BankStore.ai Launches Free Business Banking Index to Solve Global Onboarding Friction

BankStore.ai has launched its free Bank Index to help businesses navigate the complex process of selecting financial providers. By scoring over 144,000 institutions on specific operational needs, the platform aims to reduce the high failure rate of corporate banking applications, particularly for companies expanding into new jurisdictions or operating in sectors like cryptocurrency.

What was announced

The formal launch of the Bank Index is scheduled for Money20/20 USA in Las Vegas, taking place October 18–21. The tool, currently accessible at BankIndex.io, is designed to eliminate the trial-and-error approach often associated with corporate banking. It provides a searchable database of approximately 44,000 banks and account providers, alongside 100,000 other financial institutions, with new entries added to the platform on a daily basis.

The index uses a scoring system from 0 to 10 to evaluate providers against specific business requirements. These criteria include the speed of onboarding, willingness to work with owners living abroad, fee structures, cross-border payment capabilities, and openness to cryptocurrency businesses. For reviewed profiles, the platform discloses the sources and reasoning behind each score, offering transparency that was previously the domain of specialized consultants. This allows founders and finance teams to assess a potential fit before committing significant time and resources to a formal application.

Beyond the free public index, the platform serves as an entry point for BankStore’s wider ecosystem, which facilitates connections between businesses and payment providers. The company is also preparing API access to this data for fintechs and financial institutions. For the investment community, the tool is positioned as a way to accelerate the operational readiness of portfolio companies by ensuring they can secure banking services without the delays caused by mismatched risk appetites or jurisdictional hurdles.

"We spent years drawing the same map for clients: which institutions serve a particular market, what they require and where an application is likely to run into trouble. Bank Index makes that map available to everyone."

Denys Bets, CEO and co-founder at BankStore.ai.

The companies involved

BankStore.ai is a fintech firm focused on bridging the information gap between businesses and financial institutions. The company was founded by Denys Bets and Vlasov, both of whom bring extensive experience from the traditional banking and fintech sectors dating back to the mid-2000s. Denys Bets, who serves as CEO and co-founder, spent nearly a decade in bank audit, eventually heading an internal audit unit. Co-founder Vlasov has a background in business development and compliance within the fintech space.

The founders’ expertise covers corporate banking, internal audit, compliance, and cross-border business banking. Throughout their careers, they have collectively managed approximately 10,000 account-opening processes. This background informed the creation of the Bank Index, based on the observation that two institutions can review the same legitimate business and reach different decisions because their customer criteria and appetite for risk differ. BankStore.ai operates as an independent entity, positioning itself as a data-driven intermediary in a market where corporate banking requirements are becoming increasingly fragmented across different jurisdictions. By centralizing data on 144,000 institutions, the company seeks to standardize how businesses identify viable banking partners globally.

What this means

The launch of a comprehensive, free-to-access index highlights a growing friction point in the global financial system: the disconnect between bank risk departments and the needs of modern, cross-border enterprises. As "de-risking" continues to push many legitimate businesses out of traditional banking relationships, the demand for transparency in onboarding criteria has reached a critical level. This move puts pressure on traditional banks to be more explicit about their risk appetites or risk losing high-quality leads to more agile fintech competitors who are already listed and scored within such databases.

For the wider fintech sector, the move toward democratizing compliance data suggests that the role of the "specialist advisor" in banking selection is being rapidly commoditized by automated data platforms. The industry must now grapple with whether such transparency will lead to a race to the bottom on fees or if it will successfully streamline the currently inefficient process of corporate account opening. It raises significant questions about how financial institutions will manage their public-facing risk profiles in an era of increased data accessibility and competitive scoring.