The part nobody warns you about
French company law builds a loop that catches almost every new founder. A SAS or SARL cannot hold an account in its own name before it is registered, yet the greffe will not register it until the share capital sits with an approved deposit holder. Pay, park, certify, then register. In a SAS, at least half of the cash shares must be paid up at subscription. In a SARL, one fifth. None of this is unusual, but it does mean your first banking decision happens before your company legally exists.
The second surprise is residency. Banks here look at the director's tax residence long before nationality. Walk into a BNP, CIC or Caisse d'Épargne branch with a French company and a Lisbon address, and you will usually hear one word: non-résident. Industry reports put acceptance rates for such files very low at traditional branches, and most refusals happen at the compliance desk, not with the adviser who took your call.
Then there is volume. If you are a micro-entrepreneur, a dedicated business account only becomes compulsory once turnover passes €10,000 in two consecutive years. Many people stop reading there, keep using a personal current account, and later find their bookkeeping and VAT records tangled.
A fourth pressure arrived with the e-invoicing reform. From September 2026, every VAT-registered business in France must be able to receive electronic invoices. Large and mid-sized groups issue them from the same date, and smaller entities follow in September 2027. Invoicing tools are now part of the compliance question, not a nice extra.
How the online providers line up
Prices below are monthly, excluding VAT, and reflect published plans at the time of writing. Plans change, so confirm on the provider's own page before you commit.
| Provider | Entry plan | Higher tiers | Best suited to | What stands out | What to check |
|---|
| Qonto | €9 | €19 to €39 | SASU, EURL, agencies, teams of 3+ | French IBAN, team cards, accounting sync, capital deposit support | Extra cards and payment volume add cost as you scale |
| Shine | €0 plan | €11, €25, up to €80 | Auto-entrepreneurs, freelancers, very small firms | Approved e-invoicing platform, automatic invoice reminders, URSSAF estimator | Cash deposit less flexible than a branch |
| Finom | €0 plan | €17 to €40, lower with annual commitment | Solo operators who want invoicing and banking together | French IBAN, invoicing, capital deposit option | No cheque book |
| Blank | €6 | €17 to €39 | Small firms, property companies | Crédit Agricole backing, low entry cost | Lighter feature set at the top end |
| Memo Bank | Quoted per file | Quoted per file | B2B firms with heavy transfer volumes | Relationship-led service, B2B focus | Onboarding takes one to two weeks |
| Traditional branch (Crédit Agricole example) | €75 | €115 | Firms needing credit, cash and cheque handling | Cash deposit, dedicated adviser, wider product range | Residency screening, slower opening |
Three real situations, three different answers
Camille runs a one-person consulting practice in Lyon. As an auto-entrepreneur she was not legally required to hold a business account, but mixing client payments into her personal current account made her quarterly declarations painful. She started on Shine's €0 plan, used the built-in invoicing and the URSSAF estimator, and moved to the €11 tier once invoice volume grew. Her words: "I stopped rebuilding a spreadsheet every quarter, and that alone was worth the upgrade."
Nadia is a French expat in Lisbon who registered a SASU in Bordeaux to invoice French clients. Two branch visits ended in refusals before she tried Qonto, which opened the account in under a week after a video verification. Her file was simple: passport, a recent proof of address from Portugal, the Kbis, and her French tax identification number. The lesson is that the blocker was never her passport. It was the branch's internal risk process.
In Marseille, a two-person e-commerce team importing from Asia cares about currency conversion more than about cards. They keep a French IBAN account for local suppliers and payroll, and hold a separate multi-currency account for supplier payments, which keeps conversion costs visible instead of buried in a monthly statement. Firms above roughly €500,000 in annual flow often find a relationship bank such as Memo Bank cheaper than stacking tiers on a neobank.
Opening one without losing a week
Work through these in order and most of the friction disappears.
Check your legal form first. A company with share capital has to hold an account in its own name. A micro-entrepreneur has options. Getting this wrong means opening the wrong product and paying for features you cannot use yet.
Collect documents before you start. Expect a passport or ID card, a recent proof of address, the Kbis, and your personal tax number. Foreign address documents are accepted by the online providers far more often than by branches.
Sequence the capital deposit. For a SAS or SARL, the deposit certificate has to exist before registration. Some online providers handle this directly, others require a separate deposit holder. Confirm which, because it changes your timeline by days.
Price on your real usage, not the sticker. Count transfers, cards per person, and foreign currency payments per month. A €25 plan that includes those items often costs less than a €9 plan with add-ons.
Keep the accounting link open. Ask whether your accountant gets free read access, and whether invoices export to your bookkeeping tool. This decides how many hours you lose each month.
Use the right to account if you are refused twice. If your company is properly registered and banks keep saying no, the Code monétaire et financier gives you a route through the Banque de France, which can designate an institution obliged to open a basic deposit account. It is slower than a neobank, and it exists for exactly this situation.
Local resources worth knowing: the Guichet unique run by INPI for registration, the greffe of the commercial court for your Kbis, your local CCI for adviser referrals, and the Banque de France for the designation procedure.
A sensible first move
Open one account this month rather than researching three for six weeks. Pick the plan that matches your legal form today, keep the invoicing tools switched on for the September 2026 receiving requirement, and revisit the tier once you have three months of real statements in front of you. Switching a French professional account later is tedious but not impossible, and the providers above compete hard enough that moving is rarely the expensive part. What actually costs money is invoicing clients from a personal account while you wait for the perfect option to appear.
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