To open a foreign bank account for a US entity you will normally need apostilled originals of four to eight corporate documents: a state-certified copy of your formation document, a current certificate of good standing, your bylaws or operating agreement, a board resolution authorising the account, a certificate of incumbency, and usually a power of attorney. State records are apostilled by the Secretary of State of the state of formation; federal records go to the US Department of State.

What does this filing actually look like?

The typical shape is this. A US company is setting up to receive payments, fund a new entity, or pay a supplier abroad. The bank’s onboarding officer sends over a list in an email — six or seven line items, each with the words “original, apostilled, with sworn translation” beside it — and attaches a deadline tied to an account-opening appointment, a registry filing, or a first wire the business has already promised a counterparty.

Nothing on that list is difficult on its own. What sinks the file is that the items come from four different places: the Secretary of State of the state of formation, a notary, a federal agency, and the company’s own officers. Each has its own lead time, its own prerequisites, and in two cases its own expiry clock. Sequencing them wrong is what turns a two-week job into a six-week one, and it is almost always a sequencing failure rather than a missing document.

If you are opening the account in support of a new legal entity rather than as a standalone banking relationship, read this alongside the apostille pack for opening a subsidiary abroad — the registry and the bank usually want overlapping but not identical sets, and ordering extra certified copies up front is cheaper than running the chain twice.

Which documents does a foreign bank require from a US entity?

The bank writes the list. There is no universal set, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. What follows is the pack that recurs across jurisdictions, with the certification chain for each item.

Two items from the wider trade-document family show up when the account exists to support exports rather than general operations: FDA Certificates to Foreign Government and USDA export certificates are federal and go to the US Department of State, while a bill of sale is a private document that needs notarisation and then the state apostille. Personal civil records — a birth certificate or marriage certificate for a resident director — are state vital records, apostilled by the Secretary of State of the issuing state, and a diploma or transcript is a private document that a registrar signs before a notary.

Who apostilles each document, state or federal?

This is the split that costs the most time, because a document sent to the wrong office is not corrected, it is returned.

State chain

Anything issued by a state agency, and anything signed in front of a notary public, is apostilled by the Secretary of State of that state. Note the two separate triggers. Your articles of organisation are apostilled in the state of formation. Your board resolution is apostilled in the state where the notary holds a commission — which may be a completely different state. A Delaware LLC whose officers sign in Florida produces two filings in two states for a single bank pack.

Several states insert a step before the Secretary of State: the county clerk must first certify that the notary’s commission is valid. Skipping it means the state office returns the document untouched. Confirm the rule for your notary’s state before the signing appointment, not after.

Federal chain

Documents issued by federal agencies — IRS certifications, FBI Identity History Summaries, FDA and USDA certificates — are authenticated by the US Department of State’s Office of Authentications. No state can apostille them. The office looks for the signature or seal of a federal official, which is why unsigned, computer-generated agency notices can be a problem. If what you hold is a plain printed notice rather than a signed certification, ask the bank whether a notarised copy routed through the state chain is acceptable instead, and understand what that produces: an apostille certifying the notary, not the federal agency.

Apostille first, translate second. The apostille is a separate certificate attached to your document by the issuing authority, and the receiving bank almost always wants the apostille text translated too. Translating before the apostille exists means paying for the translation twice and losing the weeks between.

Does the destination country accept an apostille at all?

An apostille only works between contracting parties to the 1961 Hague Convention, which has been in force for the United States since 1981. If the destination is not a party, the route is consular legalisation: notarisation where relevant, certification by the state Secretary of State or the US Department of State, then legalisation at that country’s embassy or consulate in the US. That chain is longer and the consulate sets its own appointment availability. Our page on how apostille and consular legalisation differ in practice walks through what changes.

Check the HCCH status table rather than a blog post, including this one. Membership has expanded recently — mainland China and Canada both joined within the last two years — so instructions written in 2021 telling you to book a consular appointment may now be wrong. The reverse trap also exists: under Article 12, an existing party can object to a new accession, in which case the Convention does not operate between those two countries and legalisation still applies despite both appearing on the list.

In what order should you run the filing?

1. Get the bank’s list in writing. Ask for the document names, whether each must be an original, the recency window in days or months, the translation standard, and whether the pack is lodged with the branch, with a local notary, or with the company registry. Verbal lists change; an email does not.
2. Order the state-certified records. Request certified copies of the formation document from the Secretary of State of the state of formation, plus any foreign-qualification certificate from a second state if the bank asks for one. Order spare certified copies in the same request — a second trip to the state costs days.
3. Draft and notarise the private documents. Resolution, incumbency certificate, bylaws certification, beneficial-owner declaration and power of attorney. Have local counsel approve the power of attorney wording before signature; a POA that does not grant the specific authority the bank needs is rejected at the counter, and the signing has to be repeated in person.
4. File for the apostilles. State documents and notarised documents to the relevant Secretary of State, federal documents to the US Department of State. Each is a separate submission. The issuing authorities charge filing fees, which are included in our flat price of $120 per apostille, all-inclusive.
5. Commission the translation on the completed set. Send the apostilled originals, including the apostille certificates, to the translator the receiving country requires.
6. Courier the originals. Keep the apostille physically attached as issued, keep multi-page documents bound as the authority bound them, and send tracked. Do not unstaple anything to scan it.

What it costs to reverse the order: translate before the apostille and you buy the translation twice. Order the good standing certificate in week one and the rest in week five, and the good standing certificate may expire before the bank reviews the pack. Sign the power of attorney before counsel reviews it and you need the signatory physically in front of a notary again, which is the single most expensive hour in this whole process when that person is travelling.

Do you need a translation as well as an apostille?

In most non-English-speaking jurisdictions, yes, and the apostille does not substitute for it — they answer different questions. The apostille verifies that the signature and seal are genuine. The translation lets the compliance officer read the document.

What varies is who is allowed to produce it. Civil-law countries typically require a translator sworn, licensed or registered with a court or ministry in that country, and a US-based “certified translation” with a translator’s affidavit is frequently refused. Spain’s sworn translator system is the clearest example of this, and the same structural requirement appears across Latin America and much of continental Europe — the detail on sworn translation requirements in Spain shows how strict the distinction can be. Ask the bank one question: does the translation have to be produced in-country, and by whom. Where a US translation is accepted, the translator’s affidavit is itself a notarised document and may need its own apostille.

How recent do the documents have to be?

No US authority puts an expiry date on an apostille. The clock comes from the receiving side, and it runs from the date the underlying document was issued or signed, not from the date the apostille was attached — a point people get wrong constantly, and the same trap appears in how receiving offices apply document age limits on the personal side.

Two items carry the risk: the certificate of good standing and the certificate of incumbency, because both assert a present state of affairs. A formation document from 1998 is not stale; a good standing certificate from four months ago may be. Get the bank’s window in writing, work backwards from the appointment date, and order those two documents last in the sequence.

Common reasons an apostille request is rejected

• A plain photocopy instead of a state-certified copy. The Secretary of State can only apostille a document it or a notary has certified. Your scan of the articles is not a certifiable document.
• Wrong state. A Nevada entity’s records sent to the state where the officers happen to live. The state of formation governs, and the notary’s state governs separately for notarised items.
• Federal document sent to a state office. An FBI summary or IRS certification routed to a Secretary of State comes back unprocessed, with the lead time lost.
• Missing county clerk certification. Required by some states before the state apostille on notarised documents.
• Defective notarisation. Expired commission, missing venue line, illegible stamp, the notary’s name in the certificate not matching the signature, or a jurat used where an acknowledgement was needed.
• Copy certification the notary was not authorised to perform. Several states prohibit notaries from certifying copies of documents, which breaks the usual route for passport copies.
• Name mismatch. The entity’s legal name on the formation document differs from the trading name on the bank’s forms, or an officer’s name appears with a middle initial in one document and without it in another.
• Resolution signed by someone the incumbency certificate does not list. Compliance teams cross-check these two documents against each other first.
• Translation produced before the apostille, so it does not include the apostille certificate.
• Apostille sought for a non-Hague destination, or for a country with an Article 12 objection in force, where legalisation is the only valid route.
• E-apostille or electronic notarisation the receiving bank will not accept. Confirm format before execution, not after.
• Documents unstapled or re-bound after issuance, which many receiving offices treat as tampering.

What we handle, and what we do not

We run the US-side chain: ordering state-certified corporate records, getting notarised documents through county and state certification where required, and filing federal documents with the US Department of State. Our price is $120 per apostille, all-inclusive — government filing fees are already covered, and there are no per-page add-ons.

What we do not control is the decision at the other end. We are not affiliated with any bank, consulate or foreign ministry, and an apostille is not a guarantee of acceptance. The bank’s compliance team, and in some cases a local notary or company registry, decides whether the pack satisfies its own policy. Requirements differ by jurisdiction and the receiving authority has the final say.

Your next action is a single email to the onboarding officer asking for four things in writing: the exact document list, the recency window for good standing and incumbency, whether the translation must be produced in-country, and whether originals go to the branch or to local counsel. Send us that reply with your state of formation and the destination country, and we will tell you which items go to which authority and in what order to release them.