Our valued sponsor

Personal UAE bank accounts? Which one is the easiest to open?

I went 3x to the ENBD branch. With 100 pages of documents they request on paper. They didn’t want to accept bank statements from “digital” banks.

Also their app didn’t want to onboard me and even shadowbanned me.

Very bad experience for a HNWI.

Wio is pretty solid. (After they existed for some time)

Mashreq is alright.

Liv is .... (don't even bother)
Wondering if ENBD priority would be any better for HNWI. From my understanding it is like ADCB excellency (which I opened). From anecdotal stories (including one of the youtubers that do emirates setups) ENBD is the only one crypto friendly, that youtuber (forgot his name sorry) claims he cashed out 1M$ from crypto there without problems. (he kepts transfers smaller than 100k aed though)

I just tried Liv yesterday, app seems buggy so far and after the onboarding process it said it will take 2 days to review my application. From the onboarding questions they ask, like salary and etc I'm not very hopeful they will be ok for HNWI.

I guess I'll try Wio, now that quite few people recommend it. At least as an entry point of history so it's easier with other banks.
Honestly I'm even wondering if its worth going for anything other than accounts like exellency and priority through an introduction since I'll be moving 6-7 figures mostly.

I expected banks in Dubai to be more relaxed since their whole economy counts on attracting HNWI but so far that is not the case at all. They are harder to onboard than EU banks. I wonder if that is because of the recent influx of controversial russian capital that raised RE prices with 30% in an year and the US being not very happy about it.
 
Opened at Wio it was very smooth process. However how would they react if I fund my account with wire from a crypto exchange?

A couple of weeks ago I received a transfer of 11K AED from BitOasis to my WIO personal account. It went through without any issues. Before initiating the transfer, I asked WIO support on Whatsapp whether they would tolerate occasional transfers of 10k-15k from a local crypto exchange and they said "crypto transfers are ok" but they may need to review the transactions. They also said that the transfer won't be accepted if I have a credit facility.
My transfer took only 2 business days from the moment I initiated it on BitOasis, even though BitOasis said it may take 5 business days.
Note that I have this account for few months and I've been actively using it for payments. No big turnover though.
I'd suggest that you contact them first on whatsapp and see what they say. Better if you can wait for few weeks in my opinion and try to use the account daily so that you don't look like you opened it for crypto cashouts. I can always be wrong but that's just my thought. Good luck.
 
A couple of weeks ago I received a transfer of 11K AED from BitOasis to my WIO personal account. It went through without any issues. Before initiating the transfer, I asked WIO support on Whatsapp whether they would tolerate occasional transfers of 10k-15k from a local crypto exchange and they said "crypto transfers are ok" but they may need to review the transactions. They also said that the transfer won't be accepted if I have a credit facility.
My transfer took only 2 business days from the moment I initiated it on BitOasis, even though BitOasis said it may take 5 business days.
Note that I have this account for few months and I've been actively using it for payments. No big turnover though.
I'd suggest that you contact them first on whatsapp and see what they say. Better if you can wait for few weeks in my opinion and try to use the account daily so that you don't look like you opened it for crypto cashouts. I can always be wrong but that's just my thought. Good luck.
Thanks, that helps a lot.
I guess doing 500k aed from crypto won't have the same success though. Is there any way to understand without actually doing it? :)
 
Thanks, that helps a lot.
I guess doing 500k aed from crypto won't have the same success though. Is there any way to understand without actually doing it?
For whatever reason, when I hear WIO I assume smaller amounts. I think you can ask WIO support for larger amounts. Who knows they may accept it.
I had raised a question in a separate thread about using swissquote for larger amounts. Some people said it worked for them. I didn’t try that yet. You can find the thread here:
Thread 'swissquote for personal crypto cashout'
swissquote for personal crypto cashout
 
For whatever reason, when I hear WIO I assume smaller amounts. I think you can ask WIO support for larger amounts. Who knows they may accept it.
I had raised a question in a separate thread about using swissquote for larger amounts. Some people said it worked for them. I didn’t try that yet. You can find the thread here:
Thread 'swissquote for personal crypto cashout'
swissquote for personal crypto cashout
hmm seems iffy to just wire to swissquote and immediatelly wire out without using any of their brokerage functions, let us know if it works though please