Integration into Estonian business. Part 1

There are different reasons why people choose to do business outside the country of their origin. Sometimes it is desired to have more options for development, sometimes it is desired to cut expenses. And sometimes it is desired to start everything from the very beginning in a whole new place. In this article we will talk about integration into the Estonian business community.

So you decided that it is Estonia to be and this is just the right country to do business and maybe to live in the future. As a result, you will have Estonian company, Estonian life permit and account in an Estonian bank (as your personal one, so for your company).

What are you going to start from? At this point may we suggest e-Residence. Yes, it is still not as good as it meant to be and lets be honest, it still provides you with some crucial opportunities.

• First of all it is the card of e-Resident. Electronic identification and digital sign are now available for you.
• Second, it is the Estonian personal code of nonresidents. Which means you are officially identified by Estonian state and may use your personal code whenever you need. You can be registered as an employee/shareholder in Tax Department now.
• And third you may open a payment account with Holvi – the option available only for e-Residents with Estonian company.

After you obtained your e-Residency card, you can establish a company. Of course you gonna need a legal assistant for that. And in every respect company registration with the e-Residency card will demand much less effort and costs than if you would do it upon a power of attorney. That is also one of the reasons why to start with e-Residency.

If you have a good legal assistant (and we do expect you have) – company registration together with all documents needed, will take up to two working days. Normally company is registered the very next day after the petition was submitted.

The most exciting part of registration is that as an e-Resident you will do all registration steps by your own. You will be provided with a visual manual which will guide you step-by-step through the registration process. It takes 40-50 minutes to complete it.

When a company is registered, there is still one more issue to be managed. Yes, it is a payment account. Depending on your business model it may be:

• Holvi (only for e-Residents),
• Transferwise,
• Paysera, and
• PayPal.

You might be interested just in PayPal, since it could be a situation, when PayPal provides better conditions for Estonia than in your country. And you are the one to do business with Amazone, Ebay or something similar.

Maybe we missed some other providers with an option of business accounts for companies. We named those, which are used mostly, and which provide a real possibility for account opening. As you might already noticed we did not mention any Estonian bank at this stage. And there is a reason for that.

Reality of banking business is, that it will take you a while until you are really able to open banking account in Estonia. Yes, banks are the ones to be most involved in money laundering schemes and still it is sole entrepreneurs and freelancers to be responsible for that. This is life and no one said it will be easy and fair all way long.

So now your setup is complete and you may start with your regular business activity and preparation for life permit application. We will talk about this in the next article.