Getting money into a market is usually easy. Getting it out again is the part that needs planning, and it is decided by paperwork you complete on the way in. Here is what account access and repatriation actually require in all eight markets we cover.
Illustration — AI-generated artwork, not documentary photography.
Two questions decide whether a market is workable for you: can you open a local account, and what has to be true for your money to leave again?
| Market | Local account access | Getting money out |
|---|---|---|
| Colombia | Requires a cédula de extranjería. Practically, that means a visa first — banking follows residency rather than preceding it. | Straightforward if the incoming capital was registered as foreign investment at the time it arrived. Painful if it was not. |
| Mexico | Requires residency documentation and a tax identification number (RFC/CURP). More accessible than most of this set. | No exchange controls. The constraint is tax documentation, not permission. |
| Brazil | A CPF gates absolutely everything — account, property, investment. It is the first thing to obtain and can be started before arrival. | Requires that the original foreign capital was registered with the central bank. Registration is the mechanism that authorises the return leg. |
| Panama | Open to non-residents in principle, and slower in practice than the offshore reputation suggests. Post-blacklist compliance means heavy documentation. | No exchange controls, and the currency is the US dollar. The friction is entry, not exit. |
| Argentina | Requires a tax identification number (CDI or CUIT). Achievable, but the exchange-rate framework governing which transactions settle at which rate has changed repeatedly. | Establish the current position for your specific transaction type before committing funds. This is not a question with one durable answer. |
| India | NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts are for non-resident Indians. A foreign national of non-Indian origin has no equivalent retail route. | Capped: USD 1 million per financial year from NRO balances with taxes cleared, plus a two-property lifetime limit on full repatriation of NRE-funded property proceeds. |
| Indonesia | Tied to immigration status. The property structures that give the strongest position require either a stay permit or a company, and banking follows the same logic. | Bank Indonesia actively courted foreign portfolio inflows through 2026 with incentive measures. The direction of travel is open. |
| Vietnam | Workable, but assume a cash market for property — mortgage lending to foreign nationals is largely unavailable. | Documented inward remittance through banking channels is what makes the outward leg possible later. Same principle as Brazil and Colombia. |
Verified 11 August 2026 against the sources cited in each market brief. Rules in this table change by decree and by court injunction, sometimes without announcement. Treat it as a map of where to look, not as legal advice, and confirm anything you intend to act on with a licensed practitioner in that country.
Across Colombia, Brazil and Vietnam — and in practice most of this list — the same rule applies in different words: money can leave in the shape it arrived in, and only if you documented the arrival.
This is the most consequential paragraph on this page. Foreign capital entering to buy property or fund a business should be registered as foreign investment at the point of entry, through the banking channel, with the paperwork retained. That registration is what authorises repatriation of the principal and, later, the sale proceeds and any gain.
The failure mode is uniform and avoidable. A buyer wires money, closes on a property, and discovers three or five years later at sale that nobody registered the inflow. The money is not lost, but regularising it after the fact is slow, expensive and sometimes requires the cooperation of counterparties who have moved on. It is a twenty-minute step at the front of the transaction and a multi-month problem at the back of it.
If you take one thing from this pillar: ask your bank and your lawyer, in writing, what registration the inbound transfer requires, and keep the confirmation. Do it before the money moves, not after.
Colombia’s banking friction is real but bounded, and it runs in a specific order that catches people who try to do it backwards.
You need a cédula de extranjería to open a meaningful local account, and you need a visa to get a cédula. So banking follows residency rather than enabling it. Foreign buyers routinely arrive expecting to open an account on a tourist stamp and then discover the sequence. Plan the visa first.
The cuatro por mil — a financial transactions tax of four pesos per thousand on debits from accounts — is small per transaction and adds up in a way that surprises people running a business through a Colombian account. Exemptions exist for certain account types and thresholds; it is worth asking specifically rather than absorbing it by default.
For inbound capital, the registration point above applies squarely. Money brought in to buy property should be registered as foreign investment when it arrives. Our field reports on moving money to Colombia and opening an account as a foreigner go through the sequence in detail, including the fee structures that make a meaningful difference on larger transfers.
We are not going to publish a comparison table of transfer fees, because the honest answer is that the spread you get depends on the amount, the corridor, the day and the provider, and any table we published would be wrong within a quarter.
What is durably true: the headline fee is almost never the cost. The exchange rate margin is the cost, and on a property-sized transfer it dwarfs the fee. A provider advertising a low flat fee with a two-percent spread is more expensive than one charging a higher fee at interbank plus a small margin, and the difference on a two hundred thousand dollar transfer is real money.
Compare on the total landed amount in the destination currency. Ask each provider what will actually arrive. That single question resolves most of it, and it is the framing our field report on Colombian transfer fees uses throughout.
The second durable point: split large transfers if the corridor supports it, and never move money on a deadline you cannot extend. Compliance holds on large inbound transfers to emerging-market banks are routine, not exceptional, and a closing date that assumes clean same-week settlement is a closing date with a problem in it.
Every market in the table above has its own brief, built on the same eight blocks so the sections line up when you open two side by side.
Reported on the ground from Medellín — the flagship brief and the deepest coverage on the site.
Read the brief →Banxico, the nearshoring trade, and the Article 27 restricted zone.
Read the brief →The Selic, the CPF, and registering foreign capital so it can leave again.
Read the brief →Territorial tax, dollarization, and the investor threshold that rises in October 2026.
Read the brief →The reform trade, the currency band, and the track record behind both.
Read the brief →The strongest structural growth in the set, and the hardest direct access.
Read the brief →No freehold for foreigners — and the three structures that do work.
Read the brief →The FTSE reclassification landing 21 September 2026.
Read the brief →