Estonia’s e-Residency Program Collaborates with Payoneer to Facilitate Access to the EU Market

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Kaspar Korjus, Managing Director at e-Residency.

New technology is rapidly helping more people to access the benefits of entrepreneurship and live their lives with greater freedom globally.

Thanks to innovative companies like Payoneer, the barriers to cross-border business have been significantly reduced compared to just a few years ago. It’s not just companies that are embracing and enabling that change though.

Estonia is considered the world’s most advanced digital nation and we launched
e-Residency three years ago to expand the benefits of our e-government beyond our borders. Now anyone in the world can apply for a secure digital identity from the Republic of Estonia, which can then be used to start a trusted EU company online, run your company remotely from anywhere, and access the tools needed to grow your company globally.

What is e-Residency?

I’m delighted to say that e-Residency and Payoneer are now working together to ensure e-residents benefit from a wider choice of financial services and Payoneer customers have an easily compatible solution for starting, running and growing their cross-border businesses online.

There are now about 40,000 e-residents from 150 countries and the community is growing at its fastest ever rate. As more people discover e-Residency, more uses for e-Residency are being discovered too. I’ve met freelancers in countries like Ukraine and Turkey who use e-Residency because it is the only way for their company to receive money from abroad. I’ve met entrepreneurs as far away as Korea and Japan who use e-Residency to access the EU market. And I’ve met entrepreneurs across Europe who simply use e-Residency to lower the costs and hassle of running their company.

After embarking on this project though, we quickly discovered that business banking is one of the biggest challenges (along with borders and bureaucracy) facing the location-independent entrepreneurs that we are serving. Fortunately, Payoneer is a great example of how new financial technology is being employed to solve this challenge.

Payoneer and Estonia’s e-Residency programme already share the same values. We believe that living globally and working online from anywhere is the new norm so both governments and companies must come together to find smarter solutions designed to serve the rising numbers of global entrepreneurs, freelancers and remote workers.

That’s why we’ve chosen to work together to reduce the costs and hassle caused by banks, borders, and bureaucracy.

Both e-Residency and Payoneer have been growing separately around the world at ever faster rates — particularly in markets further from where we started, such as East Asia. Coincidentally, we even both opened new offices in South Korea this year to provide even more support to Korean entrepreneurs. This now provides us both with more opportunities to work together on specific solutions for local entrepreneurs.

Already a Payoneer customer?

Learn more about e-Residency

How to Apply for e-Residency in Estonia

We welcome Payoneer to our digital nation because together we welcome increased choice, lower fees and less hassle for entrepreneurs worldwide.