that gives you two months, tells you the balance will be brought to zero, asks for your instructions on savings books and securities accounts, and invites you to return the means of payment is, on its face, lawful even if no reason is stated. A closure with immediate effect, or with a notice shorter than two months, is not — and that defect alone can found a claim.

The second rule is the mirror image, and it is where judges show their teeth: a bank designated by the Banque de France cannot wriggle out of opening the account. The Versailles Court of Appeal dealt with a designated bank that had refused to open an account in December 2017, pointing to an earlier account closed by its bad-debt department over unpaid arrears and to a discrepancy between two birth dates on the applicant’s papers. The court held that a bank designated under the right-to-an-account provisions could not validly oppose the closure of an earlier account, even for unrecovered arrears, and that once the applicant had explained and documented the birth-date discrepancy in January 2018, the bank held everything it needed and its continued refusal was a fault. It confirmed the first-instance judgment ordering the bank to open the account under a penalty of 50 euros per day, and confirmed 2,000 euros in damages for the moral harm of being kept without an account for years (Versailles Court of Appeal, 16th Chamber, 21 December 2023, RG 22/05426). Note the court’s realism about harm: it refused to raise damages to the 12,000 euros claimed, observing that basic payment services of the Nickel type — a RIB, an IBAN, online transfers, deposits and a payment card — had remained available, so the applicant could not present the mere deprivation of those everyday services as loss caused by the bank’s fault. The 2,000 euros compensated the distinct moral injury of an unjustified refusal maintained over time. If your designated bank stalls, this decision is the template: a formal demand giving a short deadline, then an application to the tribunal judiciaire (the ordinary civil court) for an order to open under a daily penalty plus damages, exactly as the Pontoise court granted at first instance in that case.

There is one situation in which even a designated account can be closed without the two-month notice, and the Court of Cassation drew its boundaries strictly. Ruling on a basic-services account that a bank had closed with immediate effect, France’s highest civil court held: “Il résulte de ce texte que l’établissement de crédit peut résilier unilatéralement la convention de compte assorti des services bancaires de base, ouvert en application du droit au compte, lorsque le client a délibérément utilisé son compte pour des opérations que l’organisme a des raisons de soupçonner comme poursuivant des fins illégales, auquel cas il est dispensé de lui accorder un préavis.” The court added the concrete test: “Constitue une utilisation délibérée du compte, au sens de ce texte, le fait, pour son titulaire, d’en communiquer les coordonnées à un cocontractant afin qu’il effectue un paiement par virement sur ce compte” (Court of Cassation, Commercial Chamber, 30 June 2021, No. 19-14.313, on Légifrance). In that case the account had been used as a conduit for payments linked to an Iranian commercial partner, and the court quashed the appeal ruling that had treated the episode as a mere attempted misuse. For an ordinary British resident, the message is reassuring rather than alarming: routine salary credits, pension transfers from the United Kingdom, SEPA debits for French bills and transfers between your own accounts are the normal life of a designated account and cannot trigger this exception. What the exception punishes is lending your RIB to opaque third-party circuits — never pass on your new account details for someone else’s payments, however innocent the request sounds.

If you must fight, fight in the right order and keep every envelope. First, put the bank on notice in writing, recalling the refusal letter or the fifteen days of silence and the designation decision, and set a short deadline for opening. Second, return to the Banque de France if the designated bank does not execute the designation — the designation is an administrative decision addressed to the bank, not a suggestion. Third, apply to the tribunal judiciaire of your place of residence for an opening order under a daily penalty with damages, on the Versailles model, attaching the refusal letter, the designation, your proof of sending the documents and a short statement of the concrete harm suffered: missed salary, rejected debits, fees charged by landlords or utilities. Keep the RIB of any fallback account, such as a Nickel-type account, because the Versailles ruling shows judges will ask what services you actually went without. And keep the closure-notice arithmetic from the Paris ruling in mind if the dispute is about closure rather than opening: immediate-effect closure is challengeable, two-month-notice closure needs proof of abuse, and abuse means demonstrable bad faith, not merely a decision you consider unfair.

Conclusion

A French bank account is the key that unlocks salaried life, rented housing and tax compliance in France, and British residents after Brexit hold exactly the same statutory key as before: any person domiciled in France is entitled to a deposit account at the bank of their choice, the bank must open it within six working days of receiving a complete file or give free written reasons, and silence for fifteen days counts as a refusal that opens the Banque de France procedure. That procedure moves fast — designation within one working day, branch details within three, opening within three — and delivers an account with statements, SEPA debits and transfers, a payment card and a RIB, shielded by capped fees for fragile customers. Behind it stand judges willing to order a designated bank to open under a fifty-euro daily penalty with damages for persistent refusal, and to strike down closures decided without the two-month notice, while leaving banks free to close with proper notice unless genuine abuse is proved. The one door that stays shut without notice is the account deliberately lent to suspected illegal circuits, as the Court of Cassation confirmed. Prepare the file early, send everything by registered post, ask for every refusal in writing, and treat the RIB as what French daily life already treats it as: the first document of your settlement, before the lease, before the tax return, before everything else.