We built the file we could not find

How this started

We work the way a lot of people work now. The rent is in one country. The client is in another. The office is a laptop and a decent wifi password. No marble lobby. No branch manager who knows your name.

People call that “digital nomad” as if it were a costume. For us it was simpler. We needed to get paid, pay rent, and run a company without flying home to open a current account. That is the whole origin. Not a travel blog. A banking problem that traditional banking is not built for.

That life has a dull, practical problem. You still need somewhere to park a salary, a contractor invoice, or the first money in a new company. Traditional banking assumes you live on one street and can visit it. We do not. A lot of you do not either.

So we did what everyone does. We googled. We asked friends. We read forums. We landed on “best neobank” articles and App Store tiles. Mercury. Wise Business. A challenger with a metal card. Every name arrived with someone else’s referral link attached.

The people sending those links were not villains. Referrals are how a lot of fintech pays the lights. The problem was the vacuum behind the link. We still could not tell which of those names was a bank, which was an e-money wallet, which partner held the deposit, and which landing page was leftover from a product that had already closed.

“There was no log. There was no desk. There were ads.”

Google ranked whoever paid. The App Store ranked whoever shipped a pretty icon. We needed a file, not a feed.

Then we formed a company in the United States

Forming the company made the gap impossible to ignore. Incorporating is paperwork. Getting an account that is not a high-street branch you will never walk into is a different job. The United States is generous with company formation and fussy about who may hold the cash. That is the right kind of fussy. It is also where the affiliate pages get loud.

We needed answers a landing page will not give you. Is this a bank with a charter, or a fintech app sitting on a partner bank? Who is the licence holder, by legal name, not by brand colour? Which regulator? Which deposit scheme — FDIC, FSCS, DICGC, ESA — and on which entity? Can they onboard a company like ours from where we actually live?

Those are boring questions. They are the only questions that matter before you send a salary. We could not find one place that treated them as the job. We found roundups. We found screenshots of metal cards. We found leftover pages for brands that had already died.

A company in Delaware or Wyoming does not magically get you a branch. It gets you a filing number and a new set of onboarding forms. Some apps want a US SSN. Some want a US phone. Some will take a foreign director and then freeze the account six weeks later. None of that is written on the homepage that ranks for “best business neobank.”

The web of referral pages

If you have searched “best neobank” in the last five years, you have met this machine. A listicle. Ten logos. A score that cannot be recomputed. A button that is the real product. Sometimes the copy is fine. Often it is the same paragraph shuffled between brands. Dead names stay live because a dead page still earns a click.

That is what we mean by a web of referral pages. Not that referrals are immoral. That the research layer underneath them was missing. There was no independent log of who is licensed, who holds the money, who closed, and who is just loud.

So we built NeoBankDB. The file we needed and could not get. A public desk of actual digital banks — and the wallets, cards, exchanges, and trading apps that get sold in the same search — so the next person looking does not have to bounce through ads until they pick the loudest brand.

What we actually do

We do not fake a ranking. We do not paste an App Store scrape into a table and call it research. We do not invent an AI that “picks the best bank for you.” The tools here are a finder, a compare tray, a salary-versus-travel split, a company-to-bank map, and a protection-scheme lookup. They sit on the same catalog. They are not a black box.

On each file we try to name the licence, the regulator, the holder, and the scheme. We read the user reviews. We use the products ourselves where we can. Then we publish a verdict on this site, in public, with a last-verified date. If we cannot name those things, the file says so. That sentence is the whole editorial standard.

It is not only neobanks. A salary account and a card that spends USDT are different legal objects. An e-money wallet is not a deposit-taking bank. A crypto exchange that still onboards is not the clone shop with the same logo. Those products get sold in the same search, so they sit next to each other on this desk — labelled as what they are, not as what the app icon suggests.

The first reader was us: people who work on a laptop in more than one place, and who had just formed a US company. The desk had to get bigger than that. Business and corporate files. Halal banking. Banking for kids. Offshore and cross-border setups. If the job is “park the money in something with a real issuer, without a branch,” it belongs here.

Families use the kids desk. Firms use the business desk. People who want a sharia-screened account use the halal desk. The method does not change. Name the issuer. Name the scheme. Say when we cannot. Date the file.

New banking — digital banking — is the bet that you can have more of the product and less of the headache: an app, a named licence, a card that works, a corridor that is not a surprise FX markup. Look past the branch. Look past the border. That is the whole idea.

What we are not

We are not a bank. We do not take deposits. We do not open the account for you. We are not financial analysts. We do not give financial solutions. We do not guarantee any bank, wallet, card, or exchange on this desk.

We try to do the work carefully. When you put money somewhere, you still have to read the file, the licence, and the scheme, and decide for yourself. Most of the bank products here name an insurance or statutory cover. A lot of the fintech names sit on a real partner bank. That is useful. It is not a promise from us that you cannot lose money.

Scores are editorial. Outbound links may be affiliate. Dead brands go to the graveyard, not a zombie landing page. How we mark a file is written out on methodology. Recompute it. If you cannot, it is not a score.

Use it. Compare up to four files side by side. Run the account finder if you know the country and the job. The other tools — salary versus travel, company to bank, deposit schemes — sit on the same catalog. We keep adding to the desk. We need the files to be used, not bookmarked and forgotten.

Send this to the friend who is still googling “best neobank” and landing on a roundup. That is how a desk gets better than ads.