> I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.
That is very strange, because you should be able to get a temporary residence certificate (whatever it's called in your respective country) and thus get an account with if not all then at least most banks.
As someone who have been living in a couple of countries under a temporal residence I can say it's not that simple. In many cases the temporal residence is simply not accepted, or not in the list of standard docs, etc. Private companies don't really care about all those non standard cases, and they ask either for a passport of the country or a permanent residence at least.
So legally yes, you can pass a KYC, but in practice you're an edge case no one cares about
Not OP but in a similar situation. In online banks there's nowhere to upload these temporary certificates, they accept a limited number of options (passeport, residence card etc) and temporary certificate printed on an A4 paper isn't one of them. You can try sending it via email to customer support, I did it with around 8 different banks and Revolut was the only one to reply and open an account for me after the manual review. Another one was PCS that didn't even ask for residence permit but then it went bust, and it took around 6 months to get the money back.
Funnily enough this is still better compared to classic offline banks: none of them would have me even with the 4-year residence permit I have now. I come from a sanctioned country, I guess it raises some internal risk alarms. Only BNP did accept me at first but then after 3 months they froze my account with my salary on it.
I'm in the same position as the GP. Impossible, because EU bureaucracy sometimes yield kafkaesque deadlocks. For example, some EU countries stated that their permits given to ukrainians are to be considered valid past the printed expiration date and thus stopped producing new plastic for them. Now, good luck finding any KYC provider that will accept that. Or any KYC provider that accepts printed Poland's TPS. Or any provider that doesn't chuckle on a set of documents, each of which is from a different country (like me). Etc, etc.
KYC is way, way more complex than it seems. Essentially, complete remote KYC is simply impossible.
Maybe this is a dumb question, but I am trying to understand this situation. There are still some physical bank branches and I assume at least some banks will open an account for you with that TPS if you visit a branch. Is that not correct? That way you would have access to at least some financial services, if not those where as you write (remote) KYC is needed.
I tried with one physical bank, and they refused; the expat forums said it's the same with all, though I didn't verify myself tbh.
The problem is that the only thing you get is a stamp in your passport saying you applied for a temporary residence permit (including the request number).
The border control people can then (I guess) use this number to verify that your case is still pending, so you're legal in the country. But since no one else can, you get no services.
[Edit: I should add that my main problem was with other financial services, not a bank, since I could use my existing bank accounts from another country. So maybe if I'd make enough effort, I would be able to open a physical bank account, but this was not the main problem for me]
Ah this sucks.
If I understand correctly, in our country the expats get a separate paper confirming they are here legally which for some uses (one of them is opening a bank account) has the same validity as an ID card.
You get a stamp in the passport that you're waiting for a decision regarding your stay, but it's meaningless to anyone besides the border control people.
That is very strange, because you should be able to get a temporary residence certificate (whatever it's called in your respective country) and thus get an account with if not all then at least most banks.