How to build US credit as a foreigner from France
France does not give you a credit score. Not a low one, not a hidden one — the system was never built to produce one, and that changes what you are actually walking into when you apply for a US card.
For a reference on the U.S. business credit bureaus, see the U.S. business credit bureaus guide.
Founders from Germany or the UK arrive in the US having lost something. You arrive having never had it.
What the Banque de France actually holds about you
France's consumer credit information sits in payment-incident files managed by the Banque de France: FCC, FICP and FNCI.
Read the word "incident" carefully. These are registers of things going wrong — cheque irregularities, payment defaults on household credit. They record failure, not performance. If you have paid every obligation on time for fifteen years, the correct description of your entry is that you do not have one.
That is the opposite of how the American system works. US bureaus are built to accumulate a positive record: on-time payments, credit limits, account ages, utilisation. In France, the absence of a file is the good outcome. In the United States, the absence of a file is the problem.
Do not let anyone describe FCC, FICP or FNCI as French credit scores. They are public-bank incident registers, and no complete official list of private French consumer bureaus is publicly documented — so if you read that France has a bureau equivalent to SCHUFA, treat it as an unevidenced claim.
The company side is different, and it is genuinely useful
FIBEN is the Banque de France's database of French non-financial companies, and the Banque de France assigns the ratings entered into it. Access is restricted to registered members for credit activity.
Here is the part most French founders do not know they are entitled to: the legal representative of a rated company receives its Banque de France rating systematically and free of charge.
If you run a French company, go and get yours. Not because a US lender will read it — they will not, and I am not going to imply otherwise — but because it is the closest thing you have to a documented institutional assessment of your business, and it is useful when a US bank asks you to substantiate what your existing operation is.
Getting money into the US entity
France has had no exchange controls since 1989. The governing provision is Article L151-1 of the Code monétaire et financier, and it is a direct statutory source rather than a summary: financial relations between France and foreign countries are free. No restriction on outward investment. No restriction on holding or receiving USD. Standard anti-money-laundering checks and nothing more.
So the money moves. What follows is a caveat that matters because it is quoted wrongly.
The Banque de France requires specified high-contributing industrial, commercial, insurance and reinsurance corporations to report covered cross-border and non-resident service transactions monthly, where an annual service or income item exceeds EUR 30 million. That is a statistical reporting obligation on a defined population of large reporters. It is not a bank transfer threshold and it is not an approval gate. If a forum post tells you France has a €30 million cross-border limit, it has misread a Banque de France statistics page.
A US LLC does not move you outside French rules. Your transfer out of your French account is a French transaction under French law, and your US company's payments are domestic to the US. Both statements are true at the same time, and any structure sold to you on the basis that the first one stops being true is a structure to walk away from.
Your French tax position
The DGFiP's English-language tax-law handbook states that individuals resident in France for tax purposes are taxable on income of French or foreign origin. The standard corporation tax rate is 25% under CGI Article 219, and the handbook describes corporate tax as applying in principle to profits generated in France.
Worldwide income for resident individuals. That is the sentence to carry.
Your US LLC's profits do not become invisible because the entity is American. How they are treated depends on the entity's classification, your own residence, and the treaty — and that combination is an adviser's question, not a blog's.
The IRS publishes US–France treaty documents from 1994, with protocols from 2004 and 2009. A treaty allocates taxing rights and relieves double taxation. It has no effect on your credit file whatsoever.
On French controlled-foreign-company rules: how CGI Article 209 B applies is not something to take from a guide, and no claim about it is made here. It is a real provision with real consequences for French residents holding foreign entities. Get it answered properly by someone with the statute open.
What French founders get wrong
Believing they must have bad credit in the US because they have "no credit" in France. The two facts are unconnected. Your French non-file is a clean outcome under a negative-reporting system; your US non-file is a starting position under a positive-reporting system. Neither is a black mark. What you build in the US starts from zero and is entirely yours.
Reading the EUR 30 million Banque de France figure as a transfer limit. It applies to a defined population of large reporters filing monthly statistics. Most founders will never be in that population.
Expecting a "score" from the Banque de France and being told there isn't one. For an individual, that is correct and it is not a fault in your file. For a company, there is a rating, you are entitled to it free as the legal representative, and hardly anyone claims it.
The practical sequence
Months 1–3. Get the ITIN if you need one; Form W-7 is the mechanism and it is a tax processing number, not a credit product. Open a US secured card or credit-builder product that reports to the bureaus. Keep utilisation low and pay in full. Verify current terms before applying — these products change their reporting practices and eligibility rules frequently.
You are building a record from nothing. Consistency beats size, every time.
Months 4–6. Keep business and personal spending strictly apart. Have your formation documents, EIN letter, invoices and bank statements organised, and if you have a FIBEN rating, keep a copy — it is real institutional evidence about your French operation, which is a different and useful thing when a US provider asks who you are.
Months 7–12. Pull your US reports and read them line by line. Accent characters in your surname and the format of your French address are the two fields where mismatches appear. Fix them now, not during a financing conversation.
On Amex
No guide can tell you whether Global Transfer is open to you, because the answer depends on which entity issued your particular card — and that varies.
What I can tell you is what the test is. Global Transfer works from your relationship with American Express itself. Where a local card is issued by a partner bank under a Global Network Services licence, the relationship belongs to the bank and there is nothing to carry across. Find the issuing entity named on your cardholder agreement. And keep two things separate: an Amex-issued card is not disqualified by the licensee problem, which is not the same as Amex accepting your application. Programme criteria are a separate matter, and Amex is the only one who can tell you where you stand on them.
You must also be the primary cardholder, have held the card at least three months, and have the account open and in good standing.
Check before you rely on this: Amex sets and changes these terms. Confirm directly.
When you don't need us
If you are the legal representative of a rated French company, request your Banque de France rating yourself. It is systematic and free. Nobody should invoice you for it.
Form W-7 for the ITIN goes to the IRS directly, and paying someone several hundred euros to post it for you buys nothing.
Where help earns its cost is the US address problem, the structuring question when you are a French tax resident running a US entity, and knowing which providers will actually accept you before you spend applications finding out.
What we do
Keystone Bridge handles the US side for founders outside the United States — formation, EIN, ITIN, US business banking access, and business credit. Pricing is published on this site.
For the broader picture, see building US credit as a foreigner, opening a US business bank account from France and LLC vs C-Corp for French founders.