Canada Money Service Business (MSB) –
A Cyprus FX brokerage decided to start a Canadian MSB as a subsidiary offering primarily money transfer services to “hard to bank” businesses worldwide. The MSB signed an agreement with Electronic Money Institutions (EMIs) in the UK and Lithuania that can offer virtual IBANs and payment processing services by SEPA and SWIFT. Virtual IBANs are basically subaccounts, or “dummy” accounts sorting under the master account of the MSB. Technically the MSB, rather than the customers, ‘owns’ the accounts, but the customer can have their own name as beneficiary name on their designated virtual IBAN. Virtual IBANs are sometimes referred to as ‘Receiving Accounts’.
The MSB can consequently assign a unique IBAN to each customer, thereby eliminating the need to instruct customers to include a virtual account number in the message/reference field of transfers when sending funds to their MSB account. The admin team at the MSB works off a list of IBANs provided by the EMI banking partner. Each time they set up a new customer account on EBANQ, they copy and paste a virtual IBAN into the account number field. They have disabled automatic virtual account number generation for this purpose in the EBANQ admin settings. For further information about Canada MSBs, please visit www.canadamsb.com.
