.
I don’t know whether this is good news for us, or not.
This proposed new bank appears to offer hope for some relief from current money-transfer problems to and from offshore companies – specifically Caribbean offshore companies – and that may open up new money-transfer possibilities for the offshore forex brokers we deal with.
If this new bank gets up and running as planned, it will be open for business in the fall. We should keep an eye on this development, even as we continue to pursue other money-transfer solutions using bitcoin.
Excerpts from a BloombergBusinessWeek article:
The global campaign against money laundering combined with the Panama Papers made the Caribbean islands of sun, sand and offshore banking a near no-go zone for the world’s biggest banks.
So the British Virgin Islands has a solution: a bank to service offshore companies, many of them from China, locked out of the global banking system by HSBC Holdings Plc, Standard Chartered Plc and others. The new Bank of Asia (BVI) Ltd. is to begin operating online later this year.
“We have a captive client market of all these offshore companies that have had difficulties opening bank accounts, not for their own fault but because the legacy banks have stopped wanting them,” said Carson Wen, 64, a former acquisitions lawyer at Jones Day in Hong Kong and now founder and chairman of the bank. He plans to target the 200,000 out of 400,000-plus BVI companies that can’t get bank accounts.
In a speech in January, [BVI Prime Minister] Smith expressed hope that Bank of Asia “will mitigate against the restrictive banking practices that have impacted our incorporation numbers,” citing the effect of the Panama Papers’ revelations. Elise Donovan, director of the government’s BVI House Asia in Hong Kong, said in an emailed statement that the bank’s license was approved and that BVI officials were delighted.
Link to an msn.com reprint* of the Bloomberg article:
Next Chinese Offshore Play Could Be a New Bank in the Caribbean
* Note:
I saw this article in the print version of BloombergBusinessWeek (the May 22 - May 28 issue).
In the magazine the article was titled A New Caribbean Bank for Chinese Money.
Bloomberg is very restrictive regarding the sharing of their copyrighted material on the internet: only certain articles appear in bloombergbusinessweek.com. Links to Bloomberg articles posted in other sources usually fail, generating a 404 error message.
However, some sources apparently have permission from Bloomberg to redistribute certain material, and that’s how I came upon this reprint in msn.com. The title of the article is different, but the content is the same.
.