Multi-Currency IBAN Accounts

The World Runs on Cross-Border Money — and IBAN is Its Address

When a Munich-based e-commerce merchant receives a payment from a buyer in Chicago, or a London SaaS platform disburses contractor payouts across fourteen European countries, the invisible backbone enabling these transactions is a string of alphanumeric characters most businesspeople never think about: the IBAN.

The International Bank Account Number is arguably the most important identifier in the global payments system. And yet, for decades, its utility was constrained by geography, legacy banking architecture, and a stubborn resistance to change from traditional financial institutions. A business operating across multiple currencies needed multiple bank accounts — each in a different country, with different onboarding requirements, different fee structures, and different compliance burdens.

That model is now breaking apart, rapidly and irreversibly.

Multi-currency IBAN accounts — and their more operationally sophisticated variant, virtual IBANs — are emerging as foundational infrastructure for the next generation of global commerce. For merchants expanding internationally, for payment service providers building scalable platforms, and for acquiring banks reassessing their value proposition, understanding this shift is no longer optional. It is a competitive imperative.

The numbers underscore the urgency. Cross-border payment flows reached an estimated $208 trillion in 2025, according to FXC Intelligence, generating a global revenue pool of $625 billion. The broader market — when wholesale transactions are included — touched close to $1 quadrillion in 2024, according to the IMF. B2B transactions alone represent approximately 72.6% of all cross-border payment volumes, and the market is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 7.1% through 2030. Against this scale, the inefficiencies of legacy IBAN infrastructure — siloed currency accounts, manual reconciliation, opaque FX markups averaging 4–6% from traditional banks — represent a structural problem worth solving.

Multi-currency IBANs are that solution. But the full picture is considerably more nuanced than most introductory fintech content admits.

What a Multi-Currency IBAN Account Actually Is — and What It Is Not

The term “multi-currency IBAN account” is used loosely across the industry, often interchangeably with “virtual IBAN,” “multi-currency wallet,” or “borderless account.” For payment professionals, the distinctions matter enormously — both operationally and from a regulatory standpoint.

At its core, a multi-currency IBAN account is a single account interface that allows a business to hold, receive, send, and convert funds in multiple currencies, each identified by a distinct IBAN. Rather than opening separate bank accounts in Germany (EUR), the United Kingdom (GBP), and the United States (USD), a business can access all three currency rails through a single relationship with a fintech provider or payment institution — each currency sub-wallet carrying its own unique IBAN.

A virtual IBAN (vIBAN), technically speaking, is not a standalone bank account at all. It is a secondary account identifier — a reference number — linked to a master safeguarding or settlement account held with a licensed financial institution. When a payment is sent to a virtual IBAN, it routes to the master account but is attributed at the ledger level to the specific client, merchant, or sub-entity assigned that vIBAN. The bank never opens a new physical account; the routing and attribution are software-defined.

This distinction has profound implications:

• Traditional IBANs are owned by a single legal entity, issued by a licensed bank, carry full deposit protection or safeguarding obligations, and are accepted universally.
• Virtual IBANs are issued programmatically by EMIs or payment institutions, are linked to a master account, scale to millions of sub-accounts via API, and — critically — may not carry the same regulatory protections as bank-issued IBANs.
• Multi-currency accounts consolidate multiple currency balances in one interface but may not offer individually addressable sub-accounts, requiring manual reference matching for reconciliation.

The cleanest definition of a multi-currency IBAN account blends all three concepts: it is a single, API-accessible account infrastructure that assigns unique IBANs to each currency, each client, or each transaction stream, enabling automated reconciliation, local payment collection, and multi-currency treasury management — all without requiring separate banking relationships per country or currency.

Providers including Wise Business, Airwallex, Currencycloud (now part of Visa), Nium, Banking Circle, Modulr, and Klarpay have built sophisticated multi-currency IBAN infrastructure that is now powering everything from e-commerce payouts to enterprise treasury operations and embedded finance products.

Why the Old Model Fails at Scale — and Why Merchants Know It First

Before exploring the architecture of modern multi-currency IBAN solutions, it is worth being precise about the problem they solve — because it is not the same problem for every stakeholder.

For merchants, the legacy model creates a cascade of friction. A US-based direct-to-consumer brand expanding into Germany, France, and the Netherlands needs to collect payments in euros. Using a domestic USD bank account to receive EUR transactions means every sale triggers a currency conversion at the acquiring bank’s rate — typically carrying a 2–4% spread above mid-market, applied to every transaction, every day. On a $10 million annual European revenue base, that represents $200,000–$400,000 in unnecessary FX costs. Multiply this across a multi-market expansion and the treasury drag is material.

Beyond FX, merchants face settlement timing issues. Cross-border wire transfers via correspondent banking can take two to five business days. For merchants managing supplier payments, payroll, and inventory financing, that delay is a working capital problem, not merely an inconvenience.

For payment service providers and platforms, the challenge is reconciliation at scale. A marketplace processing payments on behalf of thousands of merchants, each receiving funds in different currencies and from different geographies, faces a nightmare of reference matching unless each merchant has a uniquely identifiable payment destination. Without virtual IBANs, platforms resort to generic pooled accounts with reference codes — a system that breaks at volume, generates errors, and exposes platforms to regulatory scrutiny around fund commingling.

For acquiring banks and issuing institutions, the problem is competitive displacement. Traditional banks have, for decades, charged premium fees for multi-currency account services that were only accessible to large corporates. As fintech providers democratize access to multi-currency IBAN infrastructure — making it available to SMEs, freelancers, and digital-native startups — the high-margin FX and international payment revenue that underpinned retail and commercial banking profitability faces direct pressure. The SME segment, historically underserved in cross-border payments due to cost and complexity, is now the fastest-growing segment in the market, according to Grand View Research.

The Architecture of a Modern Multi-Currency IBAN Platform

Understanding how these platforms work operationally is essential for payment professionals evaluating providers, building products, or advising merchant clients.

Currency Wallets with Dedicated IBANs

The foundational layer is a multi-currency wallet structure where each currency — EUR, GBP, USD, CHF, SEK, and increasingly exotic pairs — is held in a discrete sub-wallet, each assigned a unique IBAN. Inbound payments in euros arrive at the EUR IBAN and are held as euros; funds are not automatically converted. This is the “hold” functionality that distinguishes multi-currency accounts from simple currency conversion services.

This matters because it enables merchants to execute natural hedging — matching revenue in a given currency with expenses denominated in that same currency, eliminating conversion entirely. A UK merchant selling in euros who also buys from European suppliers in euros can route euro revenue directly to euro payment obligations, with zero FX conversion required.

SEPA, SWIFT, and Local Rail Integration

A well-architected multi-currency IBAN platform provides access to multiple payment clearing rails simultaneously. In Europe, this means SEPA Credit Transfers (SCT) and SEPA Instant (SCT Inst) for EUR transactions — enabling near-instant euro settlement at low cost. In the UK, access to Faster Payments and CHAPS. In the US, ACH and Fedwire. In many cases, providers access these rails through banking partnerships rather than direct scheme membership.

The ability to collect via local rails rather than international wires is a significant commercial advantage. SEPA transfers are dramatically cheaper than SWIFT wires, and SEPA Instant settles in seconds rather than days. For a platform collecting recurring payments from European subscribers, local SEPA collection via a dedicated IBAN versus cross-border SWIFT collection represents both a cost reduction and a conversion rate improvement — local payment methods consistently outperform foreign collection routes in terms of consumer trust and payment success rates.

Virtual IBAN Issuance via API

For PSPs, marketplaces, and embedded finance platforms, the game-changing capability is programmatic IBAN issuance via API. Rather than manually onboarding each merchant or sub-entity to a separate bank account, a platform can call an API endpoint to generate a unique virtual IBAN in seconds — assigning it to a specific merchant, a specific transaction type, or a specific currency corridor.

This has two critical operational benefits:

Automated reconciliation: Every incoming payment to a virtual IBAN is automatically attributed to the correct sub-entity at the ledger level. No reference codes, no manual matching, no reconciliation errors. For platforms processing tens of thousands of transactions daily, this automation is not a convenience — it is a prerequisite for operating at scale.

Segregated client funds: Virtual IBANs support cleaner fund segregation between the platform’s own funds and client or merchant funds — a regulatory requirement under most EMI and payment institution licensing regimes in both the EU and the UK.

FX Conversion and Treasury Management

Most multi-currency IBAN platforms offer integrated FX conversion — typically at mid-market rates with a transparent spread, ranging from 0.2% to 1.5% depending on the currency pair and provider. This is a structural improvement over traditional bank FX markups, which have historically ranged from 2% to 6% and are rarely disclosed transparently.

Advanced platforms also offer FX hedging tools — forward contracts, rate alerts, and automated conversion at target rates — enabling treasurers to manage currency exposure programmatically rather than reactively.

The Regulatory Landscape: PSD3, PSR, and the Compliance Stakes for the Industry

No serious analysis of multi-currency IBAN accounts in 2025 and 2026 can ignore the regulatory context. The EU’s payment services framework is undergoing its most significant overhaul since the original Payment Services Directive, with PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation (PSR) reaching provisional political agreement in November 2025, with publication in the Official Journal expected in Q2 2026 and compliance timelines running to approximately H2 2027.

IBAN Discrimination: A Persistent Problem Finally Getting Teeth

One of the most practically frustrating issues for businesses holding multi-currency IBANs — particularly IBANs issued by fintech providers or carrying non-domestic country codes — is IBAN discrimination. This refers to the practice of refusing to accept a valid IBAN for payment purposes because it carries a “foreign” country code, even when the IBAN is entirely compliant with SEPA rules.

IBAN discrimination has technically been illegal under SEPA regulations for years. But as PSD3 recognizes explicitly, enforcement has been inconsistent, penalties have been negligible, and many businesses and institutions continue to reject foreign or fintech-issued IBANs without consequence. The incoming PSR introduces stronger penalties and clearer enforcement mechanisms — a development that directly benefits the fintech-issued multi-currency IBAN market by compelling broader acceptance of their account identifiers.

Virtual IBANs Under Regulatory Scrutiny

While regulators are moving to improve IBAN acceptance, they are simultaneously sharpening oversight of virtual IBAN issuance and usage. The European Banking Authority has published detailed opinions on the risks associated with vIBAN chains — particularly the “layered model” where a licensed institution issues vIBANs to intermediary clients who then assign them to their own end customers.

The EBA’s concerns are specific and well-founded:

KYCC risk: In a multi-layer vIBAN structure, the issuing institution may perform KYC on the direct client but have limited visibility into the end customers being assigned vIBANs. This creates “Know Your Customer’s Customer” gaps that can be exploited for money laundering, fraud, or sanctions evasion.

Consumer protection ambiguity: If an end user holds a vIBAN but is not the legal account holder under the master account, it remains unclear whether they have a “payment account” as defined under PSD2 — and therefore whether they enjoy the associated SCA rights, transparency requirements, and fraud reporting protections.

Verification of Payee complications: The EU’s Instant Payment Regulation has mandated “Verification of Payee” (VoP) — name-match checks on IBAN-name pairs — across SEPA. But virtual IBANs can carry names that do not reflect the master account holder, creating mismatches that undermine the consumer protection purpose of VoP. PSPs must comply with VoP requirements by October 2025 for SEPA Credit Transfers.

Unauthorized activity risk: vIBAN chains can be structured — deliberately or inadvertently — to allow non-EU financial institutions or non-licensed entities to provide payment services within the EU without the required authorization.

For payment professionals building or operating multi-currency IBAN platforms, these regulatory dynamics are not merely compliance overhead. They represent genuine structural risk — and an opportunity to differentiate through best-in-class compliance architecture.

The PSD3/PSR Compliance Agenda for EMIs and Payment Institutions

Under PSD3 and PSR, EMIs operating multi-currency and virtual IBAN products face several specific requirements:

• Re-authorization: EMIs must reauthorize under the new framework, demonstrating compliance with updated governance, internal controls, AML frameworks, and — importantly — DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) requirements, which have applied since January 2025.
• Enhanced safeguarding: Stricter rules on how client funds are safeguarded, particularly relevant to multi-currency accounts where client funds are held in pooled master accounts against virtual IBAN structures.
• IBAN name checks at scale: Platforms must implement VoP infrastructure that works accurately across their virtual IBAN estate — technically non-trivial for providers managing millions of vIBANs with diverse naming conventions.

What This Means for Merchants: The Practical Opportunity

For merchants — whether e-commerce operators, SaaS platforms, marketplaces, or physical retailers with international supply chains — the arrival of mature multi-currency IBAN infrastructure creates a set of concrete operational advantages.

Reduced FX cost: Traditional banks and payment processors charge 4–6% in FX markups and hidden fees. By contrast, cross-border payment platforms with multi-currency IBAN infrastructure charge fees consistently below 1% for merchant processing on major currency pairs. The compounding effect on annual revenue is substantial.

Improved checkout conversion: Presenting local payment details — a German IBAN for a German customer, a UK account number for a UK buyer — consistently outperforms presenting foreign banking details. Consumer trust is higher, payment method recognition is better, and abandonment rates fall. For e-commerce operators, this is a direct revenue impact.

Faster access to funds: Settlement through local payment rails — SEPA Instant, Faster Payments — moves in seconds to hours, not the two to five business days typical of SWIFT. For merchants with tight working capital cycles, faster settlement is a financing efficiency, not just a convenience.

Simplified multi-market operations: Marketplaces and platforms that sell across the EU no longer need local banking relationships in each market. A single multi-currency IBAN platform with EUR, GBP, SEK, PLN, CHF, and other sub-wallets can handle collection, holding, and disbursement across the entire European footprint from a single operational relationship.

Tax and treasury efficiency: Holding funds in the currency of receipt — rather than converting immediately — allows merchants to match currency exposures, reduce realized FX losses, and manage tax timing on currency gains more effectively.

A practical illustration: a UK-based SaaS company invoicing European clients in euros can receive euro payments via SEPA Instant into a dedicated EUR IBAN, hold the funds as euros, and pay its European cloud infrastructure and contractor costs from the same EUR balance — with zero FX conversion required. Residual euros can be converted to GBP at a chosen rate, on a schedule, or via a forward contract. This is treasury management that was previously only available to large corporates; multi-currency IBAN infrastructure makes it accessible to any growing business.

What This Means for Acquiring Banks and Payment Institutions

The multi-currency IBAN wave is not simply a merchant convenience story. It is a structural challenge and a strategic opportunity for acquiring banks and payment institutions.

Revenue pressure is real. The high-margin FX revenue and international wire fees that traditional banks extracted from commercial clients for decades are being compressed by fintech-driven multi-currency IBAN alternatives. For banks that have not modernized their international banking offering, merchant wallet share is leaking — quietly but persistently — to nimbler fintech providers.

But the opportunity is larger than the threat — if banks move. Acquiring banks with existing merchant relationships are positioned to offer multi-currency IBAN infrastructure as an embedded treasury service alongside their core acquiring product. The merchant who runs card acquiring through a bank is a natural candidate for a multi-currency settlement account with the same institution — if the bank can offer competitive FX rates, API-accessible currency wallets, and SEPA direct access.

Banks that invest in modernizing their multi-currency account infrastructure — whether by building in-house, acquiring fintech capabilities, or partnering with infrastructure providers — can deepen merchant relationships, increase revenue per merchant, and reduce churn to standalone fintech providers.

Compliance as competitive moat. In a market where regulatory scrutiny of virtual IBANs is intensifying, regulated banks issuing multi-currency IBANs under full banking licenses carry a compliance advantage that many EMI-issued vIBAN products cannot match. Full deposit protection, transparent fund attribution, and established compliance frameworks are genuine differentiators — particularly for large merchants and corporates who face their own compliance obligations when choosing banking partners.

The correspondent banking model is under structural pressure. For acquiring banks operating in cross-border corridors, the correspondent banking model — with its layered fees, T+2/T+3 settlement, and limited transparency — is losing market share to direct local clearing. Banks that gain direct or near-direct access to local payment rails in key markets (SEPA, UK Faster Payments, US ACH) through multi-currency IBAN infrastructure can compete on speed and price in ways that SWIFT-dependent correspondent models cannot.

The Competitive Landscape: Key Players and Their Positions

The multi-currency IBAN space has attracted a diverse set of players across the fintech, banking, and infrastructure layers.

Wise Business has established itself as the default multi-currency account for SMEs, offering mid-market FX rates with transparent fees as low as 0.33%, IBAN accounts in over 40 currencies, and an increasingly strong API and batch payment capability.

Airwallex targets scale-ups and enterprises with a comprehensive multi-currency IBAN platform, strong API infrastructure, embedded finance capabilities, and direct local payment rail access in multiple markets. FCA authorized in the UK; licensed across key markets.

Currencycloud (Visa) operates as a B2B infrastructure layer — powering multi-currency wallet and payment products for fintech platforms, digital banks, and enterprise clients. Its deep corridor network and developer-friendly APIs have made it a preferred infrastructure partner for products built on multi-currency IBAN architecture.

Nium has positioned itself at the enterprise and real-time cross-border payments layer, offering licenses across 60 countries, access to 12 local multi-currency accounts, and virtual card options. Its infrastructure is used by banks, fintechs, and travel industry players.

Banking Circle is arguably the largest vIBAN issuer in Europe’s institutional stack, having issued 37 million virtual IBANs across its client base as of 2025. Its institutional-grade infrastructure serves PSPs, e-commerce platforms, and cross-border payment providers.

Modulr focuses on high-volume payout systems and payroll operations in the UK and EU, with direct access to payment schemes and infrastructure designed for large transaction volumes.

Klarpay, operating under a Swiss license, has positioned itself specifically for digital-native businesses — e-commerce operators, content creators, and digital entrepreneurs — offering IBAN accounts in over 17 currencies with SEPA Instant access and embedded corporate card capabilities.

The Forward View: Where Multi-Currency IBAN Infrastructure Is Heading

Several forces are converging to accelerate the evolution of multi-currency IBAN infrastructure over the next three to five years.

ISO 20022 adoption is transforming the data richness of payment messages. As SWIFT’s migration to ISO 20022 progresses and SEPA natively operates on the standard, multi-currency IBAN platforms gain the ability to carry richer remittance information alongside payments — enabling better reconciliation, lower manual intervention, and richer treasury analytics.

Real-time gross settlement expansion across more currency corridors will compress the settlement time advantage that currently requires multi-currency holding. But it will simultaneously increase the volume and velocity of cross-border flows — expanding the market for multi-currency IBAN infrastructure overall.

Embedded finance integration is driving multi-currency IBAN capabilities deeper into ERP systems, e-commerce platforms, and marketplace infrastructure. Rather than merchants logging into a separate banking portal, multi-currency treasury functionality is appearing natively within Shopify, Xero, SAP, and equivalent platforms — often powered by vIBAN infrastructure behind the scenes.

Stablecoin and programmable money integration is an emerging layer. Several multi-currency IBAN providers are exploring integration with USDC and other regulated stablecoins as settlement rails for corridors where traditional banking infrastructure remains slow or expensive. The DeFi and Web3 commerce sector — increasingly using stablecoins for supplier payments and platform settlement — is a growing user segment for multi-currency IBAN and account infrastructure.

Regulatory convergence under PSD3/PSR will, paradoxically, both constrain and legitimize the vIBAN market. Constraints on unregulated vIBAN chains will push volume toward compliant, licensed providers. The IBAN discrimination enforcement agenda will improve acceptance rates for fintech-issued IBANs across Europe. The net effect should be a larger, more compliant, and more commercially accessible market for well-structured multi-currency IBAN products.

Choosing a Multi-Currency IBAN Provider: A Framework for Payment Professionals

For PSPs, merchants, and banking professionals evaluating providers, a structured framework reduces decision complexity:

1. Regulatory standing: Is the provider licensed by a reputable regulator — FCA, De Nederlandsche Bank, BaFin, FINMA? Does their license cover the specific payment activities and geographies required? EMI license versus full banking license carries meaningfully different safeguarding and compliance implications.

2. Currency breadth and rail access: How many currencies are natively supported, versus requiring conversion? Which local clearing rails does the provider access directly (SEPA, Faster Payments, ACH, SWIFT)? Direct rail access beats correspondent-routed access on both price and speed.

3. IBAN naming and VoP compliance: As Verification of Payee requirements take hold across SEPA, how does the provider handle vIBAN naming to ensure name-match compliance? This is an increasingly critical technical and regulatory requirement.

4. API maturity: For platforms building on top of the infrastructure, API documentation quality, issuance speed, webhook support, and sandbox availability are operational prerequisites.

5. AML/KYC architecture: What are the provider’s onboarding standards? In a layered vIBAN model, what KYCC obligations does the platform take on? Understanding the compliance boundary is critical.

6. FX pricing transparency: Are FX rates quoted against mid-market? Are spreads disclosed clearly? Are forward contracts or hedging tools available?

7. Safeguarding model: Are client funds held in segregated safeguarding accounts? Under what regulatory framework? This determines what happens to merchant funds in the event of provider insolvency.

Conclusion: IBAN as Competitive Infrastructure

The IBAN — a 34-character identifier invented to simplify European bank account identification — has evolved into something far more consequential. It is now the access point through which global commerce flows, the identifier around which payment infrastructure is organized, and the battleground on which fintechs, banks, and payment institutions are competing for merchant wallet share.

Multi-currency IBAN accounts represent the maturation of an idea whose time has definitively arrived: that a business operating globally should not need to replicate its banking infrastructure in every market it enters. That currency conversion should happen on the merchant’s terms, not the bank’s. That reconciliation should be automated, not manual. That settlement should take seconds, not days.

For merchants, this infrastructure unlocks genuine financial efficiency and market access. For payment professionals, it represents the next layer of value-added services to be designed, sold, and integrated. For acquiring banks, it is a call to modernize or cede ground.

The cross-border payments market sits at $208 trillion in annual flows and is growing. The revenue pool is $625 billion. The structural shift toward multi-currency IBAN infrastructure as the organizing layer for how that money moves is not a future scenario — it is the present reality, playing out in the technology choices of every PSP, marketplace, and growth-stage merchant making international expansion decisions today.

The question for every institution in the payments ecosystem is no longer whether to engage with multi-currency IBAN infrastructure. It is how quickly — and how well.