Offshore Bank in Puerto Rico –
A group of private investors has obtained a Puerto Rico International Bank license, or ‘International Financial Entity (IFE)’ license issued by the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions (OCFI). The license allows the bank to offer banking services in full to clients outside of Puerto Rico. Such a license is sometimes referred to as an International, offshore or Class B/II license. The bank holds correspondent accounts with other offshore banks in the Caribbean but also recently obtained direct access to the US Federal Reserve (Fed) and the payment systems ACH and FedWire. The bank is therefore less dependent on commercial intermediary banks and instead acts as a direct participant on the US payments systems. Although the bank is subject to much less stringent capital and qualification requirements compared to a ‘onshore’ US bank and is not able to participate in the FDIC deposit insurance program, it’s still considered a recognized US Bank with direct access to the Central Bank, the Federal Reserve.
The bank is using EBANQ to manage all customer accounts, user profiles, secure messaging features, fee revenue management and tracking. They are using Import/Export of batch files in order to credit end-user accounts with incoming payments and to process outgoing wire transfers. Every day at 2 pm the admin team exports all Outgoing Wire Transfer (OWT) requests in a CSV file. This CSV file is then converted using a simple Excel tool to achieve compatibility with FedWire XML file format requirements for batch files. The bank has no plans to build live API integrations with correspondent banks or the Fed since the current workflow is working well and provides flexibility by avoiding infrastructure dependencies on any specific correspondent bank or payment system. If they ever decide to create automated workflows through API integrations between EBANQ and the Fed, we at EBANQ will be more than happy to assist!
