Banco Popular - The Headache Continues

Yes very normal.

They would not open a account for me when I tried few years back.

I bought my property and the seller used BP. I wired money from out of the country and they held up the money for a month to investigate.

It took 3 weeks for us to get the approval to open our accounts. Because my husband was working for a bank at the time, they were being extra diligent. For Americans, they have to verify with the IRS (or maybe someone else in Treasury) as well as their own anti-money laundering process.

We ended up opening our account at Banco Santa Cruz. The only item we had to have translated was the letter from our bank that stated we were customers in good standing and had accounts with them for XX years.

Even with the approval in place, we spent at least 2 hours there at the branch to actually open the account. Our attorney was with us to translate, so that wasn't the reason it took so long! It was just a very drawn out process.

Once we moved here, we opened a second account (in USD) with BSC and that was much simpler.  I made the mistake of wiring in over $10k, so I had an added step of showing source of funds, but even that was a pretty simple process. I just
downloaded bank statements and emailed them to the branch manager.

From what I've been told, now that we have an account at BSC and our cedulas, it would be much easier to open an account at another bank if we needed to. We've thought about opening an account with BanReservas because there are somethings that can only be done with that bank - and some cheap money transfer options that only work with them.

Looks like for some people become a nightmare to open a Bank acct,  shame to read those problems.