One bank for life

For a long time, I did not treat banking infrastructure as a separate problem. A bank felt much like a mobile operator: if it works, why think about it? Money arrives, the card is accepted and transfers go through. A company in another country brings another corporate account, then another card, and eventually several banks appear around you almost by accident.

That is how it happened to me. Over the years I opened accounts in Kazakhstan, Thailand, Georgia and China, while companies appeared in the UAE, Hong Kong, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand and the United States. Each decision answered a practical need. For a long time, I never thought to view them as one system.

The turning point came over the past few years. Since 2022, anyone with a Russian passport and an international life has learned that a bank account belongs to them a little less securely than they once imagined. This is not only about sanctions or frozen accounts. A change in internal policy, a new compliance process or another document request can make familiar financial infrastructure far less usable overnight.

I began asking a simple question: if our main bank stopped working properly tomorrow, how much of my family's life would stop with it?

We tend to measure the value of something by how often we use it. Banking does not always work that way. A family may have a main account for daily life, connected to cards, subscriptions, school fees and insurance. A corporate bank handles the business. An investment portfolio sits elsewhere. There may also be an account in another country that the family uses only a few times a year.

The last account can look unnecessary. Its purpose becomes clear when it belongs to another banking system and jurisdiction and holds enough of a reserve to carry the family when the main route fails.

I think of it like a second internet connection in a serious office. While the primary line is working, the backup appears to be an avoidable expense. When the line drops in the middle of an important call, the price of that backup feels very different.

Opening accounts everywhere is not the answer either. Every new bank, company and jurisdiction brings compliance, reporting, documents, fees and everyday attention. I am now more interested in the specific function of each financial element than in the number of accounts a family can acquire.

At one point I met a banker connected to St Kitts and Nevis. Igor Lokhmakov works with wealthy international clients and has a broad network across international banking. Through him, I began looking past the question of where to open an account and towards how banks assess a client whose life crosses several borders.

What does a bank need to understand about the origin of capital? Why can the same structure be entirely acceptable to one institution and uncomfortable for another? Why is it worth preparing a coherent source-of-wealth story in advance? When does a relationship with a particular banker become more valuable than the logo printed on the card?

For someone who has spent years building businesses, the origin of money feels obvious. I know where I earned it, which companies were involved and what the transactions were. A bank starts from a blank page. It sees documents, transfers, countries, passports and a collection of possible risks.

If that picture looks chaotic, the relationship becomes harder. When the story is coherent and well documented, the conversation changes. This turned out to be closely related to the idea behind Nomad Nova.

Imagine an entrepreneur born in Russia who has lived in Thailand for three years, owns a company in the UAE, earns some revenue from Europe, has an apartment in Moscow and wants to buy property in Spain. A few years of perfectly reasonable decisions will leave this person with accounts in several countries.

Each account may be fine in isolation. The more important questions appear when we look at the family as a whole. Where is the reserve for a year of family life? Can the wife reach it if something happens to the husband? Should business cash and family money sit in the same bank? Which currencies make sense when the family has not yet decided whether its next base will be in Europe or the United States? What happens to these banking relationships when tax residence changes?

There is no universal answer. A family living and working in Miami needs one architecture. An entrepreneur living in Thailand, running a Dubai company and considering Italy as the next base will probably need another. This is why lists of the five best banks for wealthy people tell me very little beyond a possible starting point.

I once saw private banking mainly as a higher tier of service. As capital grows, a relationship manager appears, along with investment access, lending against assets and more attentive support. Now I find it more useful to place private banking inside the family's wider geography.

Children who may study in the United States will create American expenses and perhaps property. A family based in Asia needs banks that function in its time zone and in the financial systems it uses every day. Capital held in Europe raises different questions about custody, succession and reporting. The choice of bank follows earlier decisions about where the family lives, where the business operates, which currencies it earns and what it hopes to do in five years.

There is another question that is less pleasant. If I were in hospital tomorrow and absent from every process for several months, how well would my wife understand our financial system? Would she know which banks exist, reach the accounts the family needs, pay ordinary expenses, find the documents and speak to the right person if a bank questioned an old transaction?

Entrepreneurs have a bad habit of keeping an enormous amount of information in their own heads. While things are going well, this can look efficient. Then the owner turns out to be the password, the instruction manual and the support desk for the entire family.

My own system is not perfect. The deeper I go into this subject, the more work I see in front of me. That is part of why Nomad Nova matters to me. I do not want to speak from the position of someone who has solved international life flawlessly and now teaches everyone else. I am working through the same decisions, finding strong people in each field, testing solutions in my own life and building the system I wish I had years ago.

Banking is only one part of that system, but it is a critical one. The freedom to live between countries stops feeling like freedom if money can move through only one route.

After all my experiments with countries, companies and accounts, I have reached a simple preference. Good financial infrastructure should be almost invisible. It lets the family live, the business operate and the capital sit where there is a clear reason for it to sit.

When maintaining the international structure becomes a second job, we have probably made it too complicated.