Trying To Open A US Bank Account, Almost Done

Today I experienced outage on my company website, stocks web application, cloud server and all other services I have hosted on Microsoft Azure. And the reason? My $150 spend limit per month was exhausted. 

I tried increasing my spend limit and then I was hit with an unexpected problem. Somehow, they wanted me to put in a US bank issued credit card with a valid US address. And they made it clear that it is impossible to change the country without having to create a new Azure account.

After spending an hour reading other people's frustration online with the absurd restriction on changing the billing country I decided to check if it was possible to open a US bank account online as a non-resident foreigner.

I checked out all the banks people mentioned online that they used and had success with. Unfortunately, many of them have discontinued opening bank accounts to non-residents who don't have SSN and are not physically in the US.

In the end I found one that was more accommodating -- EverBank. It is a small US bank heavily tilted to online banking and a lot more accommodating. In less than 10 mins I was done filling the forms for the account opening. The only rigorous step is that they require physical mailing of IRS W8 tax form, passport copy, utility bill for address verification and a bank reference letter directly from my bank.

I will try to get them done. And according to the information on the account opening status that is all they require to finalize my account opening. I only hope that I can ask for a US billing address. I plan to give them a call next week to see if I can use my US virtual address as the billing address attached to the debit card they'll give me.