Founders outside the UK
Incorporating in Britain from somewhere else
Three things make this harder than it should be, and none of them are mentioned by the agents selling incorporation for the price of a takeaway. Here they are, with what we do about each.
£595for the first year, everything included, then £395 a year
Verification
You cannot use GOV.UK One Login, so this is compulsory rather than optional
Since identity verification became a condition of appointment, every director and every person with significant control has to be verified. There are two routes. One is GOV.UK One Login, which is free and which depends on UK-issued documents and UK credit-reference data. The other is verification by an Authorised Corporate Service Provider.
If you have never lived in the UK, the first route will usually not complete, and no amount of persistence changes that. The second is not a premium alternative you are being upsold; it is the mechanism Parliament provided for exactly your situation. We hold registration AP003554 and have verified over 750 directors and persons with significant control under it, using international documents, remotely, without anyone travelling anywhere.
Verification is done before the company is filed, not chased afterwards. The annual fee includes it for one director or person with significant control, and each additional person is £49, stated here rather than discovered at checkout.
The address
The appropriate address test is hardest to satisfy from abroad
A registered office must be somewhere a document delivered by hand or post would, in the ordinary course, be expected to come to the attention of a person acting for the company, and where delivery can be acknowledged. You cannot satisfy that from an apartment in Singapore, and the cheap answer, an address that forwards statutory post and bins the rest, satisfies it only on paper.
We hold your registered office at 45 Albemarle Street, a building Fundsure occupies, and mail is scanned and emailed on the business day it arrives, wherever practicable. Not only Companies House and HMRC letters: everything. For a founder eight time zones away that is a materially better answer than forwarding, because it arrives in hours rather than weeks and leaves a searchable record of what came and when.
It is worth saying plainly that the market prices this the wrong way round. Forwarding costs more than scanning almost everywhere you look, so buyers assume forwarding is the better tier. For you it is not, and there is no tier to choose here in any case.
Banking
An introduction is not an account, and we will not pretend otherwise
Every competitor in this market describes a referral arrangement as a bundled bank account. It is not one. What an introduction can do is put your application in front of a provider that works for your profile, prepared so that it matches the Companies House record exactly, which is where a surprising proportion of applications fail. What it cannot do is guarantee that anybody opens an account for you.
Two limits decide the answer before anything else does, so we ask about both at the start rather than at the end. The first is where you are resident. The second is what the business actually does.
| Considered | Not covered by the arrangement |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom, Switzerland, European Economic Area, Australia, Singapore, India, United States | Everywhere else. We will say so at the outset rather than take you through an application that cannot succeed. |
Residence of the applicant. Founders outside these jurisdictions, including the UAE, Hong Kong, Canada, Japan, China, Nigeria and most of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, fall outside the arrangement.
On the second limit: special purpose vehicles, trusts, charities and foundations, and unregulated or high-risk financial services are outside the arrangement, as are most crypto businesses, precious metals, adult content, gambling and weapons. Those are perfectly good companies and we are glad to form them. They simply must not be shown a banking promise, so they are not.
Where we can make an introduction we disclose that we are paid a fee for it, here and in our terms. Where we cannot, we will tell you which routes tend to work for a company in your position, which is worth more than an introduction that fails.
directors and persons with significant control verified
Authorised Corporate Service Provider registration
supervised as a trust or company service provider
member of the Association of Professional Compliance Consultants
Where this starts
Check the name, then continue when you are ready
Nothing here needs a call, and nothing needs UK business hours. The whole purchase is designed to be completed from wherever you are, at whatever time it happens to be there.
£595
first year, everything included, then £395 a year
ContinueNot ready yet
A guide to incorporating in the UK as an overseas founder
The verification routes and which one applies to you, what the appropriate address test actually requires, what banks look at, and the filings that fall due in the first year.
Questions
What founders abroad ask first
Complex structures are worth a conversation
Multiple share classes, corporate shareholders, a trust in the ownership chain or a group formed in stages are all things we would rather discuss than have you guess at in a form. Everything else you can complete online, at whatever hour suits the time zone you are in.
Steve Middleton, director. Calls to the number above reach him or the person handling your company, not a queue.
Fundsure Limited is supervised by HM Revenue and Customs as a trust or company service provider and is registered with Companies House as an Authorised Corporate Service Provider, also known as a Companies House authorised agent, under registration AP003554. Fundsure is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Companies House does not endorse or recommend authorised agents.