July 27, 2026
Most of what businesses lose on cross-border payments hides in the exchange rate rather than the fee on the statement, so on a €50,000 payment a visible €30 charge can mask a real cost closer to €1,545. A multi-currency account closes that gap and stops the FX losses.
Imagine you have just finished an audit of your outgoings, and international payment fees have landed in your top five business costs, sitting quietly alongside rent, payroll and software. So if you are still hunting for budget leaks, start with checking the cost of moving money across borders, because the figures tend to run higher than businesses expect.
US small and medium businesses lost an estimated $800 million to hidden foreign-exchange fees in 2023 alone, according to research commissioned by Wise, while globally consumers and businesses were set to lose more than $274 billion to hidden FX fees in 2025, its G20 report found.
The pressure grows as trade does: Juniper Research forecasts that the value of cross-border payments will reach $62.9 trillion by 2030 globally, up from $50.8 trillion in 2026, and rising volume means more currency conversion for the businesses moving it.
The price of an international payment is built from three layers stacked on top of each other, and only one of them is printed clearly on your invoice.
The first layer is the exchange-rate markup. Your bank quotes a rate above the mid-market rate, the true midpoint banks use when they trade currency between themselves, typically 2% to 4% higher, and it sits inside the rate rather than showing as a separate fee. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority has singled this out as poor practice, noting that some firms present a transfer as costing nothing while still charging a markup on top of their reference rate.
The second layer is the stated transfer fee, the flat SWIFT or wire charge that shows up on the statement, and it is usually the smallest part of the total. HSBC UK, for example, charges a £5 fee to send money outside the EEA, while an independent NerdWallet survey put the median US outgoing international wire at around $45.
The third layer is the deductions that happen in transit, where correspondent banks in the chain take their own cut and the recipient's bank may add a receiving fee.
Let's put those layers against a real payment. The table below is illustrative, using a €50,000 payment to a supplier at a 3% markup:
On that single €50,000 payment the visible fee is around €30, but the real cost lands closer to €1,545 once the markup and a mid-chain deduction are added.
The same maths scales up across a year: a business converting £1 million loses about £30,000 to the markup alone at 3%, and roughly 200 transfers at £25 each add a further £5,000, taking the yearly total to around £35,000 before any recipient-side fees. Using a foreign currency account can ring-fence these costs by avoiding unnecessary conversions on funds you plan to reuse in the same currency.
Regulators have documented the same pattern at named institutions. Deutsche Bank paid $205 million under a New York Department of Financial Services consent order in 2018, after the regulator found staff had used tactics to secretly increase the markup charged to customers, in some cases making or failing to correct errors in trade records to keep the extra profit.
In September 2021 the US Department of Justice settled a civil fraud suit against Wells Fargo for roughly $72.6 million, after the bank admitted that from 2010 to 2017 its FX specialists charged 771 commercial customers, many of them small and medium-sized businesses, higher markups than they had represented, with around $35.3 million returned to those customers as restitution.
For a small business, or a company in a growth phase carrying heavy costs to reach new markets, sums on this scale add up to a significant share of working capital. Much of that loss comes from the spread rather than the cost of moving the money. Removing it is what multi-currency accounts are built for: they let you hold balances in several currencies and convert only when it makes sense, instead of paying a markup on every payment.
The catch is getting one: for small businesses especially, a traditional bank will often either decline to open a multi-currency business account or attach conditions that erode the savings. Legitimate firms are not exempt: a UK Treasury Committee inquiry heard evidence that more than 140,000 small businesses were debanked in a single year, often with little or no notice. Even when an account is opened, cross-border, multi-currency banking sits as a secondary service on a system built for domestic, single-currency accounts, so the friction starts at onboarding.
The European Chamber of Commerce has repeatedly highlighted that businesses face significant difficulties opening and maintaining accounts in another member state, pointing to differing compliance rules and complex anti-money-laundering frameworks. In practice that means:
The currency support itself is usually thin, since a bank multi-currency account often covers only euros and dollars and charges costly conversion the moment you need anything else, so a provider that stops at EUR and USD becomes a bottleneck the day you enter a new market.
A payment service provider is built for the opposite outcome: onboarding is fast without cutting corners on KYC and AML, and a single account holds several currencies across markets. Holding and converting on your own terms removes several of the costs built into traditional banking:
No forced conversion on every transaction. Receive a payment in euros, hold it in euros, and pay a euro supplier from the same balance, with no round trip through your home currency and no markup on money that never needed converting. Set up a euro account for local EUR collection, a USD account for US partners, and other foreign currency accounts inside one structure rather than separate relationships.
No double conversion in correspondent chains. Traditional cross-border payments hop between intermediary banks and often convert twice on the way, shrinking at each stop, whereas a multi-currency account with direct rails moves value along a shorter route, so less of it leaks out in transit. Our breakdown of international business payments without SWIFT delays shows how much a shorter chain saves.
Convert on your timing, in bulk. When you do convert, you do it deliberately rather than at whatever rate the bank applies mid-transfer, batching conversions closer to the mid-market rate, and predictable pricing lets you forecast the true cost of a deal instead of guessing.
One view of cash across currencies. Consolidating balances into a single multi-currency account lets you net receivables against payables in the same currency and see your whole cash position in one place, the case set out in industry analysis on consolidating treasury: fewer accounts, less conversion friction and clearer visibility.
The speed benefit adds to the savings, since correspondent banking takes two to seven days while a modern provider settles in seconds over SEPA instant and offers direct SWIFT where you need it.
Open your multi-currency account →
COLIBRIX ONE is an MFSA-authorised electronic money institution built specifically to move money across borders, and that shows up in every part of the account:
Together these cut the number of conversions, reduce what leaks out in transit and make the cost of a payment easier to forecast.
Open your multi-currency account →
International payment fees can look like a fixed cost of trading abroad, though much of the total comes from markup built into the exchange rate and from double conversion in correspondent chains. A multi-currency account addresses both, by letting you hold the currencies you earn, convert on your own timing and settle over direct rails. As cross-border volumes head toward $62.9 trillion by 2030, the cost of currency conversion looks set to stay on the agenda for any business trading internationally, and the account structure you choose shapes how much of it you carry.
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