Creating an account with IBKR from Serbia
For starters you going to IBKR Account creation (this is a referral link, where you get some amount of IBKR stock for free (up to USD1000) and I get a potential kickback).
At this point fill in the form and complete the mail verification. On the next page when selecting account type, in most cases Individual will suffice for most users.
In the next couple of pages, when providing you information, there is a couple of things to be mindful of:
1.If you have a TIN (in Serbia it’s a PIB) you can enter it, but if this doesn’t seem familiar to you, you probably don’t have it. In many countries, every adult has a TIN, but in Serbia we are not legally required to obtain one.
2.Feel free to select any base currency, I prefer having USD here, this setting only applies to the UI, basically you usually only see numbers in the UI without currency, so if you have a bunch of stocks, maybe some EUR, maybe some other currencies in the account, their value will be displayed in USD by default. You can always change this later, but this does not impact much in terms of functionality, so feel free to pick anything.
3.I recommend when picking a document to give out a passport, from my experience, giving out a passport here helps with address confirmation later, since the passport contains your address, so you might not need to provide further proof of address in later steps.
Most people will not be prompted with this next step, so you can ignore it, but if you were or still are a client with some other brokerage that is partnered with IBKR (in Serbia, for example TradeWin24) then you will be asked to log in. IBKR allows explicitly for you to have any number of accounts. Usually if you already have an account, it is easier to login and create another one, but some partners have implemented their own custom UI, which for some reason doesn’t have this option. If you find yourself in this position, feel free to Ignore this prompt and click the “current application” link and do not login with your old account.
When configuring your account, a lot of these options can be adjusted later, so for now, if you are unsure, you don’t have to set up any fancy tools or permissions for advanced financial instruments, the default ones will allow you to do the basic stock and ETF buying for example. Cash accounts means that you will trade with your available cash, margin account allows you to to borrow money against the value of securities in your account. I personally pick a cash account type.
Objectives and purposes should be considered. I personally believe in long term income generation with lower risk.
In the pictures below, the user has very low experience with trading, this will later on prompt you to go through a course in order to give you permission to trade, when I created my IBKR account, I already had a couple of years of experience with trading, so when I put in 2 years and a bit more trades, I was not prompted.
If you are an employee of some publicly traded company such as for example Microsoft, be mindful of the upcoming section. This is to make sure that there is no insider trading happening. This shouldn’t affect you much unless you have Control of the company or if you own more than 10% of the company shares.
SYEP is an interesting program, you can go ahead and research it’s pros and cons, but you can always opt in later if you so desire and keep it checked off for now.
This is the part where you will be prompted with the Stock Teaching Exam if the reported experience was low in the stock market previously, you can partake it or you can take it later and skip for now, it is up to you.
Unfortunately at this time, Serbia and US don’t have an income treaty between them, but don’t worry to much about this, capital gains tax is paid in Serbia if you are a Serbian Tax resident and not US and tax from dividends is taxed at the source. Since I don’t want to overwhelm you with taxes in this post, just know that this is not a big hurdle and will not affect most peoples tax bill significantly if you are dealing with basic financial instruments.
In the next section you can proofread once again and check if everything is okay or not. Confirm and Sign all the documents once you are sure that everything checks out.
This is the final section. IBKR tends to ask for additional information in this step, so here is a couple of things to keep in mind:
Funding an account is not mandatory, in fact, recently a friend of mine got approved without funding the account in less than 12h, it should be faster if you do fund it. I had experience with funding the account with EUR. There are two options:
-First it’s the SEPA transfer, but for Serbian banks to approve this transfer you need to have a document that you cannot access before the account is approved. This is the method I use now to fund my account and can teach you how to use it later, but is not an option for you now, until the account is approved.
-Second option that I tried is to use Wise, due to high fees I probably wouldn’t use this after you create an account or for larger amounts, but if you want to put 20EUR or 50EUR now so your account gets approved faster, that might be an option to consider (as of November 2023, people reported to me having trouble with depositing money to wise no longer being available from Serbia, so if you have some trouble here, maybe just wait for your account to get approved without funding).Filling in with the picture of the document to confirm the address is pretty straight forward, the open question if it pops up from my experience is when you have already opened account from the previous brokerage, you can say that this is another account, this is perfectly legal and withing the IBKR TOS, and you can give an explanation of why.
Congratulations! You have come to the end of the guide, at this point your account should be approved within a couple of days.
