Your Licence Is Approved. Your Bank Account Isn't.
Twenty-eight payment providers, one application process. How regulated fintech, brokerage, crypto and iGaming businesses actually get banked — and why applying direct is usually the slowest route.
The licence was never the hard part.
Ask any founder who has taken a payment institution, brokerage or VASP authorisation through to approval, and they will tell you the same thing: the regulator was comparatively predictable. The bank was not. Applications sit unanswered for weeks. Onboarding officers ask for documents, then ask for the same documents again. A provider that publicly advertises support for your sector quietly declines your MCC. Another quotes a rolling reserve that makes the economics pointless.
This is the operational gap that kills more licensed businesses than enforcement action ever does. You cannot run a regulated financial services company without a place to hold funds and a way to take payment — and the market for both has become materially harder to navigate since 2023, as correspondent banking de-risking has narrowed the field of providers willing to touch anything classified as elevated risk.
Who this is for
We work with businesses that regularly fall into the "elevated risk" bucket, whether or not that classification is fair:
- —Securities brokers and CFD/FX brokers
- —Investment advisory and asset management firms
- —Proprietary trading firms
- —Investment banks and boutique securities houses
- —Virtual asset service providers, MiCA-authorised CASPs, exchanges and token issuers
- —Payment service providers, EMIs and payment institutions
- —iGaming operators and B2B gaming suppliers
- —E-commerce platforms and marketplaces with cross-border settlement needs
If you have been declined, ignored, or quoted terms that don't work — that is the normal starting position, not a signal that something is wrong with your business.
What we place
Business and operating bank accounts. Safeguarding and client-money accounts for licensed PIs and EMIs. EMI and neobank accounts for operating flow. Card acquiring for Visa and Mastercard, including high-risk MCC categories. Alternative and local payment methods for specific corridors. And crypto on-ramp and off-ramp facilities where you need to receive customer payment in virtual currency and settle in fiat, or the reverse.
Why not just apply direct?
You can. Plenty of people do. Here is what you are taking on when you do.
First — you don't know who will actually take you.Provider appetite is not published and it changes constantly. A provider's risk committee narrows its accepted MCC list quietly and the website stays the same for another six months. We track appetite across our provider network by business model, licence type, jurisdiction, shareholder profile and expected volume — so the shortlist you get is the set of providers that can realistically accept your profile, and the ones likely to price it competitively.
Second — we already know who to ask. We hold direct contacts with the onboarding and business development officers at the providers we work with. That means a pre-qualification conversation about your actual profile before a formal application is submitted, rather than a generic enquiry into a support inbox that may or may not be read.
Third — one file, multiple applications, one engagement. We take your corporate, licensing, AML and business documentation once, structure it into the format each provider expects, and run applications to several providers in parallel under a single fixed engagement fee. Parallel applications matter more than most people realise: sequential applications to four providers can take five months. Run together, the same four take weeks.
The result is that you stop spending your own time researching vendors, writing enquiry emails, re-compiling the same documents into four different formats, and trying to work out whether the terms you have been quoted are competitive or simply the first offer.
What we don't do
Some honesty about the limits of this, because the alternative is wasting your money and our time.
We are an advisory firm. We introduce, pre-qualify and manage applications — we are not a payment institution, we do not hold or transmit client funds, and we do not operate as an agent of any provider in a regulated capacity. The contractual relationship for the account or processing facility is between you and the provider.
We cannot guarantee approval. No one honestly can. Every provider runs its own risk, compliance and credit assessment, and a well-prepared file improves your odds substantially without ever making them certain.
We will not submit applications for businesses conducting regulated activity without the authorisation that activity requires in the markets they serve. Beyond the obvious reasons, it does not work — providers verify licence status, and a single misrepresented application damages our standing with an onboarding team for every client that follows.
And we will tell you before you engage if we think your profile is unplaceable at acceptable terms. Some are. A firm with an unlicensed model in a market that requires licensing, an unresolved regulatory action, or a shareholder who cannot pass screening is better served by fixing that first.
How it works
Assessment. You share your corporate structure, licence status, business model, target markets, expected volumes and average transaction size. We tell you which providers can realistically take you and where the pricing is likely to land.
Pre-qualification. We approach onboarding contacts at the shortlisted providers with an anonymised or named profile and get an indication of appetite before any formal application is filed.
Application. We compile and structure the file once and submit to the shortlisted providers in parallel, managing questions and follow-up requests through to decision.
Onboarding. We stay in the process through account opening, technical integration scoping and — where relevant — the terms discussion on fees, reserves and settlement cycles.
The provider network
As of the date of publication, Zitadelle AG holds 28 active partnership agreements with payment service providers, acquiring banks, electronic money institutions and virtual asset on-ramp/off-ramp providers across Europe, the United Kingdom, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and offshore financial centres. That network is what makes parallel application possible — and it is why the shortlist you receive reflects current appetite rather than what a provider's marketing page claimed last year.
If you are licensed, or in the process of becoming licensed, and the banking and processing side is the piece that hasn't come together — tell us what you're building and where you've been declined. Assessment of your profile and the provider shortlist costs nothing.
Frequently Asked Questions
A high-risk merchant account is a card processing facility issued to businesses that acquiring banks classify as carrying elevated chargeback, regulatory or reputational risk — typically forex and CFD brokers, crypto platforms, iGaming operators, and cross-border e-commerce. These accounts usually carry higher processing fees, rolling reserves, and longer settlement cycles than standard merchant accounts, and the number of acquirers willing to underwrite them is limited.
Can't get banked?
Zitadelle AG holds 28 active partnership agreements with payment providers, acquirers and EMIs. Send us your profile and we'll tell you who can take you — and at what rates.