3,000 people could not open an account, and the company they complained about most is not a bank

I have been handing out a document checklist for people opening a first business account, and last week I found out that it answers the wrong question. Everything on the list is correct. Filed certificate, EIN letter, signed operating agreement, identification for every owner, proof of address, a plain description of what the company sells. I would give out the same items again tomorrow. What I had wrong was the sentence I kept attaching to it, which was that this is the part that decides whether the account opens. That sentence felt obviously true, in the way that things feel obviously true when everybody around you repeats them and nobody in the room has gone and looked, and it survived every conversation I had about it because a document list is a satisfying thing to hand somebody who is anxious and wants a task.

On 3 August I went looking for evidence and pulled the complaint file the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau publishes. It took about two hours, most of that spent getting around the block their edge server puts on plain requests. The result has annoyed me every day since.

In the twelve months to 1 July 2026 the Bureau logged 7,415 complaints about opening a deposit account, and 3,000 of those come from people who could not open one at all. Sort those 3,000 by the company complained about, and the name at the top is not a bank. It is Early Warning Services, with 397. Bank of America is second on 377. Third, on 335, is Fidelity National Information Services, which is not a bank either.

So two of the three most complained-about firms in this category do not hold anybody's money. They sell the report the bank reads about you before it decides anything, and neither of them has any interest in your operating agreement, your members, or how carefully you spelled the company name. Together they account for 732 of the 3,000, which is 24.4 per cent, and if you widen the lens to all 7,415 opening complaints they still hold 1,186 between them.

None of that is on my checklist. None of it is on the bank's published list either, and the reason is simple enough, which is that a bank has no obligation to advertise the database it consults before it says no.

The chart above comes from the pull I made on 29 July, when the same twelve month window held 84,177 complaints and 7,412 of them concerned opening. Six days later the identical query returned 84,217 and 7,415. The Bureau backfills, so small drift is normal, and I am recording it here so nobody thinks the two numbers are a mistake.

What 3,000 refusals look like once you sort them

The opening bucket splits into four named categories and the split is worth having in front of you. Being unable to open an account accounts for 3,000. An account opened without the person's consent or knowledge accounts for 2,369. Terms that turned out to be different from the ones advertised, 1,707. Confusing or missing disclosures, 339. Those four add to exactly 7,415, which is the sort of small thing that tells you the file has not been mangled somewhere in transit. Each of those four categories is a different problem with a different remedy, and stacking them under one heading about opening an account is a large part of why the published advice on the subject reads as vague, because what helps somebody who was refused outright has almost nothing in common with what helps somebody whose account was opened in their name by a stranger.

Now the part I did not expect. Of the 3,000 people who could not open an account, 83 got money back. That is 2.8 per cent. Across all 84,217 checking and savings complaints in the same year, 10,380 closed with monetary relief, which is 12.3 per cent. So a complaint about being refused an account is resolved with money at roughly a fifth of the rate of complaints generally. A further 144 closed with non-monetary relief, and 2,728 closed with an explanation and nothing else. The pattern holds steadily enough across the year that I would not put it down to noise.

I would not read that as proof the refusals were wrong. A bank declining an account is usually entitled to decline it, and an explanation is often the honest outcome. What the ratio does tell you is that the complaint route is a poor tool for this specific problem, and if your plan for a refusal is to file with the Bureau and wait, the file says that plan works about 2.8 per cent of the time.

Do the other thing first. It is faster and it costs nothing.

The two companies sitting in the middle of it

Early Warning Services describes itself, on its own consumer page, as “a nationwide specialty consumer reporting agency that complies with applicable provisions of the Fair Credit Reporting act (FCRA)”. The same page names its owners, and this is the sentence I keep thinking about: “We are owned by seven of the country's most respected financial institutions - Bank of America, N.A.; Truist Bank, N.A.; Capital One, N.A.; JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A.; PNC Bank, N.A.; US Bank, N.A.; and Wells Fargo Bank, N.A.”

Read that list, then read the complaint ranking again. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Capital One, Truist, U.S. Bancorp and PNC all appear in the 3,000, and all seven of those banks co-own the company that ranks above the lot of them.

The other one is Chex Systems. The Bureau's own list of consumer reporting companies puts it this way: “Chex Systems is owned by the eFunds subsidiary of Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. (FNIS)”, which is why the complaint file records 335 complaints against a company whose name most founders have never heard. That list runs to 64 companies, of which 6 do deposit account and payments screening, and I would put money on most people being unable to name a single one.

CFPB list of consumer reporting companies, 2025

All 6 give you the report for nothing. Early Warning states it plainly and I will quote it rather than summarise it: the company “will never charge you a fee to obtain a copy of your file disclosure, conduct a reinvestigation of disputed information, or remove inaccurate information from your file”. There is also a separate Early Warning Deposit Score, which is not a credit score, and which you have to ask for by telephone on 1-800-745-1560 between nine in the morning and eight in the evening, Eastern time, Monday to Friday.

The letter that names the file

Here is the lever, and it is a legal one. The Bureau's guidance on deposit screening says that when a bank declines you, “the bank must provide you with an 'adverse action' notice that includes the name and contact information of the screening company from which the bank got the report. You can contact the reporting company and request a free copy of the report.”

So the refusal letter is not a dead end. It is the one document that tells you which of the 6 companies to write to. Do not throw it away, and do not accept a verbal decline over the telephone without asking for the notice in writing, because the notice is what turns an unexplained no into an address and a file number. A decline delivered down a telephone line leaves you with nothing to act on at all.

Then request the disclosure, read it, and dispute anything wrong in it. An unpaid overdraft from a closed personal account eight years ago sits in that file, and it will sit there while you assemble a perfect set of company documents that nobody is disputing.

The order I would work in now

Before the entity exists, request your file from Chex Systems on 800-428-9623 and from Early Warning on 800-745-1560, because both are free and both take longer to correct than to obtain. Chex Systems is the only one of the 6 that the list marks as offering a freeze, so if you froze that file at some point in the past, lift it again before you apply anywhere.

Then file the entity and get the stamped certificate. Then the EIN, and check the name on the IRS letter against the name on the state filing character by character, including the suffix, because two government records disagreeing by one word takes weeks to unpick once an application is already open, and there is no mechanism anywhere for resolving it quickly. None of this is difficult and all of it is boring, which is probably why it keeps getting skipped.

Then write the operating agreement and sign it. Then assemble identification for the people the regulation names, which is the part everybody guesses at, and the guessing is unnecessary because the rule is short and public.

The rule the identity questions come from

The full set of LLC bank account requirements has a federal layer that no bank puts on a marketing page. It is 31 CFR 1010.230, and it asks for two categories of person. The first is each individual who “owns 25 percent or more of the equity interests of a legal entity customer”, directly or indirectly. The second is “a single individual with significant responsibility to control, manage, or direct a legal entity customer”, whether or not that person owns anything at all.

Three equal members produce three ownership files and one control file, and the control person is normally one of the three, so it comes back to three people. A holding company in the chain does not stop the analysis, it just moves it upward. If a trust owns 25 per cent or more, the regulation names the trustee. And some categories of customer are “subject only to the control prong”, which is a sentence worth reading twice if your ownership is unusual, because it changes what you have to produce.

That is the whole of it. It is two paragraphs of federal regulation and it generates most of the identity questions people find intrusive.

Where I had the insurance wrong

An earlier version of this article said the FDIC treats a single member LLC as its owner, so the company account and the owner's personal account at one bank share a single 250,000 dollar limit. I had assumed that because the IRS disregards a single member LLC for tax, the FDIC does something similar. It does not, and the rule turns on a different question entirely. Received wisdom about deposit insurance travels a great deal faster than the regulation it claims to be summarising.

Under 12 CFR 330.11 the deposits of a corporation are insured up to 250,000 dollars in the aggregate, separately from the owners, provided the entity is engaged in an independent activity. The definition sits one section earlier, at 330.1(g), and it is one line: an entity qualifies if it “is operated primarily for some purpose other than to increase deposit insurance”. A one member LLC running a real business passes that test. A vehicle set up to spread cash across ceilings does not, and 330.11(d) says the deposits of an entity that fails the test “shall be deemed to be owned by the person or persons owning the corporation”, and get added to that person's own accounts.

So the number of members is not the test. Whether the company does anything is the test. I was repeating a piece of received wisdom that I had never gone and checked, and it took reading two sections of the regulation to find out it was wrong, which is not a long job and I should have done it before publishing rather than after.

An aside about the freeze column

One detail in the Bureau's list has nothing to do with your paperwork and I cannot let it go. Of the 6 deposit screening companies, all 6 must give you a free report, and exactly 1 offers a security freeze. Chex Systems is the one that does, and Early Warning, Certegy, CrossCheck, Global Payments Check Services and TeleCheck all sit in that column marked no, at least in the 2025 edition of the list, which is the edition I read.

I went back through it twice looking for a footnote explaining the difference and there is no footnote.

My suspicion is that this is a historical accident rather than a policy, and that the freeze rules everybody knows were written with the three big credit bureaux in mind and never extended sideways. That is a guess and I would rather label it as one than dress it up. I do not know why the column reads the way it does, and I have not found anything published that explains it, and the two firms I would most want to ask about it are the two that already appear 732 times in a file of 3,000 complaints.

What I do know is the shape of the problem. A person is refused an account, is not told why in any useful detail, and files a complaint that has a 2.8 per cent chance of producing money. The document that would have helped is already in the bin. It is the refusal letter itself, which carries the name and the telephone number of the screening company because the law says it has to, and which is written in the register of a rejection rather than in the register of an instruction, so it goes wherever rejections go, into a drawer or a recycling bin, and the only free route to the file that decided the whole thing goes with it. Of the 3,000, only 1,195 attached a written narrative. I do not know how many of the other 1,805 ever read their own file, and my guess is that most of them never did, because nothing anywhere in the process tells an applicant that such a file exists.

None of this is legal advice, and an unusual structure, a trust in the chain, or members in more than one country turns it into a conversation with a lawyer rather than a checklist. What I can say is that I spent a long time pointing at the documents, and the documents were never the interesting part. The paperwork is the visible layer, and the visible layer is rarely the layer that decides anything.