I have been talking with an offshore bank in the British Virgin Islands about possibly accepting bitcoins. They are not surprisingly uninterested however the discussions were useful because they did provide information on forming a finance company in the BVI. The finance company could open an account with the offshore bank and create sub-accounts for clients of the finance company. The finance company would be able to accept bitcoins and fiat currency deposits and offer currency (including Bitcoin) exchange services.
To clarify is this wouldn't be a "bank" in the traditional sense. It wouldn't offer loans, offer interest, or engage in fractional reserve banking. It would merely provide demand (deposit) accounts.
Potential account options:
* online banking with hardware 2 factor authentication.
* irreversible account to account transfers.
* debit card with ATM access.
* bank wires to "onshore" banks (financial privacy protected incoming and outgoing bank wires use a single-use transaction ID not an account number or account holder's name).
* access to offshore brokerage services.
The account to account transfer option (initiated by the sender) is interesting because they are irreversible and that could form the basis for a secure person to person trading/conversion. As an example Joe needs 1000 BTC and Jane is willing to sell them. Jane sends coins to the finance company acting as an escrow agent (or even a third party escrow agent). Joe transfers $10,000 to Jane's sub-account and coins are released to Joe from escrow.
Just an idea at this point. Comments?
Good for you D&T! Think a lot of us in the community are realizing the hindrance of Legal Company Formations and formal Entity registration with respect to Banking partners.
For the UK at least, it's a legal requirement to run finances of your Limited company through a Corporate bank account, but most banks here won't help any BTC-related businesses. Not much has changed in this respect since you posted this thread.
I recently visited a new projects website:
http://www.coinffeine.com/ There's a slide presentation which demonstrates their concept.
And short Coindesk Article:
http://www.coindesk.com/coinffeine-centralized-exchanges-distributed-alternative/ It's headed by a team of Spanish Developers and concentrates largely on Decentralization.
Their model differs from yours however, I think your project concept has potential if escrows are suitably insured (I don't know who is the Insurance group that covers Circle, might be worth investigating).
Overseas incorporation seems to be a solid option for our BTC enterprises at current. I am making small efforts to approach policy makers with the aim of making banking institutions more friendly towards BTC space (gonna be a challenge in itself and will take time!).