My bank is considering no longer requiring a reference letter from foreign clients to open an account, but I have noticed that many small banks, like ours, do require them and many large banks like BofA do not. Does anyone have any comments in regards to this. Whether or not we should require it or what have you heard from the regulators.

I have always been with a small bank and I have never heard of requiring a reference letter.

Really? What do you do for CIP for your foreign clients.

We take a valid passport as ID - and check for a valid visa.
We are in South Florida and we have quite a few foreign customers - seasonal visitors to the area.
I have them coded in a separate group and monitor the activity.

We required our foreign customers to provide us a reference letter from another institution as means of KYC documentation. We also required other methods of identification such as: passport, credit card, driver licenses, voting permits, military IDs etc....

We do not rely on only one of the above to identify our foreign customers. We required at least 3.

So you call the other bank and talk to the person that wrote the letter?