Multi currency business accounts, compared by what the details and the rate really cost

A multi currency business account comparison usually starts with a list of currencies and ends with a list of fees, and I think both lists are the wrong place to start. The number of currencies on a landing page tells you very little. What matters is which of them come with account details a customer can actually pay into, what those details really are, and what the provider adds to the exchange rate when money moves between them.

I read the pricing pages of four providers on 17 September 2026: Wise, Revolut, Airwallex and Starling. They were picked because they sit at different ends of the market, a money transfer company, a bank with a big app, a payments platform, and a UK bank that added foreign currency accounts to a sterling business account. I was wrong about how comparable they'd be. I'd expected four prices for one product. What I got was four products that happen to share a vocabulary, each using words like account, currency and rate in the sense that flatters its own model, and none of them lying about it, which somehow makes the comparison harder rather than easier. The headline numbers measure different things, and lining them up in a single column hides more than it shows.

What "currencies" means on each page

Wise's receive page says you can "Receive in 22 currencies" and "HOLD and convert 40+ CURRENCIES". Revolut's UK plans page lists "25+ currencies supported", and its Irish page says "Send and receive 30+ currencies". Airwallex offers "Accounts with local bank details in 20+ currencies". Starling offers a euro account and a US dollar account, and says it's "not accepting applications for US dollar business accounts at the moment".

So 40 on one page and 22 on the same page are both true, and they describe different abilities. Holding a currency means you can keep a balance in it. Receiving in it with local details means a customer in that country can pay you like a local supplier, without a Swift payment and its fees on their side. For most companies the second number is the one that changes the invoice, and I'd rank providers by it before anything else.

The euro versions of these pages tell a similar story in a different currency. Wise's German euro page shows a 55 EUR set-up fee, its Irish page 60 EUR, and a conversion fee "From 0.2%" for EUR to USD. Revolut's Irish plans run from €10, €35 and €125 a month, with FX allowances of €1,000, €15,000 and €60,000 before the same 0.6% applies. Airwallex's EU page mirrors the UK one in euros, €0 or €19 for Explore and €49 for Grow, again excluding VAT. If your company invoices from the EU, read the euro page, not the sterling one, because the allowances and plan fees there are set in euros, and the Wise euro page still names the UK company in its footer, which is worth asking about before you sign.

Read from each provider's UK pricing page on 16 and 17 September 2026. Airwallex Explore is free with 10,000 GBP deposited a month or held as a balance.

Provider	Currencies with local details	Monthly fee	FX cost over the rate
Wise Business UK	22 to receive, 40+ to hold	None, 50 GBP once	From 0.24%, varies by currency
Revolut Business UK	25+ supported	10, 35 or 125 GBP	Allowance, then 0.6%; 1% outside market hours
Airwallex UK	20+	0 or 19 GBP Explore, 49 GBP Grow, ex VAT	0.5% majors, 1% others
Starling Business	EUR, USD closed to new applicants	2 GBP EUR account, 5 GBP USD	0.4%, plus a weekend margin

Local IBAN vs virtual IBAN, and why the letters matter

The local iban vs virtual iban question sounds like plumbing until a customer's bank refuses a payment. The European Banking Authority wrote a report on it in May 2024, EBA/Rep/2024/08. It describes a virtual IBAN as "an identifier that has the same format and functionality as a regular IBAN", linked to a master account that holds the actual money. It also says, which struck me as more candid than regulators usually are, that "There is currently no legal definition of vIBANs at EU level".

Why would anybody want one? The EBA gives a reason that will sound familiar if you've ever had an invoice bounce. Companies use them to get "an IBAN with the country code of a given MS, as a way to overcome issues stemming from IBAN discrimination". That's a polite way of saying some payers still reject an IBAN from the wrong country, even though Article 9 of the SEPA Regulation, 260/2012, says a payee "shall not specify the Member State in which that payment account is to be located", provided the account is reachable.

The law is on your side there. Practice isn't always on your side. I don't know how often a German utility or a French tax portal still refuses a Lithuanian IBAN in 2026, and I haven't found a regulator that counts it. What I can say is that Revolut's Irish plans page advertises an "IE IBAN", and Starling says its foreign currency accounts "come complete with their own unique and local details", which suggests both know that the country code is part of what they're selling. I cannot tell from the outside how many payers would still refuse a non-local IBAN, and I suspect the answer changes by sector more than by country. That's an instinct, not a finding. It would take a survey of payers that, as far as I know, nobody has published.

A short digression, since people ask. A virtual IBAN is not automatically worse. It routes into a master account, and the master account's licence and protection are the ones that count, so the useful question is never whether the IBAN is virtual. It's whose master account it points to, in which country, under which licence. I'd write that down for every IBAN a company publishes on its invoices, because the answer can differ between two currencies at the same provider. It's a dull spreadsheet with four columns. It's also the document an auditor, an acquirer or an administrator will ask for first, and it takes an afternoon to build and years to regret not having, which is the whole case for doing it before anyone asks.

FX markup on a business account, and what the law makes them show

Every provider in the table claims some version of the real rate. Wise says it doesn't "inflate the mid-market exchange rate" and charges a separate fee. Revolut uses "the interbank rate" plus fees. Airwallex charges "0.5% above interbank rates for major currencies, 1% for all others". Starling adds a "Low fixed fee of 0.4%, in addition to the exchange rate", with a margin at weekends and bank holidays it doesn't size on that page. I have not found the size of that margin anywhere on Starling's multi-currency page, and I read it twice.

The fx markup business account buyers care about is the total, and the EU has rules on showing it, though narrower ones than I'd assumed. Regulation 2019/518, now folded into Regulation 2021/1230, makes providers express card currency conversion charges "as a percentage mark-up over the latest available euro foreign exchange reference rates issued by the European Central Bank". That's Article 4, and it covers card payments. For credit transfers, Article 5 only asks for the "estimated charges for currency conversion services" to be shown before the payment. Article 4 also lets a provider and a user who is not a consumer agree that some of the electronic notices don't apply, and business accounts are exactly that case.

I had assumed the ECB mark-up rule covered every conversion, and it doesn't. And the ECB itself says its reference rates are "published for information purposes only" and that "Using the rates for transaction purposes is strongly discouraged". They're usually updated "at around 16:00 CET every working day". So the benchmark in the law is a rate the ECB tells you not to trade at, published once a day, which makes it a fair yardstick for a card payment abroad and a poor one for a treasury conversion at 09:30. I'm not sure the UK has an equivalent rule for business accounts; I didn't research the FCA side, and I'd rather say so than guess.

Multi currency fees beyond the conversion

The fees that surprise people are rarely the headline percentage. Wise charges nothing to receive domestic payments in 9 currencies but a fixed fee on Swift receipts, "6.11 USD" for a USD wire. Revolut bills incoming Fedwire transfers "at £8 per transfer, starting with the first transfer". Airwallex lists Swift transfers at "£10-20/ transfer (SHA and OUR)" and domestic EUR, GBP and CHF transfers as free. Starling's euro account costs "just £2 a month".

Add those up for a real month and the ranking moves. Sometimes it moves quite a lot. A company receiving 10 USD wires a month pays 61.10 USD at Wise in receipt fees alone, and if those 10 arrive by Fedwire at Revolut the bill is 80 GBP, before a single conversion. A company paying 20 suppliers by Swift from Airwallex pays between 200 and 400 GBP. None of these numbers are large for a busy business, but they rarely make the headline of a comparison, and I'm slightly annoyed that the flat fee, which can easily cost more than the markup, is the line most easily left off a chart, including my own table above.

Airwallex's plan structure deserves a line of its own. Explore is "£0 /month if you deposit at least £10k per month or hold a minimum balance of £10k", and £19 otherwise, with prices "VAT exclusive". Grow costs £49 a month, also before VAT. For a seller with steady receipts that's effectively free. For a consultancy with lumpy invoices it can flip between free and paid from one month to the next, which is harmless in money and irritating in bookkeeping. I find it hard to call that a flaw. It's a plan designed around a particular kind of customer, and the condition is printed plainly on the page, which is more than several pricing pages manage for their own conditions.

How I'd read the comparison for a real company

Start with where the money comes from, not where it goes. List the countries your customers pay from and the currencies they pay in, then check which provider gives local details in each, and which of those details are virtual. Then list your conversions by pair and by day of the week, because a 1% weekend fee and a 0.5% major-currency fee reward completely different habits. Only after that do the monthly plans mean anything.

My guess is that a company selling in EUR, GBP and USD with steady weekday volumes ends up close to indifferent between three of these four providers on cost alone, and should decide on licence, IBAN country and support. That's a guess, and it depends on volumes I can't see from here. Your mix of currencies isn't something any comparison can see, this one included. Starling is the odd one out, mainly because its US dollar account was closed to new applicants when I checked.

What I still can't answer from the pages is the part that matters most on a bad day. I went looking for how long a payment held for review takes to release, and I didn't find it on any of the four pricing pages, and a currency account that's frozen for a week can cost a company more than any markup in the table above.