Good questions deserve clear answers.

MSB activities may include money transmission (payment services) foreign exchange, and cryptocurrency exchange. If you are looking to offer asset management or trust management services, please check swedishtrust.se. Combining a Swedish Trust Company with a Montana MSB can be a powerful strategy for widening the range of permissible financial activities.

MSBs must maintain an appropriate anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing program, including customer due diligence, risk assessment and reporting obligations. The formation package includes AML/CFT policy documentation.

Montana does not itself restrict services to be limited to the state. However, offering targeting other US states or countries specifically can trigger separate licensing or registration requirements in those jurisdictions. Please review our MSB Resources section for further details. Most of our Montana MSB owners are international clients operating worldwide online but without targeting specific countries.

You can start your MSB operation as soon as your LLC is registered which is usually within 24 hours. Although the full process with IRS, FINCEN etc takes 2-4 weeks, you can start operations immediately.

FINCEN does not charge an annual MSB registration fee. Registered agent and office services carry ongoing fees, and other compliance obligations still apply but overhead is minimal.

Yes. FINCEN provides a public MSB registrant search. We also offer our own MSB Validation tool at msbsearch.com, where both Canadian and US MSBs can be verified in one place.