Relay Eligibility: 31 Countries, Checked Owner by Owner

"Relay cannot open a Relay Account for any business owner who holds citizenship or residency in one of the following countries"

"The restriction applies to any business owner named on the Relay Account application, including beneficial owners."

Relay, Prohibited Countries. Last updated August 11, 2026. Two things in there are unusual and both matter.

Citizenship or residency. Most providers pick one. Relay tests both, so holding a passport from a listed country puts you outside the policy even if you have lived somewhere else for twenty years.

Any business owner, including beneficial owners. Not the applicant. Not the majority holder. Any owner named on the application. This is the clause that surprises co-founded companies.

Afghanistan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Burma (Myanmar), Burundi, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Congo (Democratic Republic), Cuba, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, Yemen, Zimbabwe.

Relay publishes these as one list. Unlike Mercury, it does not separate sanctions-mandated exclusions from institutional risk policy, and we are not going to split the list on Relay's behalf. Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria are plainly sanctions cases; the rest are not labeled either way.

Ten of the twelve providers in our index publish no last-updated date at all. Relay stamps this list August 11, 2026.

That is worth more than it sounds. On a Mercury or Stripe page you cannot tell whether the policy changed this morning or two years ago, and our retrieval date is the only date in existence. On Relay's you can see the policy's own age.

When you are deciding where to spend two weeks of application effort, a provider that dates its rules is telling you something about how it manages them.

Founders treat these two as interchangeable. They are not, and neither list contains the other.

Mercury's institutional list runs to 48 countries and tests residence only. Relay's runs to 31 and tests citizenship or residency, for every owner. Different lengths, different tests, different answers.

If you live in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines or Vietnam, Relay is the application to make. If you live in Ethiopia or Guinea-Bissau, it is Mercury.

The single most common Relay failure among otherwise eligible companies is a second owner.

You live in Germany. Your co-founder holds a Nigerian passport and lives in Toronto. Your Delaware LLC is fine, your own position is fine, and the application fails, because Relay's restriction covers "any business owner named on the Relay Account application, including beneficial owners" and tests citizenship as well as residence.

Nothing about the entity fixes that. Restructuring ownership to remove a co-founder from an application in order to pass a bank's screening is not a workaround, it is a misrepresentation, and the beneficial-owner language exists precisely to catch it.

Relay describes case-by-case review in general terms across its help content, and we have not verified any published exceptions process for a listed country. Treat the list as the answer rather than as an opening position.

We have not verified how Relay treats an existing account whose owner acquires citizenship or residency in a listed country after opening.

We have no approval-rate data. Absence from the list means this gate does not close on you, not that an account will be opened.

I live in Nigeria. Can I open a Relay account with a US LLC? No. Nigeria is on Relay's list, and the entity makes no difference because the test runs on the owner. Mercury lists Nigeria too, so both of the common fintech routes are closed.

I'm a Pakistani citizen living in Dubai. Does Relay work? No. Relay tests citizenship or residency, so a Pakistani passport is enough on its own regardless of where you live now. This is the clause that separates Relay from providers that test residence alone.

My co-founder is on the list but I'm not. The account cannot be opened. The restriction applies to any owner named on the application, including beneficial owners.

Is Relay's list the same as Mercury's? No. Relay lists 31 countries, Mercury lists 48 under institutional policy plus a separate sanctions group. Five significant markets are blocked by one and permitted by the other, in both directions.

How current is this list? Relay dates it August 11, 2026, which is Relay's own date rather than ours. We re-read it on September 1, 2026 and the date had not moved.