Everyone here is not seeing the elephant in the room. No country will implement KYC on foreign money. It's free money. Yet, we live in world where pretty much every country requires a residence (and a dozen other documents) to open a bank account except, uhm, the USA.

I find the money transfer system created in Malaysia to be interesting. It started as a transfer system between banks, then an e-wallet that you can use to pay in stores, then they added a Visa card, then they integrated with Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand where you can pay locally with your MYR wallet. Now they added a remittance service that basically acts as a SWIFT transfer (though it looks expensive). It seems like they have found a way around the KYC rules. I wonder how long they can keep at it before they get hammered and if they can increase their Fx integrations to more countries.

When once I was deregistered from an address (Abmeldung), the German bank instantly went apeshit hysterical with "Are you American?" letters. At least half dozen of them ignoring all of my previous responses or feedback. Of course I have nothing to do with US and none of my personal details indicate that I do, I'm fully EU person.

Some are, some are not. The US tax reporting requirements for their citizens abroad made a lot of banks refuse American customers.

But there are also other requirements that are not related. The most effective workaround at the moment is to choose a EU bank outside of Germany. This skips the requirement for a residence permit or a registered address, so people can land in Germany with a functional bank account.

Another workaround is to rely on branch employees to be a little pragmatic and let immigrants open an account. These exceptions are naturally impossible to document, but they are a normal part of German bureaucracy.

A third and last workaround a symbiotic relationship between a relocation consultant and a bank employee. They expedite the process and in return they get a steady stream of high-income customers.