Offshore Banking

Banking is the piece of a cross-border plan families think about last and that fails first. The citizenship completes, the property closes, the structure is formed — and then the money has nowhere sensible to sit, because nobody asked early enough where it would be held, in which currency, and under whose regulator.

I am a licensed real-estate and investment-migration professional, not a bank. Accounts are opened and supervised by licensed institutions; my part is the judgment that comes before the paperwork.

The honest reasons are unglamorous, and none of them is secrecy. The first is proximity: a family buying Caribbean real estate, paying a builder or funding a citizenship application moves money into the region constantly, and doing that from an account several time zones away is friction they eventually resent.

The second is diversification: one institution, one currency, one regulator is a concentration nobody would accept in a portfolio and many quietly accept in their cash. The third is continuity — banking that survives a move rather than one rebuilt after it, because mobility is a portfolio and cash is part of it.

The version of offshore banking that sold privacy stopped existing more than a decade ago. Every jurisdiction a serious family would consider participates in automatic exchange of information, and under the Common Reporting Standard accounts are reported to the jurisdiction where the holder claims tax residency. A properly held foreign account is visible, declared and entirely ordinary.

For Americans the mechanism is FATCA, and it follows US-person status, not a travel document — banks ask for place of birth precisely because of this. Presenting a second passport to obscure US status is not a strategy; it is a false statement to a financial institution. And nothing underneath changes: the United States taxes its citizens on worldwide income wherever they live, so a foreign account adds reporting — FBAR and Form 8938 — and takes nothing away. That is why second citizenship for Americans is insurance, not a tax play. Where tax is the real objective, the question is where a family is actually tax-resident — that is international tax planning, not a choice of bank.

A second passport does not open a bank account. Citizenship-by-investment due diligence and a bank’s own client acceptance are separate processes against separate criteria, and treating one as evidence of the other is how plans stall.

What citizenship and property do change is the relationship: a citizen who owns a home in the region is a different proposition to a bank than a stranger sending a wire. A citizenship by investment application and a property closing both move money on a timetable, and a structure with no account behind it cannot move money at all — which is why offshore company structuring, offshore trusts and foundations and the banking beneath them are designed together.

Start with depositor protection, because it varies more than almost anything else and almost nobody checks it. The Cayman Islands has no deposit insurance scheme at all, only a modest depositor preference in liquidation. Bermuda’s caps at a low fixed amount per depositor per bank and covers Bermuda-dollar deposits only. Barbados insures up to BBD 25,000 per depositor, per bank, per ownership category. All three are modest against relocation-scale balances, so I say the same thing every time: spread meaningful sums across more than one institution.

Then the cost of moving money: Barbados levies a 2% government foreign-exchange fee under its Exchange Control Act on essentially any foreign-currency transaction, separate from whatever the bank charges. Labels deserve scrutiny too — Barbados ended its ring-fenced offshore banking regime in 2019, so what exists there today is onshore banking, as what opening a Caribbean bank account actually involves shows at ground level.

The map itself is being redrawn. The Caribbean has lost correspondent banking relationships for a decade, and the institutions that anchored retail banking here for a century have left with them — Scotiabank from 2019, RBC in 2021, and in May 2026 CIBC agreed to sell its controlling stake in CIBC Caribbean to Bermuda’s Butterfield Bank, creating a bank of roughly US$29 billion in assets across 19 jurisdictions. Fewer names means more concentration where protection is already thin, and less room for the judgment a smaller bank could once exercise for a long-standing client. That is the last test: knowing your banker now matters more than knowing your bank, the case I set out on the CIBC–Butterfield deal.

No one outside a bank can promise you an account, and I do not. What I can do is settle what the family needs the banking to do — which currencies, which jurisdictions, alongside which property and which structure — before a purchase or an application forces the answer. I do not open accounts, hold client funds or opine on any bank’s suitability.

Requirements beyond coordination — multi-currency treasury, institutional custody, banking built around a trust — route onward to a dedicated specialist private-capital practice, alongside the wider private client advisory work and family office services.