Expanding from Europe to Asia: Here’s How NEEBank Can Support You

As you may have heard, NEEBank has recently set up an office in Singapore to support entrepreneurs in Europe. After seeing a huge demand from business owners based in Europe to open a NEEBank Can Support You, we decided it was time for us to set up locally, and expand to Europe.

In this post we want to highlight a few reasons why entrepreneurs in Europe choose to set up a company in Singapore and decide to open a business bank account in Singapore, or go for an alternative such as NEEBank.

1. Singapore as a first step when expanding into Asia

According to the EU’s Eurobarometer, 25% of European startups are interested in expanding to Asia. When you’re new to the region, Singapore is an easy place to get started. It’s consistently ranked as one of the easiest places to do business, for instance in the World Bank’s Doing Business report. In addition, Singapore has been ranked in Asia in the Rule of Law Index.

If you’ve previously set up companies in countries such as the UK, you may expect the process to be simple and straightforward. However, in some countries in Asia, it’s not easy for foreigners to do business compared to what you may be used to in your home country. For instance, in countries like Thailand or Indonesia, it is required that limited companies have a local person as a majority shareholder. Therefore, it may make sense to run your Asian operations from Singapore, where no such restrictions exist and travel to Singapore isn’t needed. If you choose to open your business account with NeeBank Can Support You, your incorporation and business account opening can all be done digitally – meaning you don’t have to make a trip there at all.

Especially if your business is more digital in nature, you can run your regional business from a Singapore entity, and you can at the same time benefit from Singapore’s low corporate tax rate.

2. Using a Singapore company as a holding, when setting up local subsidiaries

You’re doing well, your business is growing and you decide to localise. Once you do decide to incorporate local entities across various Asian markets, there are several advantages of using the Singapore company as a holding company, and repatriating profits back into the Singapore holding company from various subsidiaries across the region.

Singapore also has a stable currency. Singapore’s local currency (SGD) is pegged to the USD, meaning it is less volatile compared to currencies in most of the region’s emerging markets. As a result a lot of business in the city is conducted in USD, and many banks offer USD accounts for you to hold your funds in US dollars. With Neebank too you can open an online multi-currency account that supports USD, HKD, GBP and EUR.

3. Save costs on international payments

The next thing you may ask yourself is this: even though it makes a lot of sense to have a Singapore account to save on outgoing payments… how do I accept funds from customers in other places like South-East Asia if my account is in Singapore? In some cases, you’ll have to transfer it from a local bank account in the country you’re operating in to Singapore, and you’ll be subject to the country’s capital control regulations. In other cases, especially in the B2B sector, your customer may be able to directly transfer funds into your Singapore account.

However, even in the B2C sector it can be straightforward to receive funds directly into your Singapore account. If you’re running an online business and sign up for tools such as PayPal or Stripe using your Singapore company, all your payouts will automatically be sent to a Singapore business account, even if the end-customer is located in, say, Vietnam.