Few letters land as badly as the one from your bank giving notice that it will close your account. For an international business it can be existential: without a bank, you cannot be paid, cannot pay, and cannot operate. The instinct is to argue or to panic. Neither helps. What helps is understanding why it is happening and moving quickly and calmly to secure a new relationship before the old one ends.
Why banks do this
In most cases it is not about you specifically. It is de-risking: banks periodically shed customers whose profile costs more to monitor than the relationship earns. A foreign-owned structure, cross-border flows, a jurisdiction the bank has decided to exit, an industry it now avoids, an account that generates compliance work, any of these can put a customer in the category the bank wants to reduce. The decision is often driven by the bank’s own regulatory pressures rather than by anything the customer did wrong.
Those pressures have a legal source, and it explains the timing too. Article 13(1)(d) of Directive (EU) 2015/849 requires ongoing monitoring of the relationship and the transactions within it, with the information held kept current and the source of funds examined where necessary. Article 14(5) applies those checks to existing customers at appropriate times on a risk-sensitive basis.
Article 3 of the Wet ter voorkoming van witwassen en financieren van terrorisme carries that into Dutch law, and requires the file to be reopened where the bank doubts what it gathered before. Closure follows from Article 14(4) of the Directive, mirrored in Article 5(3) of the Wwft: a bank that cannot identify the customer or the beneficial owner, or establish the purpose of the relationship, must end it.
Where de-risking stops being risk management
The word has a defined meaning in supervision. The European Banking Authority uses it for a refusal to enter into, or a decision to terminate, relationships with customers or categories of customers associated with higher money laundering risk. It has concluded that de-risking whole categories, without regard to individual risk profiles, can be a sign of ineffective risk management.
The guidelines the authority issued in March 2023 turn that into instructions. Banks are to distinguish the risk of a category from the risk of the customer within it, to avoid blanket termination of whole categories, and to satisfy themselves before ending a relationship that every reasonable mitigating measure was considered and rejected. De Nederlandsche Bank has called for the same targeted and risk-based approach.
The 2024 European package tightens this, but the dates matter more than the headlines. Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 applies from 10 July 2027 and Directive (EU) 2024/1640 falls due for transposition on the same date. Regulation (EU) 2024/1620 has applied since 1 July 2025, so the new authority exists while the rulebook it will administer does not yet bind.
Do not take it personally, and do not go quiet
The two worst responses are an angry complaint and silence. The bank is rarely persuadable to reverse a de-risking decision, so energy spent fighting it is usually wasted. And going quiet wastes the notice period, which is the one asset the situation gives you. Treat the letter as a deadline to solve a problem, not as an insult to answer.
One exchange is still worth having. Ask in writing what would change the assessment, and offer the mitigations the bank is supposed to have weighed first: fewer products, restrictions on cash or on particular corridors, a shorter review cycle. More often than a reprieve it produces a written answer telling you what the next bank will find.
The closure notice is not a verdict on your business. It is a clock. The only useful response is to use the time it gives you.
The formal route starts inside the bank, with its complaints procedure. The usual alternative to litigation is narrower than most expect: Kifid, the Dutch financial services complaints institute, hears an entrepreneur only on business financing or financing advice covered by one of four named codes of conduct, and only once the internal procedure is exhausted.
That leaves the courts. In a judgment of 5 November 2021 the Hoge Raad held that banks may, by virtue of their position in society, be obliged to offer a payment account to non-consumers too, because without one it is close to impossible to run a business. It accepted in the same breath that integrity concerns can defeat that obligation.
The notice period, and where it comes from
The notice period does not come from the anti-money laundering rules. Article 55(3) of Directive (EU) 2015/2366 lets the provider terminate an open-ended contract on at least two months notice where the framework contract so allows. Article 38(1) then lets the parties disapply that title, wholly or partly, where the user is not a consumer.
The separate European right of access to an account is often invoked by the wrong person. Article 16(2) of Directive 2014/92/EU gives consumers legally resident in the Union the right to a payment account with basic features, and Article 2(1) defines a consumer as a natural person acting outside his trade, business or profession. That takes a company out.
The right is bounded even for those it covers. In the Netherlands it sits in Article 4:71f of the Wet op het financieel toezicht, and Article 4:71g obliges the bank to refuse where it cannot meet the requirements of the Wwft. Termination runs off a closed list in Article 19(2) of the Directive: deliberate use of the account for illegal purposes, no transaction for more than twenty-four consecutive months, incorrect information given to obtain an account the applicant would not otherwise have had a right to, loss of legal residence in the Union, or a second qualifying account opened since. Article 19(4) requires two months written notice with reasons for the dormancy, residence and second-account grounds, while illegal use and incorrect information take effect immediately.
Understand what a new bank will ask
The reason the old bank left is exactly what the new bank will examine, so the task is to present the business in a way a bank can onboard without the friction that caused the exit. That means a clear ownership chain up to the ultimate individuals, a documented source of funds, a coherent explanation of what the business does and why its flows look the way they do, and a structure clean enough that a compliance officer can understand it. We set out what to expect in our note on opening a bank account for a Dutch BV.
The ownership chain is where most files stall, and the duty is heavier than a shareholder list. Article 13(1)(b) of the Directive, and Article 3 of the Wwft in the same terms, require the bank to identify the beneficial owner and, for a legal person, to take reasonable measures to understand the ownership and control structure.
A trap here is specific to the Netherlands. Article 10b of the Wwft obliges a company to hold adequate, accurate and current information on its own beneficial owners, and Article 10c obliges the bank to report to the Chamber of Commerce any discrepancy between the register and its own file. A mismatch is not a private irritation. It is reported, as our note on the Dutch UBO register explains.
Substance and simplicity help
A business with genuine substance, real presence, real management, real activity, onboards more easily than a structure that looks like a conduit, because substance answers the question the bank is really asking, which is whether it can explain the relationship to its own regulator. Where the structure is more complex than its purpose requires, simplifying it before approaching a new bank removes exactly the friction that led to the exit. This connects to the substance discipline in our note on Dutch substance requirements.
In onboarding terms substance shows up in ordinary things, not in a legal opinion. An address that receives post and holds people, directors reachable in the country who answer questions, minutes recording decisions taken where the company is, and accounts that match the account activity. It is what the file note is written from.
Complexity works against you arithmetically. Every additional entity adds a jurisdiction to risk-rate, a register to check, directors to identify and a reason to give. Where a layer has outlived its purpose, removing it before the onboarding is faster than explaining it during the onboarding, and far faster than explaining it afterwards.
Move in parallel, not in sequence
The single most important practical step is to open the new relationship while the old account still functions, because a business with no bank is far harder to bank than a business with one. Approach more than one institution, because onboarding takes longer than the notice period suggests and not every application succeeds. A business that waits until the old account closes before seeking a new one has turned a manageable problem into an emergency.
Run the old account normally in the meantime. Emptying it in a hurry, moving balances in round amounts to accounts nobody has seen before, or letting activity stop altogether produces exactly the pattern the monitoring duty exists to catch. Keep paying and receiving what you normally do, and move the relationship rather than the money.
If no bank will take the account within the time available, the fallback is a licensed payment institution or a foreign IBAN, which keeps the company trading while the banking question is settled. It is a trade-off, not a substitute: counterparties, lenders and public bodies do not always treat it as equivalent.
Fix the underlying cause
Finally, treat the closure as a signal. If one bank found the structure hard to bank, others may too, and the durable fix is to address whatever made it so: the unnecessary complexity, the missing documentation, the absent substance. A business that opens a new account without fixing the cause may receive the same letter from the new bank in two years. The point is not merely to be banked today, but to be bankable.
The two years are not a guess. The duty to keep the customer file current is continuous, and reopening it is triggered by a change in the customer circumstances or a doubt about what was gathered before. An acquisition, a new director, a shift in the shareholder register: each is a trigger.
The hardest case is the structure documentation cannot rescue, where the entity has no function a bank can describe beyond standing between the owner and the money, and where we have set out separately why an offshore company fails to get a European bank account. There the work is a different structure.
If you are facing this, we can help. Montclare handles exactly these situations for international businesses and families. Our services are set out on our services page.
This article is informational and does not constitute tax, legal or financial advice. The right course depends on the facts. Each engagement is subject to scope and applicable regulation.