Live Q&A with the e-Residency Team – Ask us Anything!

Introduction foreign and welcome to the ear residency webinar uh I can see that there's already a lotof people streaming in so we're going to wait a minute to let as many of you as possible come in andwe'll start the formal part of the webinar in one minute in the meantime if you want to startintroducing yourselves in the chat we'd love to hear your names and where you'retuning in from and if you are an e-resident or not if you're thinking about it and if you are any Resident youalready have a company and what sort of company do you havehello from Algeria wow and India fantasticI from Brazil I think there are a few Brazilians probably in this webinar today because we have a very specialguest from Brazil hello hello guys hello guys from Braziland some e-residents too already too so that's good it's coming thick and fastuh it Aly Switzerland Germany hello everyone how's that how are everyone'ssummons I hear it's quite hot in many parts of the world yes hotis anyone tuning in from the beach like from their beach chair with a drink in handor by the pool Maybe well the good news that would be interesting we're obviously going totalk about e-residency today which means that doesn't mean that you live in Estonia but if you ever decide to visitit's a very nice time of year to visit it's only in the low 20s uh we're not too hot here we're enjoying our outsideweather just another reason uh to love Estonia but I think let's get started it seemslike we have well over 100 people here already so I'm going to bring up some slidesforeignWelcomeokay so as I said welcome to the live q a with the e-residency team and specialguests um where we hope that we can answer as many of your questions as possible todayum my name is Hannah Brown I'm head of content at e-residency and here is myIntroductionscolleague I'm Alex and we've also got a very special guest uh Edilson who is an e-resident andrecently a new e-residency Envoy Edison would you like to introduce yourself yeah hello guys thank you very much forthe invitation and let's try to answer some questions of people I know theyhave a lot of questions to us about this Estonia and about your residency so wellI am computer scientist I am expert in cyber security and I went to Estonia in2018 bringing my company from Brazil to Estonia and I'll tell the story justafter the introduction and then I'm here living in Estonia right now and I willreceive the invitation I'm very honored about being an Envoy of your residencyso thank you very much for the invitation and let's go thanks Allison and we also have another two veryspecial guests from one office why everyone so thank you residency team for for theSpecial Guestsopportunity for us to participate in this webinar and we're very glad toshare our 15 years of experience here with uh with people who are joining wehave 133 persons already joined us and that's that's the very good number anduh thanks everyone for joining and my name is Daria and I'm working in oneNorthwest Estonian Department as an account growth manager which means that I'm responsible for houstonian marketand let's say helping people to to open up the company to expand their existingbusinesses to Estonia and to find the best solution for the companies to be managedand here is my colleague we read hi I'm Mia I'm the legal advisor in one officeEstonia department and I'm helping from start till the finish with everythingfrom the legal Parkand as I've said before one office has 15 years of international experience andAbout OneOfficewe are operating now in seven markets Estonia Finland Sweden UK Ireland Latviaand Lithuania and uh let's say we are always researching and opening othermarkets so our customers have plenty of choices where to start or where toexpand their existing businesses so it means that we have specialists in eachcountry and if any kind of support for our customers needed regarding thecountry they're interested in we're always ready to help and umuh it I think that it actually gives the feeling that everything is done by thelaw correctly and all the Declarations reports submitted and so on andum sneak peek there are more countries to come so if you're interested to be updated with our newsplease subscribe to our newsletter as well and um uh one office was also the link betweengovernment and our customer in setting up the world record in onlinecompany incorporation and it was done in 15 minutes in London technique Tech weekso and I would say actually that the biggest achievement and the pride of oneoffice is that we are real people who are sitting behind the computers and solvingproblems helping to find the best solution and uh to give like the fastest support we canand I think that this personalized attitude is one of our strengthsand I think from this we can move to another slide to the next one and VeraServiceswill introduce our services a bit more okay uh our services really easy tostart most of our services are online so you can make the purchase straight fromthe website and the first package or like to startif you don't need any other services they're like no hidden fees you just payfor the company formation you will receive Estonian address the pricealready includes the state fee and you also receive contact person Servicesthen when you need to have accounting services then for only 35 Euros permonth you will have an online service where you can create sales invoices andstore all your expense documents and they are all comfortable in one placeand it is really convenient for you andthe best part of one-off is that we offer personal Solutions if you want toestablish a company with more complex a structure or you have a accountingthat needs like some kind of special Arrangement then we are offeringtailor-made solutions for your company and we also give legal advice whetherit's selling your business or including some investors and all the necessarydetails with that so I think this is everything from ourside at the moment and we'll wait for your questions uh to answer and to toget to know how can a one office help you with this protestMarketplace Partnerum so uh and just to clarify as well one office is a Marketplace member ofe-residency which means that they are a vetted trusted partner of The Residencycommunity so they are on our business directory which will tell you about alittle bit later and you can either contact them here directly or you can find them on our on our website as wellso um I'm going to hand over to Alex in just one minute but before I do that just to let you all know we're going todo this live q a in three parts the first part is the is what you see here what is e-residency the basics of whyyou should apply and how to do so um we will stop and answer a few questions on related topics after we dothis part then we will turn to part two which is about company formation and business banking and then we'll stop andwe'll do some questions on that topic and finally we'll end with taxation which I'm sure many of you havequestions about if you do have questions please put them in the Q a tab you cancontinue networking in the chat that's absolutely fine but if you want us to answer your questions either in writingor speaking please put them in the Q a tab and two of my colleagues Meredith andKatrina are also on the line here and they will answer some of the questions in writing provide some helpful linksthese kinds of things and the one final thing I wanted to talk about is at the end of the webinar there will be asurvey which we would love for as many of you to answer as possible so that we can take on the feedback for futurewebinars so with that I'll hand over to Alex all right thanks Anna yeah so umthe first part is about what is the residency so I did see in the chat that we do have a few e-residents herealready so this part is probably kind of old news for you but for those of you who aren't e-residents yet let's startwith that and go through that process so first of all what is the residency The Residency at its core is a digitalidentity that gives you access to estonia's e-services and it also givesyou the ability to do secure digital signatures and it's also a digital kids doingbusiness here in Estonia as well and beyond that as you can see already from from Edilson being here it's also givesyou access to a community of the residents so if you saw on the first slide we have over a hundred thousande-residents now around the world so when you become any Resident you get immediately you know put into thiscommunity and able to do business deals and really get able to grow your businessbut it's also really important to talk about what e-residency is not so let's go over that as wellso e-residency is not a travel Document it's not citizen Citizenship a Visa orresidency permit and it doesn't have any sort of automatic Pathway to those to those either so that's good to keep inmind also e-residency is not tax residency so we do have a section about taxes later I know there's a lot ofquestions about that so if you do have some questions put them in the Q a but we'll also go over them a bit laterand here residency does not give automatic access to a business bank account and we're also going to cover that too because I know that's a that'sa big question in people's minds if they're starting a company here in Estonia and it also doesn't give you access to apersonal bank account so who can apply for e-residency e-residency is only granted toWho can apply for eresidencyindividuals I think this is sometimes confusing for people because you are granted as an individual e-residencywhich you then use to normally register a company here in Estonia so that's good to keep in mind you have to havesubstantial interest in using e-services and starting a company in Estonia that's the main reason why people apply and ofcourse probably not too many people here who this applies to but uh it's not open for Estonian citizens or residents ofEstonia and just as a reminder too we also have restrictions on new applications fromRussians and Belarusian citizens currentlyso why should you become a new Resident why why are you here today on our on our live q a first of all the main benefitBenefits of eresidencyis that you can register an EU based company 100 online from anywhere you can run your business remotely with secureaccess to Services here in Estonia so it's really good for people who are location independent who like to haveflexibility from you know where they run their business you can also digitally sign documentswith the highest eida standards now you're asking me Alex what does that mean this is a a framework within theEuropean Union that ranks uh levels of digital signatures and estonia's ID card digital ID card that you get asan e-resident gives you the highest level so it's as strong it's equivalent to a handwritten signatureand of course we're going to keep mentioning it over and over again but this community the e-residents 100 000 around the world this is a really bigbenefit that you get when you become an e-resident and here's another one Patrick hereso what's the timeline for becoming an e-resident first you're going to apply online this is an application processTimeline for eresidencythat's administrated by estonia's police and Border guard board takes about 30 minutes then you are going to choose apickup location um and and also pay the state fee at this time which is 100 to 120 eurosdepending on where you apply after that estonia's police and Border guard board is going to review your application and they have 30 days by thelaw to do that so it will never take longer than 30 days after they've reviewed your applicationuh your if you receive a positive answer which the vast majority of people do um your emergency kit will you know beshipped from Estonia to your pickup location uh within two to five weeksand of course one Sierra pickup excuse me once you're here is a digital ID card has been shipped to your chosen pickuplocation which is an embassy or Consulate of Estonia around the world you're going to make an appointment to go to the Embassy uh give yourfingerprints and collect your car so as a as a kind of summary thisprocess generally takes about three to eight weeks depending on where you are if you're if you live a little bit closer to Estonia it could be in thethree-week side if you live on the other side of the world it's more on the eight week sideand this is also on our website but here are the pickup locations for e-residency so as you can see we don't have you knowGlobal coverageentirely Global coverage so if you do need to um you know you might need to travel to a location near you to pick upyour digital ID card so just keep that in mind before you apply itand I'll turn it back over to Hannah to go over the company formation details well before we do that leteResidency Journeyq a oh yes while we're checking the Q a maybe Edilson this might be a nice time for you to talk about your e-residencyjourney and how you came to be in Estonia and running a company in Estoniayes yes let me just see the I saw some people sending messages to me on thechat and I would like to ask you to send the message to the Q a because it's easier to us to retrieve the questionand answer it okay because in the in the chat screen it will be like it's real fast and we can't get all the messagesover there so thank you very much for everyone who iswatching this presentation right now and as I said before I am Edison I came toEstonia I I started my journey to Estonia in 2017and because of the kind of services I created in Brazil I created a companywho does authentication authentication of people authentication of documentsdigital we developed some protocols for digital identity and then uh sometraditional institutions in Brazil they didn't like what we were doing and thenuh we we had some problems with them they started to stalk us on in eventstrying to apply some censorship on something we were talking about and theybecame more aggressive and at some point our lawyers told us you need to leave the country and then we started to lookinto some jurisdictions for some place who could understand better what we weredoing and because we we use blockchain as infrastructure we don't handlecryptocurrencies we don't talk about cryptocurrencies we don't sell cryptocurrencies to anyone but we usepublic blockchains infrastructure to to manage to everything we do as a companyand Estonia after doing a research a huge research around the world we foundEstonia as the best best place to go because we we studied we researchedaround like 4 40 jurisdictions uh since Hong Kong to Portugal and then we crossit some something that is important to us the regulation taxes costs for livingand for running the the company and then Estonia was on the top of the list and because of that we decided to open thecompany in Estonia but we didn't know anything about Estonia or or a little about Estonia then I started through thee-residency first I applied it to the eurizance it was like aaccepted or available in one month as Alex was saying before they have arule for 30 days they need to to be able to issue The Residency after or reviewThe Residency because they can they can deny or they can acceptthen uh in Brazil at that time the embassy the Estonian Embassy was closedin the same year 2017 and then the closestplace to get the The Residency was Portugal then I had to travel to SouthKorea and in the when I was returning to Brazil instead of going to Brazil I cameto Estonia to get my e-residency open the company apply to the bank accountthen return to to Brazil just after because well in Brazil we have a lot ofbureaucracy for everything like opening a company take months sometimesand everything is like is low over thereand I didn't believe for sure I didn't believe Estonia couldbe fast faster to open a company so I decided to come to Estonia to apply bymyself and understand and okay then I got my residenceI will in Brazil we have some intermediary for opening the companies we need to go to some accounting companyto help you because it's a lot of paper a lot of rules a lot of things to dothen I came to first office to an office they helped me and Ian wastalking to me at that time no you can do it by yourself you know please guy helpme because I can't believe I can do it by myself okay then one office helped meand I applied it towards like uh but Janet said he applied it to us like aFriday almost even it was like 5 P.M in the next Monday he was calling mesaying uh it was during the morning very early he thought oh your company is open the register number is this then you cango to the bank and open the bank account or apply to the bank account account then I I chose uh La TVI went there because the bank you need to go it's it's not because the stone isbecause of uh European rules I needed to go to the to the bank I applied inperson over there then it took a lot of time for for opening the bank account because it was my first relationshipoutside Brazil first time and they needed to understand a lot of things about my company about myself about mymy my partners then but the bank account was open on just after so that's part ofmy journey to Estonia and the company I realized the company was 100 open afterthe bank account and it's sometimes it's not easy for sure but it's not becauseof stone it's because of the European rules and we are subject to thatthank you Edilson that's really helpful and I I will ask you because there are a few peopletalking about asking wanting to know more about blockchain and crypto maybe we'll talk about that a bit later you can you can talk about your expertise inthat area a bit later but I I can see quite a few people wanting to know more about your company and your and yourinterests um there have been a few people asking about you know why aren't there pick uplocations in this country or in this region or um why why are some old pickuplocations closed um unfortunately we yeah we we only do have these 40 or so uh locations aroundthe world and we we appreciate that we do have some geographical gaps um there are differentum things we're testing at the moment for example there's mobile pickup points is something that we're piloting and weare rolling those out to sort of more cities each each year um so yeah it's watch this space but atthe moment the best thing to do is to uh actually travel to a country where youcan easily you know either get a Visa or go Visa Visa free to collect yourdigital identity so um apart from that I thinkum there's not so many uh questions on the application process or anything so I think let's move on to the companyformation topic and business banking um because I know that there'll be a lot of questions on this on this areaso the first question you might ask and we've sort of touched on it a little bit is why do business in Estonia why startWhy do business in Estoniaa company here and we like to think of there being four really uh good reasonsthe first is that it's easy at every stage whether you're starting the actually registering the company youheard from one office before that you can register a company in 15 minutes and that was actually an e-resident on stageuh at a business conference in London so it was that quick um and once you are running the companyit's also very easy to manage the administration and the accounting for example it's um It's All Digital and youhave 24 7 access remote from wherever you are in the world to the systems to help you do thatthe second reason um is that it's you can feel safe doing business in Estonia in the securedigital systems that are here and the um the the being part in acountry that's part of the EU that's part of NATO um and most International institutionsas well the third reason is that you have access to a lot of opportunities for yourbusiness and you to thrive and so this is whether you're a freelancer and you just want more less time spent on adminmore time spent on your creative projects or if you're running like a you know a multi multinational series ofcompanies and you want easy access to the EU to EU clients to do business inEuros for example so you know and everything in between basically you have a lot of access to Startup the startupecosystem here in Estonia which is extremely vibrant and flourishing you have a very good companyum sort of trustworthiness in the eyes of investors of VC Evangel investors these kinds of things and Estoniancompanies can also apply for European grants and Estonian grants as well sosome of just some of the the opportunities that you're opening yourself up to by becoming an e-resident starting a company in Estoniaand we've mentioned Community but I just want to really highlight this point that Alex made earlier but you're joining aGlobal Network of entrepreneurs and not just e-resident entrepreneurs you're also you're also now in the EstonianMafia of startups you're meeting service providers like one office there's 130 ofthem on our on our marketplace right now so that's a lot of business people here in Estonia and in other countriesum and as I said Venture Capital investors accelerators uh other startuppeople as well so um it's no wonder that Estonian e-residents have started well over 26000 companies since the program began in 2014. but here I just wanted to quicklyask Daria and Veda do you have anything to add here about why why do you tellyour clients Estonia is a good place to start a company I'd say basically from my experiencethat the the main point of having an Estonian company and becoming anEstonian new Resident is that you can do everything online you can do everything remotely and it gives the possibilityfor for Freelancers who are opening their companies and providing services for their comp for their customers toenjoy traveling around the world and doing the doing their things doing theirbusinesses and growing their businesses and gaining Partners Etc so you canlet's say mix two things you can enjoy your life and you can do your businessand we will manage the other parts like accounting Etcthank you so uh the process of company registration it's even easier thanStarting a business in Estoniabecoming a new Resident I would say um so once you are in your resident and once you have your digital ID card youcan start your company uh as soon as you have it basically so the first thing we recommend doing as an e-resident is tochoose a service provider and um and I'll talk a little bit more about this in the next slide but you'll definitely need them for at least oneum service the and then once you have the service provider you can either do this yourselfor your service provider can help you do this themselves um log into the E-Business registry with your ID card oryour service provider might have an API formation Service as well and then register your company I think thehardest part in this whole process is what is the name of your company and is it available basically and then maybethe second hardest thing is figuring out what you're doing and matching it to an area of activity code in the system butdon't worry too much about that because it's something that you can very easily change each year when you do your annual reportso another thing to think about is if you are in a particular industry you may need a license or a notice of economicactivity Estonia has a very low regulation business environment so there's not it's it's not there'sthere's no big surprises here when we talk about the industries for example ifyou want to um uh have a tourism license you might need to give a notice of economicactivity uh if you are doing some types of educational activities uh if you aredoing construction and also financial services so if you are providing forexample a crypto wallet as part of your service you'll definitely need to get a financial service license so this issomething that um you know you need to think about but for the vast majority of people who aresay you know wanting to do consulting or marketing services or I.T you knowprogramming these types of things it's very unlikely you'll need a license and finally you'll apply for a businessbanking account most people do it differently from you Adelson it's normally company then back bank accountapparently it is possible the other way too and I will and we will talk about business banking in a few slidesMarketplaceso I mentioned the marketplace and I also and you can also see actually one office's logo here as well so this is auh a product on our on the e-residency website um and it's a business directory ofservice providers that we vetted and Trust um know how to provide services and andthe types of services that your residents need so there are over 130 service providers on the marketplaceum and as I mentioned there might be that there's probably one thing that you will need a service provider for atleast and that is a local contact person it's uh it's the only mandatory service that most e-residents need and um it'sif your company um has a foreign management Board address so if if you as say the soledirector or a group of if there is a group of you as directors if you all live overseas and you have foreignaddresses then you'll need to have a local contact person and address in Estonia only certain professionals or licensedRepresentatives can be a contact person but they're and they and their operators the companies local address mailbox andmessenger service but they're not um they don't have any liability or responsibility for your company they'renot a director a shadow director a non-executive director any of these things they're purely a contact uhmessenger for your company and then the marketplace on the marketplace there are also many otherslet me interrupt just just one second my first Contact uh contact in in Estoniawas one office as well so I hired them to receive all the mailings andeverything and being the contact person in Estonia so they provided that serviceto me as well in the very beginning you know it also not no idea that it was one office so I'm really glad that Iinvited today it's worked out perfectly I shouldn't have said anything butum yeah so and then you will find our service providers on the marketplace who can also help you with company formationif you need that assistance accounting legal Consulting as as one office do taxConsulting and more um so definitely um advise you to have a look on the whatMarketplace and it is it does have a lot of features built in soum filters for example a comparison tool review and rating system and I've done avideo uh with a demo of the marketplace on our YouTube channel so I recommend if you're having trouble sort of navigatingit uh watch the video and hopefully that can help you find the right service provider for youApplication feeokay so let's talk about costs so uh the application fee for your residency asAlex mentioned is 100 to 120 euros sorry ignore the mistake on the slideum to start a private limited company which is known in in Estonia as an ooo it's 265 eurosand a local contact person you're looking at say somewhere between 200 400euros a year you can sometimes you can find a bit lower sometimes it's a bit higher but this is sort of the averagethat we see accounting you can find accountants that start from about 50 euros per month itmight be part of a package where you get the local contact person as well or they help you with company formation so solook out for those kinds of Deals they can be really cost effective and helpful for your Administrationand then um also think about when you're making a budget particularly in the first year of starting a company othersome of the other costs so um do you have to travel to a pickup Point uh to pick up your ID card youmight have some extra expenses there um uh what extra services do you needand are there fees involved some banks have transaction fees so so think aboutthat there are also extra fees involved with getting business licenses and umfor example if you're working with a lot of software and these kinds of things or cloud storage you know that they cancost quite a lot so think about those kinds of things as well um we've done some like rough back ofthe sort of beer coaster um costs for your first year startup uh uhfees and if you're DIY or do it yourself which um here I just mean become a newResident starter company and get a local contact person you can you know you're looking around just over 550 Euros forthe first year if you want more help though if you want an accountant or one of these packages I mentioned thenyou're looking more over the 1 000 Euros Mark for the first yearum and we do recommend that if you're someone who doesn't really like admin or accounting or or you know you're just alittle bit worried about you know thinking about different laws and rules in Estonia with with the account on theaccounting side of things maybe it's a good idea at least for the first year or two to use an accountant and then onceyou see once you know the system once you've realized actually maybe it's not that difficult and you can do it yourself and maybe in future years youcan you can delegate it to yourself or someone else and and that's something that'sAccountingunbelievable for a Brazilian like doing the accounting accounting for your company during the entire year I justhire accounting over here to do the annual report to help us with the annual report and it's pretty cheap it's notnot expensive but in Brazil it's impossible you need to pay for if you have a company any size you need to havean accounting for helping you every month every month you can't do byyourself you do some mistakes or something wrong and be paid and you payfines because of that and here in Estonia you can do everything by yourself and every ending of it's notthe ending but at the beginning of the month I go to the emta website I reporteverything I need to report like I spend I don't know five minutes maximum andafter like reporting everything paying the taxes and I'm free to work in mybusiness during the entire month that's the thing thanks Edison yeah that's a really nicepractical use case there um so I mentioned the oh this is theprivate limited company just a few things on this this is by far the most popular business form in Estonia notjust amongst e-residents but also amongst estonians as well and uh if you ever do visit Estonia or meet anEstonian somewhere in the world I I can I mean I will put a five eurobet on the fact that they probably have their own oh everyone in Estonia has their own it's uh they use it for theirsort of side hustle or their Airbnb or everything it's it's a very simple company structure to set up and to andto manage as well um it's suitable for one shareholder companies solopreneurs Freelancers whowho want to use sort of a more um uh legal legally safe uh structure fortheir for their business it's also suitable for companies of three or four as well or more shareholders it has verylow minimum share Capital it's from one Euro Cent per shareholderum and it uh and the company obviously as as it's a private limited company itlimits the shareholders liability and there's a very easy registration process as we've covered beforeI'm going to hand over to Alex to cover business banking yeah so thanks Hannah I mean I've seen quite a few questionsBankingabout banking in in the Q a and I think our colleagues have been doing a good job answering those but let's just uhtake some more time to go through the process because I know there's quite a few questions so the thing to keep inmind is there are three basic options to open a business bank account for your Estonian company the first one is themost popular and it's also the easiest which is working with a payment institution or a fintech company that'sin the European Union or european economic area this is because these business accounts can be opened fullyonline so you don't need to you know go through extra hassles uh it offers you the widest choice so on the next slidewe have a chart with some of the um the fintechs that work well with e-residents who started companies here you can alsolook for additional ones as well um but to keep in mind they do not provide business loans so if you werelooking to get a business loan then this wouldn't work for you but again I would really like to highlight that this is the this is what most e-residents chooseto get started with a fintech account or a payment institution account uh firstanother option is to work with a bank in the EU or eea so for example if you already have a banking relationship witha bank uh in the EU you can approach them and say hey can I open up a business account for my Estonianregistered company I just talked to any residence who uh who's visiting Estonia uh two months ago and he actually didthis with a bank in the Netherlands and it was fine so there's a lot of people who actually find this really easy to doas well and again yeah based on your existing relationship that's normally how it works the third option is if you do wanta Traditional Bank business bank account in Estonia this is what Edilson was describing here um with lhv which is apopular traditional Estonian bank that people use to open up their business bank accounts if you want to do that youwill need a strong connection to Estonia so they're going to say what's your business plan do you have any umemployees in Estonia do you have any business partners here uh do you plan to have an Estonian language website atsome points questions like that they will want to know that also you're going to need to do a personal visit toEstonia so as we've been saying you know with e-residents you don't need to come here but for this uh for this you wouldneed to come here to open a traditional business bank account so hopefully that answers kind of all the questions about Banking and kind ofgoes over the three different options that you have and let's take a look at the thecomparison chart here so again um the first two on the left here lhv and cope are these traditionaluh I don't know if any Brits here would call them High Street Banks probably um so these are where you need to cometo Estonia to open up the the business account the rest of these on the screen here are fintechs you can open themonline for your company and they have different um you know different different things they offer one thing I would like tohighlight is this is kind of technical but for anyone who works with any online payment platforms or marketplaces ifyou're selling on an Etsy or um on eBay or Amazon Fulfillment by Amazon orsomething or even doing um like collecting money through Google AdWords or AdSense or something then you mightneed um and still need an ibad number so you might want to look at one of these first two options um in the fintechwhich is one office is um one office one offices offer that's a mouthful while orwe we trust and speaking of one office maybe you guys can talk a little bit about your banking offer that we havehere and how people can you know get started with that yeah of course thanksum basically I would say that I would start maybe from the beginning that one office has my one office platform uh Idon't know how many of you have already heard about it something uh but my oneoffice platform is uh is a good place to keep all your documents and to to havethe overview of your company and basically every one one of his customersgives a heaven access to this platform where you can easily first of all createsales invoices for your customers you can even track them you can mark them ifthey're paid or not if they're canceled Etc you can upload all your expensedocuments and on this platform we have a section called my money and we have apartnership with airwolix which means that actually air Rolex is a little bitintegrated into our platform and it will refer you directly to your bank account so basically uh there are a bit moreadvantages of of this partnership but I will not like go into details at themoment if you are interested in just contact us and we will we will give you a little bit more information but yeah Iwould say that mostly our customers are using air Rolex and wise as well and Iwould say that fintech we will like confirm that fintech Solutions are actually the most most popular onesthanks Daria um and yeah just uh if anyone wants to watch another recording of a web or twoone or two webinars actually on our YouTube channel on the e-residency YouTube channel there are a couple ofwebinars that we did last year with um one was was with lhv and Co-opum so it was all about their products and their eligibility criteria um and they answered a lot of questionsfrom the audience as well and the other one was with fintech's um into Duo thatone was with integero and we also had decta which is a payment wallet paymentGateway and this is something that I don't have on the slides here but I know that there are some people who need payment gateways on their own websiteslike on their if they're a merchant if they're an online seller and we do have uh some really good options uh on our umon our Marketplace for example strike is there and decta as I mentioned so if youneed a payment Gateway they're also in our Marketplace that you can you can find them in the filters as wellHow to compare Estonia to other countriesokay so uh uh I I had one more slide here which I forgot about nearlyum and I'm not going to go through this in great detail because there's a lot of content here um and here is actually a really goodtime to tell everyone watching that you will get a copy of the slides so tomorrow you'll get an emailum from the e-residency zoom account uh with a link to our web a special webpage on our website and there you candownload these slides so don't worry about like writing all this down right now um butum on this slide I just wanted to point out that we have a lot of uh comparisoncontent between Estonia and other countries as a business destination and I'm currently putting quite a lot ofmulti-country comparison on our blog as well but this is a sort of a shortsummary of some of the information in that you can find in these in these blog postsum I just wanted to point out three things the first thing we've covered this already a little bit but the time taken to register a business Estonia isuh on average it takes about two hours as you heard already it can take as low as 15 minutesum uh if you compare that to some other countries where if you start a if youstart a company there as a foreigner it could take days it could take a few weeks even in some places as well sothat's something to keep in mind the other thing um is that um era there's norequirement for you to have like a local director or an authorized agent to youknow act for your company in Estonia and you don't need a visa for example inother countries if you want to open a company there as a foreigner there are these otherum conditions so for example in the US and uh in Portugal you'll need anauthorized agent in Ireland you actually need at least one direct use resident inthe in the European economic area and in Singapore you'll need a local director or you'll need to live there you'll haveto have a visa to start a company as a foreigner so only the UK and Estonia really give the option of um of startingas a foreigner and not having one of these things and finally um the the setup process is fully onlinein Estonia it's also fairly similar in the UK and Singapore um it's particularly in Singapore where you dohave a digital ID called the sing pass or the court pass in the UK you don't have a digital ID so you may besacrificing you know a little bit of security there but you can do it online in the other countries it's uh it'seither a no for example in Portugal uh in the US and Ireland you probably need help to do it with with an agent or alocal director or you might even need to like physically upload documents rather than you know using um uh electronicplatforms so these are some of the sort of this is the type of information we've got on our blog so if you want to ifyou're really thinking like choosing between Estonia and one of these other jurisdictions recommend going on ourblog and having a look because we've got way more information on there about taxes and all sorts of things as well soUkraine residency programthat's that so um and then finally in this section of the the presentationum if there are any ukrainians in the audience um we've been running this um uhprogram since the war in Ukraine started in March last yearum and uh basically ukrainians can get a residency paid for by the program andthere are a series of participating service providers who will cover your company registration fee as well sowe've got more information on our website um but just to just wanted to alert you to this uh promotion that's ongoing thisyear as well okay so before we get to taxes let's gointo the Q a um Daria better or Adelson are there any questions that you've seen in the Q athat you'd like to answer while while Alex and I kind of have a lookCrypto companies in Estoniayeah some people was asking there if the there's some crypto companies in Estoniayeah yeah there's a lot and but now probablyum this answer will answer a lot of questions okay in a stone and it's notbecause of Estonia right now Europe is approving a new regulation about cryptocurrencies and crypto assets thename is Mika and Estonia they did something before Mika but very relatedto Mika so if you have a crypto company you need to follow some new rules and uhin case of your custodian you need there's a another uh things you need tofollow so you need to apply for a license for being a crypto company in Estoniaand there's something new over there because if you have a crypto company youneed to have a local director working in the company that's probably oneexception of the company for opening a company in Estonia because for crypto companies you must have a local directorright now based in the new regulation uh of Europe and the new regulation redrunning testimony all right thanks um you know thanks Edison you know Ithink one thing I have also seen a couple questions about that um in the beginning we talked about youknow what e-residency is not that is not a reseller residency permit or something but there's been quite a few questionshere about you know what if I do want to move to Estonia and so there are two programs I'd like to mention and one ofthem is called the startup Visa so if you have a company registered in Estonia or actually outside of Estonia you canapply for the startup visa and bring yourself and your team to Estonia and there's another one that just waslaunched uh last year called the digital Nomad visa and this is if your company's registered outside of Estonia or ifyou're Estonian company primarily serves clients outside of Estonia then you can apply for a digital Nomad Visa so also Edilson didn't you originally move to Estonia with startup Visa yeah what happened was in 2018 I came toEstonia I did some travels to Estonia then I met a startup Stone over here andI was talking to them and I told them oh I'll move to a stone I'm just very fine where are the investors how is themarket or around and everything then they told me oh you should apply to thestartup visa and I was one of the first ones for getting the startup Visa it'sit's not the first one because they say oh original my your company is the babyoffice startup Visa because at that time even the borders they didn't know how tomanage the application number and everything and I was getting information over there bringing interested upEstonia getting information in South Estonia telling to the borders how to do the thing then I got my applicationnumber up my Visa approved and then I moved it to Estonia and I'm living hereright now well hopefully it's hopefully they've improved it since you gave your feedback um but yeah so that's just if anyone isit wants to move here physically you can't look up those two um those two programs and one thing I can add uh Estonia isWork in Estoniadoing a lot of they give a lot of support even for in Residence and forstartupers and Founders who are moving to Estonia and Estonia has another uhagencies like work in Estonia so if you have a family they they help how torelocate your spouse or for example your wife living in Estonia and they bring alot of uh meetings meetups for the community communities of your residentscommunities of startups and we learn a lot living in Estonia from the all theagencies Estonia has it's crazy so there's a questionDo I need to set up a company immediatelyum from a couple of people about do I need to set up a company straight away as soon as I become any Resident andactually no you don't you have time the e-residency digital identity um lasts for five yearsum so you have five years really to do it um so if you become an e-resident and then maybe you know something happens inyour life and you're like oh no I'm not quite ready to start right now that's absolutely fine um just be aware that after five yearsyou would need to renew your um your digital ID and become uh get your secondcard um and there's also um a few people asking about uhrecording of This webinar so we're actually live streaming this simultaneously on YouTube and therecording will stay up on YouTube afterwards so if you want to re-watch um you can do that as welland then the final thing that I wanted to say because I I did see a question um maybe we didn't make this clear are TheTwo Hosts presenting this talk from the Australian government or a private company so Alex and I work for e-residency of Estonia which is agovernment program um uh we're part of we're a program within the Australian investment agencyso uh yes we are talking to you from the the government's perspective the products perspective as wellum but you know Estonia is a startup nation and uh things move here pretty quickly so uh don't think of us likeyour average you know bureaucrats or civil servants um think of us as more of a governmentstartup I can see another question here that Ican that I can maybe bring up um can I open several companies with your residencyum this is fine you can absolutely do this there are many residents who have uh more than more than one or even twocompanies um but one thing that I will note here is it's actually possible to do different things with just one companyso Estonia doesn't have a rule that you cannot you can only operate your company in like thatum in one area of activity so for example if you uh if you were doing business consulting or like you maybeyou're giving some advice on like marketing or something but you also wanted to use your company to to holdsome Investments you can actually do that personal Investments you can do that with the same company if you wouldprefer though to have two separate ones also fine as well just so you knoweResidency servicesum I would actually maybe add here regarding one of the services and uh since we have pretty big team here inour headquarter in Italian and we have lawyers in-house we have accountants and house and basically uh we are welcomingevery every customer with any structure you want to to open uh we helpwithholding companies with subsidiaries we can like what's our big strength isis that we do work in like as I've mentioned before seven countries and wehave a lot of customers who are actually growing together with us and they have some time ago opened the company forexample in UK and uh where do they live actually and then they have started tothink about expanding their business and they have opened the Estonian company and they have moved both companies toone office and we are managing the accounting part of their business fully like for UK company and for Estonian oneand so this Estonian company is now the holding company of UK company sobasically we do handle all such of uh the most complicated cases and if youhave any questions just feel free to contact us and I think Vera will help with uh yes we also establish companiesthat maybe one of the shareholders individual but the other shareholder isa company and the company can be from UKor whatever but this is just a little bit longer procedure when a foreignercompany is starting a company but we also provide the service for thisTaxesyeah that's a really good point um I think because I did see a question about can I have a Delaware LLC as ashareholder and yes you can that's fine but uh it would it will require a notary I think so yeah it will take a bitlonger but there are service providers like one of two can help you with that um then and someone else asked whetherum you know if you have more more than one shareholder or director in your company can they do they have to be e-residentsum it will make things much easier to do your admin if everyone is an e-resident or has some form of a Estonian ID cardwhether it's an Estonian or whether it's an e-resident but it's also possible to do it without but then again youprobably need to do most things using a notary so just so you're aware it will make my life much easier if you're alle-residents okay so um I'm we've only got sort of like 10 15 minutes left so Ireally want to get onto taxes I can see that there are a lot of questions already about taxes and also a lot ofquestions from some Nomads and I'm hoping that some of the content I cover in the next part will cover will answersome of your questions as well so let's turn to part three which is taxesand um in the meantime yeah continue asking questions and we'll we'll try and answer as many as we can by the end ofthis so the first slide here is very simple umcan you plug the sorry my uh my power sorry sorry everyone power issuesokay thanks sorry everyone uh uh so the first slide here is just to introduceyou to the main taxes to be aware of as an international company founder thefirst one is your personal taxes um and generally speaking this will be declared in your country of tax residence I canalready hear you saying what if I don't have a tax residence wait we'll we'll talk about that in a minutethe second type of taxes are company taxes um and generally speaking you willdeclare these company taxes where your company is a tax resident and or has aneffective place of management or has activities which constitute a permanent establishment these are all long wordsand big International tax Concepts and I'll cover them more in the next slide the third type of taxes to be aware ofare the payroll taxes and social contributions in some countries these are known as labor taxes orum uh superannuation pension these kinds of names and you will declare these whereyour employees of your company are located or registered and this includes yourself if you're a solopreneur and youpay yourself a salary as an employee of your company wherever you are located you'll need to look at the local thelocal employment laws um and around labor taxes there andregister yourself if necessary and the final type of taxes which we're not going to cover in much detail todaybecause they're a whole webinar of their own um our value-added taxes or vat alsoknown as GST in some countries as well sales taxes essentiallyum so in in Europe um these are generallyum paid in the country where you're where the con you register and pay themin the country where your end consumers buy products but if you're selling onlineum that Europe has made some streamline procedures where you can own where you only need to register and declare youruh your vat in one country so you can do this in in Estonia the rates might differ depending where you're where theend product has been purchased by the consumer um but you can usually set this offbetween countries the the tax authorities will set this off between countries soum the schemes I'm talking about are the One-Stop shop and the import One-Stop shop and again as I said there could bea whole webinar in themselves but um just so you know that the Europe the European commission is trying to makebat a little bit more streamlined so um these these things are happeningwhich is great so let's go more into detail on companytaxes the second uh type of taxes that I mentioned in that slideso for Estonian companies they will be automatically registered as tax residents in Estonia by the Estonian taxand Customs board uh when they're registered um so this means that technicallyspeaking they are a tax resident of Estonia when they're registered but there are two things to be aware ofum the first is that if your company is also considered a tax resident in another country so um if you know it'seffectively managed in another country I can see I I I've already seen questions from people in Germany on this theGerman Tax Board is particularly strict on this so just just so you're aware if you're running your Estonian companyfrom Germany if your office is there if your employees are there you know your assets everything it's very likely thatyou will be considered to be effectively managing your company in Germany and also it's very likely that the Germantax Authority will consider your activities to create a permanent establishment in Germany so your companywill probably have tax liabilities there as well and then the other thing is if youremember right at the beginning of this webinar Alex said that irresidency is not a tax residency which means thate-residency won't exempt companies from Dual tax residency or foreign tax liabilitiesthe good news though is that Estonia has signed well over 60 uh double taxationtreaties with different countries including Germany so um if you um if it's if it looks likeyou should be paying corporate tax your company should be paying corporate tax in Germany for example or other countries that have treatiesum it's very likely that the Estonian tax Authority will exempt um taxation here in Estonia of yourdividends so these are some things that maybe this might surprise some people on thewebinar maybe you haven't heard of these sort of international tax Concepts before um but this is something that yeah everyInternational Company every company operating across borders this will affect all of you no matter whetheryou're an Estonian company a Delaware company or Portuguese whatever it isso you shouldn't be double taxed as any Resident but we recommend that you contact a local tax consultant forprofessional advice and um now I want to talk a little bitabout the Estonian tax system firstly Estonia has a very minimal tax regulationcompared to other countries the the legislation is very very thin and veryeasy to to understand quickly um it also has relatively low ratescompared to other countries particularly in Europe so what does this mean it means thatthere's no annual corporate income tax instead you pay standard tax ondistributed profits so anything that you reinvest any profits that you reinvest in your company you don't pay any tax onthis no annual tax um it's only when you start Distributing profits in the form of dividends forexample that you pay uh 20 over 80 on the net distributed profit if you dothis regularly over three years or more the standard rate goes down to a reducedrate of 14 over 86 on net distributed profitsvit and Australia is 20 um and uh you must register for vit ifyour company is making 40 000 Euros uh turnover per year or more and as Imentioned in the the earlier slide there are these uh European One-Stop shop and import One-Stop shop regimes to tosimplify that procedures in Estonia as part of these regimes so that makes things a bit easier for you in Estoniataxes can be declared and paid online as Edilson mentioned before and um theAustralian tax Authority or amp does as he also mentioned is extremely friendly they're they're very responsive theyhave a dedicated email and contact line for non-resident taxpayers so people whodon't live in Estonia um but might be paying tax here so and and I've used uhnot necessarily their non-resident email but I've used their other contact forms before and they reply with you know theyreply within a few hours normally within a day so um they try and be as helpful as they can on uh within you know withinwhat they can help with um so I think all of this being said it's no wonder that Estonia has beenranked number one on the tax competitiveness index by the tax foundation for the last nine yearsum so let's get on to um the The Nomad topic and um and maybethe sort of you know elephant in the room of well but you just told us that when we met we might not pay tax inEstonia so why are you now telling us all the great things about taxes in Estonia well this is where we start talkingabout substance so if you want to um if you really want to um take advantage of estonia's taxcompetitive tax um system and rates and everythingum you need to have you need to show that your company has substance in Estonia and on this slide I'll gothrough a couple of ways you can do that that different tax authorities around the world would consider when they'relooking at your whole structure so the first few are if youum if you want to structure your business in a way where you would do some of these things to to show that youreally do have substance in Estonia so for example you might rent an office um hire employees hereum you might come to Estonia once or twice a year to hold important board meetings and make really key strategicdecisions about your your company you know a lot of a lot of your residents actually come and spend a few weeks ayear here it's very nice in summer as I said at the beginning so um they come here they come for business conferencesthey come to network with other e-residents and they hold their board meetings and um and and meet businesspartners and and clients these kinds of things here another thing that you can think about doing is registering assetsand intellectual property or IP in Estonia you can do this through like trademarks or you can do this withvehicles um or other other physical assets thatmight come in handy so the next one next topic I wonder about is becoming a digital Nomad sothis is sort of going to what a lot of people are asking about um what happens when I don't have a taxresidency so um if you're if you are a digital Nomad and you don't have a tax residency or atleast you know you're a Perpetual traveler um uh this can be a really really goodway of making sure that you can pay taxes in one country so you can basically choose where you pay taxes foryour company maybe you choose a different place as a person maybe you decide that you'll you'll you'll chooseyour your home country or another country with low taxes with low personal taxes but for your companyum as a digital Nomad it's much you're much safer paying your company taxes here in Estoniaum one thing that I wanted to mention at this point because I saw that someone did say that they're often on a sailboator they're uh like lying on different beaches traveling a lot so maybe youqualify as a Perpetual traveler as I think the tax accountants call it one thing that you should be aware of is ifyou decide I'm not going to pay taxes anywhere for yourself I'm talking about personaltaxes here is that a few years down the track when you do decide that you want to settle somewhere and maybe get abusiness loan or or a personal loan mortgage to buy a house or something thebank is going to look a little bit strangely at you when you say that you haven't paid taxes for a few yearsum it might make things more difficult for you to get a bank account or get a mortgage or borrow money uh to start acome to you know get investment in your business because you may be seen as a risky uh as a risky person and that'snot just um that's not just sort of hearsay that's uh According to some of the sort of European regulations otherGlobal um anti-money laundering counterterrorism these types of regulations as well so yeah I I wouldthink long and hard about whether you maybe should choose a country whereverit is as a person and as and for your company where you pay tax so that you have the paper trail and your you knowlegit within the global system of Taxation so this is a sort of advice Isuppose but not not legal advice but just something to think about um if you are in that category of peopleanother option is to relocate and we have Edilson here who's obviously done thisum uh this means that he for his company and I think probably personally as well Estonia is his tax residencyum so that's something to think about um very easy for you to do if you're in Europe alreadyum because Estonia is part of Schengen and as we already mentioned before there's a lot of Visa programs that canhelp you move here as well and we have more information about all these topics on our websiteum at this link okay so that's all uh for the time andfor doing just that's to add and for doing business with the entire Europe it's pretty easy being in Estoniabecause of the because it's in the block the European block so it it's prettyeasy that's one of the biggest things for our decision because we evaluated many many countries in in Europe at thattime and because of our strategy was is selling some products to the to to theEurope as well because in Portugal is Spain in Italy they have the same issues with the bureaucracy as we have inBrazil they understand very well the problems I'm trying to solve then comingto Estonia was a great thing for for addressing those countries as wellthanks Edilson Daria did you want to maybe make a comment on some of the tax stuff get back to this uh tax topic andto maybe give some uh additional information and additional uh let's sayuh blog posts from where to gain the uh a little bit more information aboutEstonia and Texas um maybe it would be better if I will just attach it to the chat so everyonewill see it in in just a second and uh if you will go there that's our uh blogpost about taxes in Estonia and we have added actually a little bit we haveadded some examples already there so uh if you will see that your case isfamiliar with that or if it's not you can always contact us for uh for aconsultation with our with our content and she will pick up she will describeall the taxes in Estonia and what do you need to pay in your exact case and thenwe'll pick up the best solution how how can one office handle the accounting partum maybe I'll jump in here give Hannah a little bit of a break here uh let us drink some water or somethingum but yeah I think um so the the resource the blog that one office just dropped in the in the chat you can havea look at that but I saw a couple when Hannah was speaking about taxes I saw quite a few questions too aboutdividends what are dividends is different from salary um so I think I will I will also drop alink in the chat too so if you as we discussed if you are eligible to pay your corporate taxes in Estoniaum then you know there are Beyond dividends you also could consider salary and board uh board members and directorsfees so those are two other things you want to consider as well so um definitely take a look at that and read about thoseum but I think most mostly residents definitely want to know about dividends because that's what they're most interested inum anything else to add to that yeah and a few people are asking about hiring employeesum firstly you can hire employees uh anywhere but you'll need to in anycountry but you'll need to make sure you're very clear on what the employment laws are in the country where youremployees are located a really good way to to do this is to use a an employerrecord and we do have some on our Marketplace so for example deal is is uh is one in our Marketplace there areothers like remote uh other other companies that can help you with that kind of stuff and they are um basicallythey act as the employer of record and they know that what the rules are and what the um the registrationrequirements and like the tax social benefits all these kinds of things are for different countries so they canadvise you on that and they often do a lot of the admin for you through like a payroll uh their own payroll platformsso um if you're looking at um hiring Employers in different places I recommend looking at thoseokay any anything else we want to end on umI think there are a couple of people asking about the tax rates going up um So currently in on the Estoniangovernment is considering um raising the tax rate the corporate tax rate uh the personal one I think isgoing up next year the corporate one we'll see if it if it goes up it'll go up in two years timeum uh but it hasn't been approved yet so let's see what happens um and if it does go up it'll go up to22 over 80 no 78 so it'll be 22 of netnet distributed profits so um that's something to be aware of but it won't they'll still have this zero percent onreinvested so anything any profits that your company makes that you put back in basically leave in the company bankaccount essentially um you don't pay taxes on that like like you would in in a country that has anannual corporate you know from the minute that you earn your first Euro inyour company you owe taxes it's not like that in Australia at all and that's really the key benefit of estonia's corporate taxation system it's reallymeant for companies that are growing and reinvesting in themselves this is It's really the best the best place to do business if your business is in thatphase so I think that's a good place to stop the webinar I know that there are many questions we haven't answered um but ifyou um do you have more questions um or feel like you didn't quite get theanswer that you were looking for um here are a few different ways that you can askum ask our team so as I mentioned at the beginning you'll get a survey pop up please answer it it would be great tohear your feedback on this session we have a subreddit here linked that youcan find and ask questions and there are not only people from our team monitoring it but there are other e-residents andservice providers there so you might get answers that way there's also a Facebook group called e-residents of Estoniawhich is another great place to ask questions from different people I've put our support customer support emailaddress here so if you have any specific questions about e-residency that that's a good place to go and if you're readyto apply if you're not yet a new Resident but if you're ready to apply here's also the the apply linkum and now I would like to ask Daria and Vera if that if you have any uh finalthoughts or any final things that you'd like to tell the audience before we goum actually the only thing I would like to add is that if you are not any Resident at the moment but you considerbecoming then actually one office offers e-residency application assistance aswell and this is one of our services which is connected to company information and as we have talked beforeaddress and contact person services so basically you can get the full package with assistance for for applying fore-residency and then we can help you with starting your company and we canprovide address and contact person services and the usual price for uhassistance is 100 Euros plus v80 but for all the webinar attendants we do offerit for zero until the end of the August so youcan get it actually for free just just go to our landing page and contact medirectly for additional information thank you Daria that's a really niceoffer thank you and uh Adelson um thank you so much for being here how did you find it todayoh it does it's a school I was answering many questions in Q a uh for 40 peopleas well I probably I answered many if you have more questions you can find me in LinkedIn and I'm always available youyou can find me on social media as well and or through original my that's mycompany we are now living in Estonia I I live in Estonia under the startup Visaright now and I'm very glad for helping and by the invitation for being here sothank you very much and if I can contribute in anything just just you know how to find me so that's the thingthank you very much thanks Edilson thank you Alex thank you thanks everyone and thank you everyone at home for tuning inand have a really really nice afternoon or morning wherever you are in the world and we hope to welcome you into theresidency Community very soon thank you bye