Why do banks refuse to open accounts to foreigners or people with temporal residence permits?
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It sort of depends on the country in question. Every country has a bank regulator (usually Central Bank) and they set up specific rules for banks to operate in their country.
It is quite typical that banks are required to “know your customer”. These “know your customer” (aka KYC) rules are there to make it harder for money laundering and tax evasion. Some countries have capital controls that restrict the amount and nature of foreign currency transactions. There are also countries like the USA (somewhat notoriously) that specify rather strict reporting rules for banks that service US citizens and residents. Because almost every bank needs to use the USD etc, they try to follow these reporting rules to avoid sanctions and blacklists. Overall, these kind of requirement makes it rather inconvenient, somewhat risky and definitely costly to service foreign customers. So a smaller local retail bank might have policies not to serve non citizens etc simply to avoid this.
In many cases, foreigners can open accounts with large international banks if they have a local subsidiary. Most large international banks have the systems in place and will service foreign customers unless it is totally forbidden by local bank authorities.
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