Company Incorporation with E-Residency: How to Start a Company in a Day

But e-Residency is the only Digital ID that can be obtained by non-residents of these countries. If you want to learn more about other Digital IDs and ways of incorporation with them, explore this article.

Enty launched incorporation with e-Residency that allows you to open a company in a matter of one business day with no calls, paperwork, and other nonsense.

There are three incorporation paths:

If you want to become a single shareholder and proceed with e-Residency, the process of incorporation will be quick and easy. You'll be able to incorporate a company right on Enty's website, the whole process will take just several minutes, and your company will be incorporated within one business day.

If you want to add multiple shareholders, the incorporation will be done right during the call with our client manager. Please notice that each shareholder must have an e-Residency card. Each additional shareholder costs €100. We recommend starting the process with multiple shareholders right away if you need it because post-incorporation addition of shareholder is much more complex.

If this is your path, choose "Open a Company With e-Residency", and other shareholders will be added during the next steps.

This path is more expensive and time-consuming because it requires notary services and extra labor-intensive operations. Incorporation through notary will be a wise choice for those that have difficulties with obtaining e-Residency.

If you are looking to learn more about this option, check out this article.

When registered on Enty, it's time for you to select whether you want to proceed with an e-Residency or without it. After you've selected a suitable incorporation way, fill in the information regarding your company: company name, company’s phone number, share capital, main field of activity, and activity code.

During this step, you will need to fill in contact information, roles in the company, detailed addresses, and other legal information for each shareholder/director. In case of incorporation without an e-Residency, please, prepare your passport or another Identity document as we will require its number and issuance date.

Choose the company maintenance plan among Lite, Standard, Pro, or e-Commerce options. Note that you cannot skip this step because in Estonia you're obliged to have a Virtual office, i.e.legal address and contact person — this service is included in all our paid packages. A topic of Virtual office is provided below.

We also have to ascertain Estonian authorities that you are not a part of sanctions or PEP lists, or known to be involved in criminal activities. Here is how it works. You'll just take a picture of yourself with your documents to verify your identity on a special website. It's very easy and takes just 5 minutes. This step is a must. You'll go through this step again while opening a bank account.

Single-shareholder incorporation with e-Residency
All that's left to do is to verify your identity using one of the Digital IDs. First, you need to authenticate your ID card using PIN1, just fill in codes needed for a certain Digital ID.

After this step is completed, you need to sign documents using PIN2. In the special window, download and check the documents you're going to sign, and if everything is OK, complete the signing in several seconds. Soon, we'll send you a link for compliance (check the previous step). And that's it.

Multi-shareholder incorporation with e-Residency
First, you will need to book a call with your personal manager. During which you and other shareholders will need to sign documents in the company register. The whole process won’t take longer than 10 minutes.

Incorporation through the notary
In this case, you will need to download documents’ package that we’ve prepared for you. After that, please sign them. These documents will need to get notarized and apostilled. When it’s done, you should send them to our office in Tallinn using any courier service such as DHL, FedEx (please, don't send the docs via usual postal service, pigeon mail, etc).

Feel free to contact us wherever you want, your personal manager will help you with every problem. During the incorporation, you will have a call and a chat with our manager regarding your future company.

Share capital is one more thing to pay attention during the company incorporation. Share capital is a conditional amount of money, which founders set by issuing equity. It shows the sizes of all founders' shares: the percentage of owned shares will be equal to the portion contributed to the share capital. The share capital is also divided into separate shares and each founder can have the shares with an unequal par value.

The minimum share capital is €2500 which is much lower than in most European jurisdictions. This condition lowers the threshold to start a business in Estonia. Surely you can contribute more than €2500 for purposes to attract bigger loans, counterparties or to take part in tenders.

Share capital contribution can be done online promptly after obtaining your Estonian ID card. 'To pay the share capital' means transfer the needed sum to the company's bank account. After that, you have to provide proof of payment. To make this happen, you request a digitally signed statement that should conform to some requirements from your banking provider. It takes several days for the Estonian Business Registry to approve the share capital contribution.

Among the basic requirements for companies incorporation in Estonia, there are a legal address and a contact person. A combination of these two is often called Virtual Office and offered by many Estonian service providers.

So, now it's time to dive a bit deeper into what most people on the market offer under the name of "Virtual Office". Please note, that the information below is our opinion that is based on our knowledge and experience.

When you are looking at different Virtual Office packages, you will be shocked at how different the prices and included services are. That’s why Virtual Office often seems a ‘black box’ to many entrepreneurs. Some services might be useful: a service provider will receive and resend mail or even appoint the needed meetings. But most of the service providers on the market offer swollen virtual office subscriptions to increase their prices. They might offer multilingual secretarial services to answer your calls, setting a company in a certain respectable business district, providing you with real office space, or even with a fax number (in 2022, really?). In most cases, most of the services can't be excluded from the subscriptions.

Legal address and contact person are just legal requirements. It’s true that the address and the spokesperson can be used to contact a company ‌with notification or any issues. In practice, it occurs rare enough. And since a maintenance costs of a Virtual Office tend to zero, we highly recommend choosing these services’ providers either with ‘bare minimum’ or a complex of unique features that will help you manage companies' activities. Note that Virtual Office is included in all Enty subscriptions starting from Lite together with seven other services.

If you already have a company, you can easily switch your service provider to another one that offers true automatization. All Enty’s subscriptions include Virtual Office among with a wide variety of tools that let you operate a company with ease. The process of transferring you company is simple, free, and won’t take longer than 10 minutes.

In the modern world, you can incorporate your company in one country and operate in another one. If incorporation itself appears to be a quite simple task, opening a bank account (without which your company can't operate properly) might be a headache. Luckily, Estonia offers an opportunity to open a bank account for a company in other EEA countries.

That's where Fintech providers come into play — a far more flexible and client-friendly option than traditional banks. Some might be able to work even with companies that operate with cryptocurrencies.

Fintech providers have made an appearance during the online revolution and became a new concept of financial flow transition. Your basic purpose for obtaining a corporate bank account is to get an IBAN number and freely handle your payments. Both Fintech providers and traditional banks have licenses and can provide you with IBAN. That's why there is no big difference in how to get it.

The most important advantage of Fintech providers is that you can do everything online and won’t have to travel anywhere to open a bank account.

Each Fintech provider has its own requirements based on directors' and shareholders' residence, the company's business model and country of origin, and whether the company has a physical presence (rented office).

For example, Wise doesn't work with businesses that operate with crypto, but Bankera is open to such companies; it is free (in some cases) to open an account in Wise, while Bankera will charge a €200 application fee which can be non-refundable and so on. It will be quite a challenge to find the fintech provider that suits your company’s need the best by yourself because a task requires to visit dozens of websites to collect whole characteristics and compare providers.

Differences between each provider are quite huge. In order to help you, we offer 3 free options that will help you choose the right provider for your company:

• Free quiz-based tool that recommend the right Fintech provider for you company based on your answers
• Our article that compares different 6 online banking options
• Our research that will help you compare Fintech providers

Fast, easy, and free of charge.

The list of documents needed to open a bank account in a Fintech provider is generally much shorter than in traditional banks but varies from one Fintech provider to another. Generally, you will need to provide:

• Certificate of Incorporation or Extract from your local Register of Commerce (not older than 6 months)
• Memorandum and Articles of Association
• Company's register of shareholders and directors (not older than 6 months)
• In rare cases, Fintech Providers might ask you to provide other documents

Our Open Banking feature will help you with company maintenance once you have a business bank account. Just connect your bank account directly to Enty and get all banking data reflected right in our interface. Such integration will also help to ease up accounting. As the data from your bank statement will be automatically reflected in accounting reports. In the nearest future, we will upgrade our Open Banking with advanced statistics and other features.