A UK business bank account when nobody lives here

The number I had wrong

I have been writing 85,000 pounds in emails for years. It is the figure everybody knows. It stopped being right on 1 December 2025, when the deposit protection limit rose to 120,000 pounds per eligible person, and I did not notice for 9 months because nothing about it reached me except a page I had no reason to reread.

Thirty five thousand pounds of error sat in something I was telling people with confidence.

The Financial Services Compensation Scheme puts it plainly. If a UK authorised bank, building society or credit union fails after 30 November 2025, it will "automatically compensate you up to £120,000 per eligible person, per bank, building society or credit union". The 85,000 figure applied from 30 January 2017 until 30 November 2025, which is long enough that most of the internet still repeats it and long enough that I stopped checking.

So before anything else about opening an account from abroad, this. The protection figure moved and nobody told me. If a UK business bank account for non residents is what you are researching, check the number you are working from before you plan around it.

What follows is what I check now, in the order I check it, and the short list of things nobody publishes at all.

Protection is per licence, and that catches people with 2 accounts

Protection does not attach to the account. Where banks share a banking licence, the scheme has to treat them as 1 bank, and the 120,000 applies to the total across every account you hold with that group rather than to each account separately.

Somebody I act for split a balance across 2 brands to stay under the old limit and end up with 1 limit covering both, because the brands sat inside 1 licence. For the limit to apply twice you need providers that do not share a licence. Which banks share one is searchable on the Financial Services Register.

Where an account is held jointly, cover runs to the same 120,000 per eligible person, and if you hold an individual account and a joint account inside 1 group, the limit again applies across both.

Temporary high balances have their own rule that I forget every single year. Qualifying balances are protected up to 1.4 million pounds for 6 months from the day the money first landed, and it exists for the sale of a house and events like it rather than for a company that habitually runs a large balance.

I find that rule harder to hold in my head than any of the numbers. It is the one I have to look up every time.

An aside about what the compensation rule is actually written about

The scheme describes deposits with a UK authorised deposit taker, and it says your provider must be authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority.

That sentence does more work than it looks like it does. It means the useful question about any provider is not what the marketing calls it but what the Financial Services Register says it is, and that register is public, free and searchable, so the check takes about 40 seconds and settles an argument that otherwise runs for a week.

I suspect most of the confusion here comes from the way products are named rather than from anything difficult in the rules themselves. The names are chosen by marketing departments and the permissions are chosen by a regulator, and only one of those two is written down in a place you can search.

I am not going to tell you what any particular provider is, because permissions change and I would be wrong within a year. Look it up on the day you need the answer. Anyway, back to the company itself.

What the bank can read about you before you say a word

Everything a company files at Companies House is public the day it lands. Registered office, directors, people with significant control, share capital and the whole filing history.

That record starts on day 1. Whoever assesses an application can open it in a browser, and I would assume they do, because it costs nothing and takes a minute.

This is where the residency question turns out not to be the interesting one. Directors do not have to live in the UK. What the company does need is an office address inside the UK, and that address has to clear 2 published tests: anything delivered there is brought to the attention of a person acting for the business, and whoever sent it can obtain confirmation that it arrived.

A Royal Mail PO Box does not pass, and neither do the equivalents. The rule about the address is written as a test of whether post reaches a person: "you or someone acting on behalf of your company will be made aware of any post addressed and delivered to your company". If you are hunting for proof of address UK company requirements, that sentence is the requirement, and it is about delivery rather than about what a document looks like.

What I got wrong the second time

There is a second mistake in this subject that I made for longer than the first one, and it is more embarrassing because the answer sits on the same page as the limit.

I used to tell people to spread a balance across brands. It is sound advice when the brands are separate firms and it does nothing at all when they sit inside 1 banking licence, because the scheme then treats the whole group as 1 bank and 1 limit of 120,000 pounds covers everything you hold across it.

I had assumed that a different name on the card meant a different licence. It does not, and the register will tell you in under a minute which brands share one, which makes my assumption exactly the kind of thing that should have taken 60 seconds to check and instead took 4 years to notice.

The practical version of this is short. Before you split anything, look up both providers. If they share a licence you have split the balance and not the protection, and the second account is doing nothing except giving you another login to lose.

It still annoys me that the answer took 60 seconds and 4 years.

The filing history is the part you can actually control

Late accounts at Companies House cost 150 pounds up to 1 month, 375 pounds from 1 to 3 months, 750 pounds from 3 to 6 months and 1,500 pounds after that. The penalty is issued automatically. File late 2 years running and the figure doubles.

The ladder is short and it is public. Nobody rings you first about it.

Skip a confirmation statement altogether and the bill reaches 5,000 pounds, with striking off available on top.

I mention the ladder in a piece about banking on purpose, because the filing record is the one part of the application that is entirely inside your control and is visible before anybody speaks to you. Your first confirmation statement is due 12 months and 14 days from incorporation, your first set of accounts 21 months from registration, and both of those dates are set the moment the certificate is issued rather than negotiated later.

I would rather somebody spent an afternoon on those 2 dates than a week comparing providers.

None of that wins an application on its own. It removes the questions a reader would otherwise have to ask first, which is a smaller claim than the one people usually make for it.

What I cannot tell you, and why nobody else can either

There is no published approval rate by residency. I went looking for one across the material I read for this piece and found 0, which means anybody quoting you a percentage has invented it or is repeating somebody who did.

I do not know how any individual assessor weighs a company owned from abroad, and I am not going to pretend a pattern I have seen in a handful of cases is data. A handful of cases is not data. It is a handful of cases.

What is written down is a short list: the protection limit and the date it changed, the rule that the limit follows the licence rather than the account, the register entry that says what a provider is actually authorised to do, and the filing history that is public from day 1.

The rest is somebody's decision, and I keep thinking about how much time gets spent guessing at it instead of on the 4 things above.

The order I would work in

If somebody asked me where to spend the next 2 hours, I would not spend them comparing providers, because the comparison is the part everybody enjoys and the part that changes least, and because at the end of it you have a spreadsheet and still no idea whether the answer will be yes.

My instinct is that comparison gets the attention because it feels like progress. I would not defend that as more than an instinct.

The protection figure and the date it changed come first. I had that wrong by 35,000 pounds and it took 9 months to surface.

Then the licence question, which is 2 searches on the register. Then the registered office, because an address that fails the delivery test can eventually cost the company its existence rather than an application.

Then the 2 dates that are already fixed: the first confirmation statement at 12 months and 14 days, and the first accounts at 21 months. Both are set by the certificate. Neither of them moves because you were busy.

That is 4 things, all published, all checkable in an afternoon. The fifth thing, whether a particular provider says yes to a company owned from abroad, is not published by anybody, and I have stopped pretending I can shorten that part for people.

Tidiness does not make an application succeed. It just means the parts under your control are tidy, and the conversation starts from a record that does not raise questions before anybody has asked one.