1. Having lived a long time in France, I know how difficult it is to open a single Credit Agricole bank account if you do not have French citizenship. To me, it seems impossible that accounts could be opened in the names of your Bitcoin depositors and issued IBAN/SWIFT numbers for international transfer, if you do not have the account holder present with identification and a French tax code to open the bank account. How do you plan to work around these issues, and if you're planning to allow non-French citizens to have access to French banks, each with their own account numbers, what type of license do you have to do that?
We're going to work with Aqoba to do as much as is legally possible. Just because some French banks make it hard does not necessarily mean it legally isn't feasible to open accounts for foreigners. That is one thing.
The other thing is that requirements are different for bank accounts ("comptes de dépôt") and payment accounts ("comptes de paiement").
I honestly don't know what exactly is possible and what isn't. We'll be working with Aqoba, our lawyers and their lawyers to figure out exactly what is possible and what isn't. There is already one thing that is 100% sure : any resident, or corporation from a SEPA-zone country is able to open an account with us.
We honestly didn't think there would be this kind of massive interest from Americans and other nationalities all around the world.
The exact type of license we'll have for this is "IOBSP" ("Intermédiaire en Opérations de Banque et Services de Paiement"), Aqoba has an EP ("Établissement de Paiement") license (PSP).
2. Although I understand you're still growing, the volume on Bitcoin-Central is nowhere near enough to bring in the money to finance the above licensing (or even the overhead that would be required to run such a business). Where are your funds for backing this and when will your customers see documents showing you are sufficiently liquid to trust with deposits -- let alone deposits guaranteed by the French government?
You seem to be slightly confused here, one of the main points of this move is to allow our customers to trust us less. By this, I mean that the customer funds are safe, deposited in their own name (the customer's name), clearly segregated from our corporate funds. These funds are legally not our property. I can only let you imagine the catastrophic consequences of an unlicensed exchange being sued to bankruptcy by a state, a bank or some other party. If such a thing was to happen to us, all our clients would be safe to the very last cent.
The guarantee of the French government doesn't cover our own bankruptcy (as it wouldn't be needed since as I outlined, our funds are legally separated from our customers funds), it covers our customers against a default of the Crédit Mutuel Arkéa which is the backing financial institution. For an unlicensed exchange this guarantee is 100k€ globally for the comined customers balances, for us, the guarantee is 100k€ per customer.
