No Israeli bank will open an account for me without a branch visit. Can an Israeli payment company onboard me remotely instead?

The standard answer a non-resident gets from an Israeli branch has not changed in years: come in person, bring originals, and expect the compliance department to take a view afterwards. What has changed is that the branch is no longer the only regulated place to hold shekels. Israel now licenses payment companies under a separate regime, supervised by the Securities Authority rather than the Bank of Israel, and in February 2025 that regulator told them they may identify a customer over a video link, including a customer who lives abroad.

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Detailed Answer

On 13 February 2025 the Israel Securities Authority published a directive to payment companies on implementing anti-money-laundering obligations through online identification technology. The point of it is to let a licensed provider identify and authenticate a client online, without a physical meeting, while keeping the reliability of the identification and controlling the money-laundering and terrorist-financing risk that comes with remote onboarding. Two methods are permitted, video conference technology and visual identification technology. Before using either, the provider must carry out a money-laundering risk assessment of its remote identification process, put a risk mitigation plan in place, and adopt an internal policy governing the use of the technology. The provision that matters most to readers of this page is the express permission to identify a service recipient who is not an Israeli resident, coupled with increased controls on that identification. That is a deliberate regulatory choice, not an oversight, and it is the first time a mainstream Israeli financial regulator has written a non-resident remote-onboarding route into a directive rather than leaving it to each institution's risk appetite.

Understand what you would actually be getting. A payment account held with a licensed payment company under the Regulation of Payment Services and Payment Initiation Law 5783-2023 lets you receive and send payments and hold a balance. It is not a bank account. There is no overdraft, no mortgage, no securities account, and no deposit insurance of the kind people assume, and the counterparties matter: some Israeli institutions, the Land Registry chain in a property purchase, and certain government payees still expect a bank account in the payer's name. The realistic use cases for a non-resident are receiving rent from an Israeli tenant, paying an Israeli service provider, running the recurring costs of an apartment, and settling small Israeli obligations without a wire fee each time. Two cautions. Check the provider actually holds a licence and is on the Securities Authority's register, because the sector has grown quickly and the licence is what brings the directive and its protections with it. And expect the remote identification to be more searching than a branch visit rather than less: the increased controls the directive requires for non-residents mean more documentation about the source of funds, not less. Where the goal is genuinely a bank account and the branch has said no, the reasons and the escalation route are set out in our answer on what to do when a non-resident business bank account is rejected in Israel.

In Practice: The Israel Securities Authority directive of 13 February 2025 permits a licensed payment company to identify a customer through video conference technology or visual identification technology instead of a physical meeting, and expressly covers a service recipient who is not an Israeli resident, subject to increased controls, a documented money-laundering risk assessment and an internal policy. Payment companies are licensed under the Regulation of Payment Services and Payment Initiation Law 5783-2023. Onboarding typically runs one to three weeks from application to a funded account, against two to six months for a non-resident bank account, and there is no deposit protection equivalent to a bank's. Cost is rarely the deciding factor: from July 2027 the Supervisor of Banks caps a bank's current-account basket at NIS 10 per month for 100 transactions, so choose on access and function rather than on price.

When to Consult a Lawyer

• The money moving through the account belongs to an estate or a company. A payment account opened in the wrong name is worse than no account, because an Israeli succession order or a corporate resolution has to match the account holder exactly before a bank or the Land Registry will act on a payment out of it.
• Your home country treats the account as a reportable foreign financial account. A payment account can be reportable for FBAR, FATCA or common reporting standard purposes in the same way as a bank account, and providers do not always tell you that at onboarding.
• The provider declines you after the video session. A refusal by a licensed payment company sits under a different supervisory framework from a bank refusal, so the complaint route runs to the Securities Authority rather than to the Supervisor of Banks, and the arguments are not the same.

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Speak With an Israeli Attorney

We check that an Israeli payment provider is properly licensed, prepare the source-of-funds file that remote identification of a non-resident now requires, and advise where a payment account is genuinely a substitute for a bank account and where it is not.

Contact us for a confidential initial consultation.