Wise: everything you need to know about him in 2026!

Introducing the financial service provider Wise

Wise PLC (formerly TransferWise) was founded in London in 2011 by two Estonian founders, Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus. The company set out to revolutionize international money transfers by offering a cheaper, faster and more transparent alternative to traditional bank transfers. Wise's services now go far beyond simple currency exchange: a multi-currency account, global bank details, a debit card, a business account package and a range of integrations are available to tens of millions of private and corporate customers worldwide.

The company currently has around 15-16 million customers and manages around GBP 140-150 billion in cash flows annually. Wise’s CEO remains Kristo Käärmann, who as co-founder has played a key role in shaping the company’s strategy since the beginning. Over the years, the company has grown into a global fintech player, gone public and is now one of the most well-known fintech providers in Europe and globally.

📒Table of Contents📒

I have created a table of contents to make it easier for you to navigate the longer articles:

• 💰Wise costs
• (I.e.Wise's interfaces
• 💵Extra features of Wise accounts
• 🆚Competitors: Wise's opponents
• (I.e.Section for Hungarian investors
• ✅Advantages of Wise
• ❌Disadvantages of Wise
• 📝Wise's summary

🙋‍♂️Wise Basics🙋‍♂️

In this section, I examine the specialties of the analyzed financial service provider or broker, what is its position in the market, how it views itself, whether it is an institution with a traditional banking background, a discount broker, an online broker, or a mixture of these. How well does it protect its investors, and what can you expect in the event of a collapse?

❗The following information is based on my own experience. I have been using Wise's retail account for almost 6 years, and their business account for 3 years. It worked so well for me that as a Hungarian tax resident, I closed all my domestic bank accounts and saved a lot on costs. The situation has changed somewhat since then, you can read below how❗

The information below reflects the status as of November 2025. It is important to note that although Wise was basically a very cheap provider, state taxes imposed on banks and financial service providers are added to the costs. So the actual cost in your country may differ from what is described. Generally it is the same, but I can also tell you about different cases. One such country is Hungary, where Wise will pass on the additional costs arising from transaction tax from 2025.02.17.

Wise – which is traded on the LSE under the ticker WSE (LSE:WISE), also listed on the London Stock Exchange – a service provider designed primarily for sending money. The founders’ primary goal in 2011 was to make it easier for people working abroad to transfer part of their salary abroad. In fact, the founders had to transfer money between two countries due to their own life situations, as they both lived in London, but one of them received his salary in EUR, and the other had a EUR-based home loan in Estonia, but received his salary in British pounds, so they constantly had to switch from one currency to another. This is how it came about that they would “swap” transactions between each other and save a lot of money, and this life situation later gave rise to the basic idea for Wise.

Before Wise, for example, if someone wanted to send money from Western Europe to Central and Eastern Europe because they were working abroad, they had to use the SEPA system, the eurozone's fast transfer system. The situation was even worse if they wanted to send money outside the eurozone, for example to Serbia or Ukraine, because then they had to use the very expensive and slow interbank SWIFT system. Such systems also exist in other parts of the world, such as Faster Payment in the UK, ACH and Fedwire in the US, and NPP/BECS in Australia.

How did Wise solve the above problem of slow and expensive cross-border transfers? By matching the same side of transfers going to the same place with each other, thus keeping the transfers within the country's borders. Let's look at an example:

• ➡️Vladimir wants to transfer British pounds from England to Serbia, which will be converted into Serbian dinars,
• ⬅️Thomas wants to transfer Serbian dinars from Serbia to England, which will be converted into British pounds.

The Wise system will take the AB and BA transfers and sort them into AA, i.e. a UK transfer, and BB, i.e. a Serbian transaction, which will result in 2 local transfers instead of 2 SWIFT transfers, which is not only cheaper, but also faster, as they never cross national borders. In this case, Vladimir's British pound will be transferred to where Thomas would have transferred it, while Thomas' Serbian dinar will be received by Vladimir's recipient, just like in the case of Wise founders Kristo and Taavet.

💡Of course, this example greatly simplifies what Wise does, because in reality the provider has to maintain a large liquidity amount in each currency. The larger these amounts are, the cheaper it will be for Wise to transfer, part of which is returned to the clients, by reducing the service fees. The name of the method: scale economies shared model.

Several questions arise from the above:

• 🟰What happens if the two amounts don't match? And that's almost always the case.
• ❓Where does Wise get the foreign exchange to balance the difference between the two amounts?

The answer to the above is that Wise monitors:

• 💯How many people want to send money from Serbia to England,
• 💯and at the same time how many from England to Serbia.

This two-way traffic is predicted and settled by Wise, moving money within its own local accounts. That's why we have cheap fees and exchange rates that are very close to the mid-market rate. Where there is an imbalance, it is settled by hedging in the foreign exchange market. If the turnover in a given direction is too high, Wise will cover the difference with very cheap wholesale FX instruments, thus keeping the fees low. This means that as a large provider, we get much better prices for exchanging currency pairs than you would get as an individual.

????Wise's approach has proven so successful that over the past 11 years, they have served around 16 million customers worldwide and employ over 5000 people. They also have an office in Budapest, where a team of around 700 people works and is the company's second largest European headquarters. 

The company's position is further strengthened by working with a total of 12 banking partners across four continents. These include several well-known digital banks and fintech providers, such as Monzo, N26, Bunq, Neon, as well as Singapore's Aspire and Australia's Up Bank. It is very important that Wise was able to be profitable from the beginning, even under the name Transferwise.

💡After early capital raisings, it has been profitable since 2017, so for almost a decade, and has been a listed company since 2021, meaning its financial data can also be tracked. According to Fiscal.ai, it generated a profit after tax of £386 million on £1278 million in revenue this year, providing an extra layer of stability. (Fiscal.ai).

This can only be said for Revolut, for example, since 2024, but there is no stock market data there because it is a private company, while Monese is loss-making, while N26 sometimes makes minimal profit, sometimes makes a loss, so they are not nearly as stable financially as Wise.

💰Wise retail account costs and information💰

In this section, we examine how much it costs to use the services of a financial service provider or broker, and what types of transactions will put a strain on your wallet. Who should open an account: short-term or long-term investors?

As with all financial service providers, this is perhaps the most important aspect. Wise registration is free. In exchange for opening: on the normal, "retail" account*:

• ✨ no account management fees or monthly fees,
• 💰 there is no fee for keeping money in the account,
• 🌍 You can have balances in more than 50 currencies,
• 🏦 most currencies come with an international IBAN number, so you get a dedicated and not a collective account,
• 💳 the card has a one-time order fee of 5.3 EUR (6.19 USD, 2204 HUF), there is no annual card fee until it expires, you do not need to request a new one (usually the expiration date is 6 years)
• 🔄 no transfer fee between Wise accounts (which can be transfers between your own accounts and transfers to another Wise client)
• 🏧 no transfer fee for HUF or EUR transfers, 150 USD (up to 50000 HUF for Hungarian customers, but there is a transaction tax)
• 📱 no SMS fees because the Wise app uses pop-up messages

* The data in the list refers to non-Hungarian citizens, as they are affected in several places by the extra profit tax introduced by the government, also known as the transaction tax, which service providers largely pass on to the population.

📌In practice: I have been using the accounts for almost six years, and apart from the cost of currency exchange and transfer, I have not paid for anything yet. Unfortunately, as a Hungarian tax resident, transfers have become very expensive since February 2025, thanks to Hungary's brutally high transaction taxes, but this does not affect non-Hungarian residents, so this is a specific case, so in practice the transfer of EUR and HUF is not free. By the way, Wise has only passed this on to users since 2025-02-17, before that it absorbed the cost for three years. You can view Wise's costs at this link.What's really great about it is that the company is extremely transparent, and its fees are constantly falling as their economies of scale increase. Anyone who reads Wise PLC (LSE: WISE) quarterly reports, you can know that this is a stated goal of the management.

Which, in the case of Wise, has a cost:

• 🫰🏼currency exchange: 0.54%, at an exchange rate close to the mid-market rate
• 🫰🏼sending money abroad
• 🫰🏼receiving money from abroad
• 🫰🏼card usage in foreign currency
• 🫰🏼transfer between non-Wise accounts: 0.54%
• 🫰🏼ATM fee*: 2.65% + 200 HUF per withdrawal
• 🫰🏼Create a deposit on the Interactive Brokers broker interface: 0.3 USD (50 USD for Mo. residents)

Wise is very consistent in showing you exactly what fees apply to you. They even wrote an article about it, which you can access here: article about costs.

* In Hungary, it is a legal obligation for citizens to be able to access their money free of charge up to a value of 150000 HUF, with a maximum of two withdrawals, but the extra profit tax appears on top of this.

📌In practice: Previously, Wise's services were much cheaper for Hungarian tax residents, but on the one hand, the extra profit tax has increased this significantly, and on the other hand, a lot of banks are passing on the costs to Wise. An example of this is ATM-based cash withdrawals at OTP, where the withdrawal costs 2000 HUF. This has nothing to do with Wise, just the bank that owns the ATM, but it still has to pay someone the guild fee.

🏢Wise business account costs and information🏢

After the traditional retail Wise account, I opened a business account 3 years ago, and my salary also comes here, from a Revolut account. The costs of the business account are as follows:

• 💸 one-time account opening fee: 60 USD (18910 HUF – it used to be much cheaper, approx. 7000 HUF),
• 🎉 first card fee: free,
• ➕ additional cards: 4 USD (1400 HUF)/card,
• 🏦 balance maintenance: free (regardless of currency),
• 🌐 Receive transfers in the following currencies: free (AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, HUF, NZD, RON, SGD, TRY, non-wire type USD transfers),
• 💵 Receiving USD wire transfers: 4.14 USD (fixed fee),
• 🔄 Currency exchange fee: variable: more at this link,
• 🏧 Withdrawal from account: free, no limit (this may also be subject to extra transaction tax, as in Hungary, which Wise passes on to customers)

💡What is a wire transfer? A form of international bank transfer in which money is transferred from a sending bank to a receiving bank, typically through the SWIFT system. In this case, the transaction may pass through multiple intermediary banks, all of which may charge a processing fee.

Main features of wire transfer:

• 🌍 It is used for international money transfers, especially for larger amounts.
• ⏳ It can be slower, usually takes 1–5 business days (but now it's pretty fast in my experience).
• 💸 More expensive because the sending bank, intermediary banks, and the receiving bank may also charge fees.
• 🏦 It is based on bank data, such as SWIFT/BIC code, bank account number, beneficiary name.

In practice, a wire transfer means a traditional international transfer through a bank, but in technical jargon it is called a wire transfer.

🏦Wise bank or not?

A few thoughts on the above, one of which is that Wise is not a bank, but an online financial service provider. This also means that it does not have to meet as strict conditions as a bank. So, it does not have to insure the accounts with a deposit protection fund, so it is not subject to the legislation that typically provides protection up to EUR 100000 in Europe. Is it a good thing that Wise is not a bank? Yes and no, let's look at both cases.

Why this is positive:

• ✅Wise does not lend, so it cannot go bankrupt like banks,
• ✅Wise keeps its clients' and its own money in separate accounts, in case of bankruptcy, client assets do not mix with its own,
• ✅Wise is also a regulated institution, but the model is simpler than that of a bank.

Why this is negative:

• ❌no state deposit insurance,
• ❌Wise actually keeps its clients' money in custodial banks, and they can also fail,
• ❌It operates through partner banks, which is an institutional risk, and it does not have the same prestige as a traditional bank (let's just say that customers are not interested in this).

Wise is registered with the FSCS in England (F.S.C.S.), is subject to the supervision of the English financial protection scheme and is required to store client assets separately, i.e. separately from its own assets. We also know how much money clients entrusted to Wise in total, last year it was 14.7 billion GBP (roughly 20 billion USD). A point of comparison is the broker LightYear, which recently exceeded 1 billion USD, while Revolut had 38 billion USD in client assets last year, so Wise is not a small service provider at all. If you are interested in more information about how Wise protects its clients' money, you can take a look here: Article on protective measures.

🌐Wise integrations with other providers

What is definitely worth mentioning is that Wise has a particularly good banking integration, many of its partners have integrated the Wise Platform into their systems. This means that you can either:

• 🏦integrates into the service provider's interface, such as IBKR integration, I wrote about it here: Interactive Brokers broker account analysis – Professional for professionals.
• 🤔Banks use Wise's transfer system in the background, the customer doesn't have to do anything, and usually doesn't even notice it.

This also means that this type of integration has already been implemented with a number of financial institutions in Europe. In France, with the two largest banks, in the UK with Monzo, in Germany with N26, in the Netherlands with Bunq, in Switzerland with Neon, in Australia with UP Bank, in Estonia with LVH Bank, while in Portugal with Activo and in Singapore with Aspire.The point is, they already have over 60 partner integrations, in over 70 countries and 40+ currencies.

📌In practice: Since I have both an Interactive Brokers and Wise account, the former can read the latter's account balance, so I don't have to write out any kind of deposit request, fill in a lot of data if I want to transfer money to the account. I just enter the amount, and the money is automatically transferred from the Wise account in 1-2 days. I can't mess up the bank account number, there is no IBAN, intermediary bank, and the like, the process is very convenient.

🎢Wise's interfaces🎢

In this section, I examined what the interface of a financial service provider or broker is like. Where and in what form can their applications be used, how complex are they, are they outdated or modern? Do they provide any special services compared to their competitors that you have to pay extra for elsewhere?

Wise basically has two interfaces, a desktop one that I used on Windows, and a much better mobile app that I used on Android, but of course there is an iOS version as well. The two interfaces are essentially equivalent to each other, or at least I didn't find any function that couldn't be done on one or the other. But before you can start using the services, you have to register.

📜Wise registration

Wise registration is quite typical and quick, you have to press the registration button at the top right of the website. Enter your email address, then you will be given a password, but you can also complete the process using your Google, Facebook or Apple account. You will need your personal documents, as I recall you can provide a driver's license and an ID card.

After registration, there is usually a data update every year, which usually means re-reading personal documents or a quick selfie camera identification, the classic turn left, turn right solution, which can usually be completed in a few minutes. There is also a built-in protection for bank card use, which is activated after a certain number of card payments and requires the use of a PIN code. And it's okay that security is important to Wise in this regard, but you will see below that the situation is not so good everywhere. Registration can also be completed from the application, and I think it's easier to do it from there, because:

• 📷It's easier to scan documents with your phone's camera
• 🤳🏼make a selfie video
• 🪪set up two-factor authentication
• 👍🏼set a pattern or fingerprint for quick unlocking and transaction approval later

📳What do you do in the Wise app?

I would like to share a few practical experiences that have worked for me with Wise's interfaces. In everyday use, I use the application exclusively, because there is not really anything that can't be done from there. However, it is easier to see things on the browser-based interface, but I don't always sit in front of my notebook, but I always have my phone with me. What the Wise application is very good for:

• (I.e. If you have two accounts, you can switch quickly. For example: your salary will be deposited into your personal account, while your Wise business account will receive invoices issued for your business. Transfers between Wise accounts are free and extra fast.
• 📊 It's great for generating monthly statements and more.
• 🔄 Repeat recurring monthly payments, such as your accountant's bill or subscriptions.
• 📱 Check balance, send or request money, split bills.
• 💱 Exchange money between currencies.
• 💳 Create virtual cards for online purchases.
• 🔗 Share Wise tags, codes, etc.

Overall, the modern world has been optimized for mobile use, so it's much easier to set everything up from here, toggle notifications, etc. In other words, if you don't want to use the Windows interface, you don't actually have to.

🧑🏼‍💻What do you do on your desktop?

What's great about Wise desktop is the transparency. Everything is much bigger, it's easier to list and find specific things. For example, if you have a subscription that is recurring, Wise's interface lists them. This is great because you can directly disable each one individually, as you'll see in the case of Duolingo below.

I usually only use it when I'm looking for something specific, for everything else I use the Wise app.

💵Extra features of Wise accounts💵

In this section, I examine what instruments are available on the financial service provider's or broker's platform, in what form you can purchase them, and how wide their range is.

Since I have been using Wise accounts in parallel for more than 3 years, I have tried a lot of its features, which are also useful in practice. The Wise retail account already has the very trendy features known from fintech apps:

• 💸 adding money, requesting money from others,
• 📇 can pick up people from your phone's contact list who are also Wise users, and you can also search for them,
• 🤝 split the bill between friends,
• 📷 QR code-based payment, e.g. via Qvik and PayNow systems,
• 🌍 balance in 50 currencies, free of charge, most of them have IBAN numbers,
• 🏺 opening a savings account under the name "jar",
• ⏱️ periodic, automatic currency exchange, in multiple currencies,
• 💳 creation of virtual, reusable and disposable Wise bank cards for online payments (maximum 3/person),
• 📱 Google Pay integration on Android phones,
• 🛡️ setting all kinds of spending limits, card freezing and other protection mechanisms,
• 👥 adding partners for permanent, recurring or frequent transfers, and showing the names of service providers for recurring withdrawals and how much money is withdrawn at certain times,
• 🙈 you can hide your account balances from others (it removes the numbers from the interface, but this can be turned on and off),
• 🧠 smart exchange: automatically switches from the currency that is most advantageous; if the coverage is only partial, it switches from the currency that is cheapest to complement the former,
• 💰 They pay interest on the money you keep in the account.

Essentially, it does everything like Revolut, but Wise does not provide brokerage services like, say, LightYear.

📌In practice: I would like to highlight a few things from the above, one is the money deductions for monthly or annual fee providers, which Wise can block. Where can this be interesting? For example, Duolingo tends to crash when you want to cancel its annual subscription, and this payment can be blocked within the phone application. The other is the restrictions and limits, which I tend to lower when traveling abroad, while I share the amount with another provider, such as Revolut, so that they cannot steal both at the same time. The same is true for online purchases, generate single-use Wise cards, or an online card (these can also be frozen), which you put behind Paypal, it already provides a multi-layered security.

💡Extra tip: smart exchange is a good thing and works automatically. However, abroad, it often happens that the terminal asks in which currency to debit your accounts. Always choose the currency you pay in, i.e. the local currency! Otherwise, the financial service provider operating the POS terminal may charge an extra fee to the accounts, which may seem like it is a cost of Wise, but in fact it is not.

🤑Interest payment on foreign currency accounts

Wise has been paying interest on available balances in accounts since the beginning of 2023. This is actually a redistribution of what Wise earns on the accounts (it distributes 80% of the interest earned above 1%, it keeps 20%, for example, in the case of 3%, you get 2.4% and 0.6% goes to Wise). This is called the scale economies shared model, I explain what it is in more detail in the Wise Plc. analysis. The point is that the interest payment is called cashback, and it is automatic. This typically depends on the current base rate, but in December 2025, when I write this article, the amount of this cashback is:

• 💶0.8% on EUR balance (if your account balance is at least 147 EUR),
• 💷2.4% on GBP balance (if your account balance is at least 49 GBP),
• 💵2.4% on USD balance (if your account balance is at least 45 USD),

Wise does not pay interest on other currencies. You can find the details here..

Do I have to pay taxes on it? Since Wise Europe operates in the Belgian tax system, where the refund is subject to a 30% withholding tax, Wise automatically deducts this from the interest and pays it to the authorities. Please check whether there is any extra tax on the amount in your country.

📌In practice: There is usually a problem with the above: You will receive cashback on both your accounts, including your business accounts. Since you have to issue invoices for your entrepreneurial activities, the amount of the invoices issued and the balance of the entrepreneurial account may differ due to the cashback, which the tax authorities may consider. That is why you can opt out of paying interest. Click on this link for that!

💼Business account features

An entrepreneur account may or may not be required for certain forms of income generation. This varies from country to country, but for the Hungarian example:

• 🏚️not subject to VAT – subject to tax exemption, KATA, etc. – it is not mandatory for entrepreneurs, but they can open it, the meaning of this is that this way your business and personal income are separated,
• 🏢VAT-registered entrepreneurs and companies are required to open a business account.

Basically, it is worth opening a Wise business account if you exchange currencies a lot, for example, part of your income comes from abroad or you have to work with a lot of remittances - for example, if your payments are not made in your own currency - or you employ others and need to transfer payments abroad in a different currency through the Wise business account.

📌In practice: Business accounts are usually offered by banks, and are very expensive, while Wise and Revolut usually offer their services cheaper. But, you can't tell in advance, so check it out, because prices can vary quite a bit.

Once again, the most important prices regarding Wise's business account:

• 💸 One-time account opening fee: 60 USD (18910 HUF – no monthly fee)
• 💳 Bank card application fee: first card free, no annual card fee, additional cards: 4 USD (1400 HUF)/card
• 🌍 Free 50+ balances in different currencies (you won't get a collective account)
• 💵 USD wire transfer fee: 4.14 USD
• 🏧 Withdrawal is free

As for the functions of the business account, in addition to the above retail account options:

• ⚙️ setting up business data,
• 📄 extracting invoices for accounting: Wise can list the monthly account balance in XLS, CSV and PDF formats, even separating expenses and cashback. This is how I have been sending my monthly statements to my accountant for years. By the way, the retail account also knows this, if you don't want to open another one.
• 🔗 integration with the international Xero, Quickbook, the English FreeAgent and the Hungarian Billingo systems: It probably works with many other accounting platforms as well. This way, your accountant can pay your invoices directly from the software, without having to log into Wise separately.
• 👥 add team members, manage payments,
• 🧾 You can download a receipt for transfers with the converted amount, exchange rate, and you can also separate the charged cost if necessary.

📌In practice: Wise does not have a registered subsidiary in Hungary, so it does not qualify as a Hungarian financial institution, even though it gives you a Hungarian account number. So, if you are a VAT-registered entrepreneur, you cannot have an exclusively Wise business account. But, you can still make payments from there. If you are not VAT-registered, then it is not mandatory to open a business account in Hungary and your payments do not have to go from one, I can confirm this from practice, because I have been doing it this way for years. However, due to the aforementioned private assets/business income and the preparation of statements, it is worth opening one, as the account has no recurring costs.

🆚Competitors: Wise's opponents🆚

In this section, I examine who the competitors of the analyzed financial service provider or broker are, what their pricing is compared to them, and who they can and cannot be recommended to.

The first and most important is probably Revolut, I think Wise competes with them the most. Of course, other financial service providers can also be mentioned, such as Monzo, Bunq, N26, but most of them are also digital banks, not just financial institutions. Among the solutions designed exclusively for sending foreign currency, Remitly, Payoneer, OFX, WorldRemit, Airwallex can also be mentioned, but they have almost no presence in Europe. So no matter how I looked at the market, I always came back to this: Wise's biggest opponent is Revolut!

We will also analyze Revolut, but in the meantime, briefly:

• 🏦Revolut is not only a financial service provider, but also has a banking license
• 📈They also have access to stock market services on the Revolut platform

Because of this, their customer base is not exactly the same, so you can only really compare the fee structures of Wise and Revolut. You can see the differences in the table below, but since I have also been using Revolut for 7 years, I have detailed a few things.

However, the above does not clarify the point, as the two services are good for different purposes:

• 🔵Revolution: What makes Revolut more complicated to use is that they have all kinds of accounts with extra services. For example, insurance, airport lounge access, brokerage services, etc. So Revolut is a Swiss army knife that wants to be good for everything at once. If someone is looking for a good all-round account, it's great for that, and also for online shopping, because there are no prerequisites for it. It is also good for exchanging money up to about 1000 EUR per month.
• 🟢Wise: What Wise is very good at is cross-border remittances. I think Wise is the cheapest, plus you have an IBAN for everything, it's very easy and fast to manage transfers. I usually send invoices to Norway, and the money usually arrives within a few minutes of initiating the transfer. However, it is not an EU country, and they do not transfer HUF, but EUR. And this is not a one-time transfer, but regular and has been working for years. So, if you have a lot of cross-border transfers, then use Wise.

But the best part is that you can sign up for both, so why not use them side by side?

🇭🇺Section for Hungarian investors (and others)🇭🇺

In this section, I will introduce a few local peculiarities and legal "loopholes" worth taking advantage of for investors who are tax residents in Hungary.

Wise is very cheap both on paper and in reality, However, the Hungarian transaction taxes, which were levied on service providers in several rounds, will be passed on to Hungarian customers as of 2025.02.17This means that there may be some items added to the numbers above. What I encountered during use:

• 👛increased transfer fee to Interactive Brokers. It increased from 0.3 to 50 USD per 10,000 USD.
• 🫰🏼In some ATMs, there is a fee for withdrawing cash from the Wise card, e.g. at OTP the cost is 2000 HUF.
• 💰increased switching cost: pay attention to exactly how much Wise charges, because this also increased after 2025.02.17.

Fortunately, there is a statements and reports/statements of fees tab in the Wise app and on the interface, where all costs can be requested retrospectively, and it is worth checking these from time to time.

❌Disadvantages of Wise❌

In this section, I will examine the disadvantages of a financial service provider or broker.

I ran into two things about Wise, which are disadvantages, and one is downright unpleasant, which I would write about in more detail. One is that Wise is not a Hungarian financial service provider, so if you run a VAT-registered company, this cannot be your only account. The other is that since Wise does have an office in Hungary, with 700+ people working in Budapest, it is not customer service and is not an actual branch. So it is not subject to domestic account or investor protection funds. I am not particularly worried about this, because English is not worse either – I wonder which one has more money for compensation, say Hungarian, Estonian or English? - but Wise's customer service is not good.

🦸🏼Wise customer service: email only

Wise used to have actual customer service in all countries and a physical phone number, but now some of these have been discontinued due to cost reductions, such as Hungary, but it is possible that this has happened elsewhere as well. There is only one channel left, you can write to their online customer service in one of the languages ​​used in the EU, even Hungarian, and they will respond by email. Why is this a problem? Because if:

• you are in trouble, you will not be able to reach anyone quickly, there is no chat or phone number,
• Their attitude is quite dismissive and they try to avoid it as long as they can.

❗A specific incident❗A friend of mine used a Wise debit card because it was the only way he could exchange foreign currencies in multiple countries and he was preparing for a long series of trips abroad. He paid somewhere where the underlying bank that provided the service at the payment point was hacked, it was Evolve Bank & Trust, formerly known as First State Bank, more here. The damage caused to my friend was tens of thousands of USD, yet Wise wanted to avoid liability, citing user error. How panicky would you be in, say, Brazil, if your account balance suddenly dropped to zero and you couldn't call anyone on Wise's website? It would probably be quite a lot, and you wouldn't even have the money to travel further.

"Long story short": the matter ended well in the end, months later Wise compensated the damage, but their attitude is questionable, to put it mildly. If you would like to read the full story, please visit the Forbes website.

📌In practice: the lesson from the above is that you need to distribute your assets among service providers, it is worth storing money on Revolut and other service providers in addition to Wise, especially if you are going abroad. Turn on 2-factor authentication, set card limits, and if you buy online, use a self-destructing card or put it behind a PayPal interface. The devil never sleeps, it's better to be safe than sorry, because although the above case is extremely rare, it does happen.

However, I have had a Wise personal account for 6 years and a Wise business account for about 3 years and I have never encountered a bug, I have had no security issues and most of the horror cases are older cases.

✅Benefits of Wise✅

In this section, I will examine the advantages of being a financial service provider or broker.

To summarize the above, here are a few advantages of the Wise account that I have experienced in practice:

• ✅most of the fees are one-time, I haven't paid for the residential account, and once in my life for the business account (at that time the opening fee was still 7000 HUF, not ~18000)
• ✅I have never paid an annual card fee, whereas before they simply deducted an amount of around 10 EUR for it
• ✅I got rid of a lot of stupid bank fees
• ✅It is very easy to prepare statements and submit them to the accountant
• ✅exchange money close to the average exchange rate
• ✅with the two accounts I can separate my private assets from my business income, the transfer is free
• ✅the recurring payments section is good (which I didn't automate because, for example, you have to enter the invoice number in the comment, but you know)
• ✅recurring payments can be disabled, like subscriptions
• ✅works with Google Pay, so I can pay with my watch
• ✅Their Pop-up system is very good, you can authorize transactions with the click of a button
• ✅in theory, their fees will become cheaper (as the transfer volume on Wise's site increases)
• ✅because I am an investor and have an Interactive Brokers account (Interactive Brokers analysis), that's why I use the Wise-IBKR integration and transfer money to my accounts with the click of a button

Of course, there are countless other benefits that I mentioned above, but these are benefits that have been repeated on a daily basis for years.

👍🏼From 2025.12.08, you can set limits per card in the Wise app.

That is,

• 🌐you can create a card for online purchases, set the limit just above the product to be purchased, and then freeze it after the purchase,
• ✈️you can make a travel card with the same logic,
• 🤵🏼You can limit the cards issued to your colleagues, but you can also set limits on marketing spending, for example, and I could list the benefits of this feature.

📝Wise Summary📝

Wise summary, lessons learned.

Wise is a great service if you need to make cross-border payments. They exchange currencies very cheaply - only Interactive Brokers has been better in my experience - they transfer money cheaply, and the transfers arrive incredibly quickly, especially if you use Wise's system. Since Wise's fees will get lower and lower over time as they attract more people, it's worth checking back in from time to time. So Wise as a service is a good thing, but there is another side to the coin.

By this I mean that it will not be equally cheap in all countries and not in all currencies, in this respect, for example, Hungary suffers a particularly big disadvantage due to the transaction tax. This is also true if you want to transfer in some very special currency, which does not affect the countries of the European Union, the USA, England so much, but for example, in the case of Far Eastern currencies or the currencies of African countries, or perhaps some Balkan countries, this is no longer so clear. It also bothers me that they only respond to problems by letter, which is a rather outdated solution in 2025.

And finally, a thought: Wise is a pure play cross-border money transfer system, but now some fintech competitors offer much more services, the best example being Revolut. However, there is nothing stopping you from using all of them at the same time, especially since Wise registration is completely free for residential accounts.

IF YOU CLICK ON THE IMAGE LINK BELOW, your first 150000 HUF related activities during the WISE account opening will be fee-free, which is worth taking advantage of. Even better, open a Revolut account right away, for diversification!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What kind of service provider is Wise?

Wise is an international financial services provider, or you can call it a fintech company, whose main profile is providing favorable currency exchange, multi-currency account management and cheap international transfers. The service operates with simple, transparent fees, uses real market exchange rates and facilitates cross-border money movements without hidden costs. Wise serves millions of users worldwide, both individuals and businesses, who pay, transfer or receive money in foreign currencies.

Are TransferWise and Wise the same? When did the former become the latter?

Yes, TransferWise and Wise are the same service provider. The company was originally called TransferWise, which it used from 2011. The company decided to rebrand in 2021, shortening the name to Wise to better reflect its expanded range of services, which now includes not only money transfers, but also a full multi-currency account and card. The name change was therefore just a rebrand: the operation, technology and user accounts remained the same, just a more modern and simpler name was given to them.

Is Wise a bank or just a financial service provider?

Wise is not a bank, but an officially registered Electronic Money Institution (EMI). This means that it does not provide classic banking services and is not covered by a deposit insurance scheme. However, it manages users' money in segregated accounts, which Wise cannot access for its own operations.

In practice, Wise can be used like a modern multi-currency bank account, but it is not legally a banking institution.

How much does the Wise card cost? Is the Wise card free?

The Wise card is not free: there is a one-time production and delivery fee, which in Hungary is typically around 2420 HUF. There is no annual fee, and the card is free to maintain. Ordering a physical card is not a prerequisite for using virtual cards and certain digital payment functions.

How much does it cost to open a Wise account?

Opening a Wise account is completely free. There is no registration fee, account opening fee or monthly maintenance fee. The user only pays when ordering a card, exchanging currency or initiating certain types of transfers.

The account can be created in over 50 currencies, with local bank account details in multiple countries.

Wise or Revolut? Revolut or Wise? Which is better?

The two providers have different strengths. Wise is advantageous if you need cheap, transparent currency exchange, favorable international transfers, and real exchange rates, without weekend surcharges. It also provides local bank account information in several countries.

Revolut has the advantage of a much wider range of services: investing, crypto, insurance, statistics, spending management and premium packages. For everyday main account, Revolut is more convenient, for foreign exchange and international purposes, Wise is more cost-effective.

Wise card reviews: how useful is it?

Most users find the Wise card reliable, fast, and especially convenient for paying abroad. It automatically charges the correct currency, so the exchange rate is often more favorable than at traditional banks.

The card works well for online purchases, travel, subscriptions and also supports Apple Pay / Google Pay systems.

Wise Hungarian customer service phone number: I can't find it, where should I look?

Wise does not operate a dedicated Hungarian phone support service. Phone support is only available in certain countries, mostly in English. For Hungarian users, in-app support is the main administrative channel.

Where can I reach Wise customer service?

Wise's customer support is primarily available online: in-app chat, a web-based customer support interface, and an extensive help system. Phone support is limited and typically in English.

TransferWise reviews: same as Wise?

Yes. TransferWise was the former name of Wise, they changed in 2021. So the opinions and experiences are fully valid for today's Wise service.

The operation, fees and services are built on the same foundation.

How does Wise work?

Wise reduces the cost of international transfers by using mostly local payment systems within its global network. The money technically doesn't cross borders: money deposited in one country is paid out locally in another.

This is faster and cheaper than transferring money through the SWIFT system.

Wise account opening: how complicated is it? How much does it cost?

Opening an account is simple and can be done in a few minutes. After online registration, personal identification is required, which can be done with a photo of your ID and facial recognition. The process is completely free of charge.

Wise bank login: how do I do it?

Logging in is done on the official Wise website or app. The user identifies themselves using an email or phone number and then receives a one-time security code — the system does not use a traditional password.

Wise registration: how complicated is it?

Registration is an easy and quick process. After providing basic information, identification follows, which is done entirely online. After verification, the account can be used immediately for currency exchange or transfers.

Wise Hungary: is there a Wise branch in Hungary?

No, Wise does not operate a physical branch or customer reception office in Hungary. The service operates entirely online, with customer service and all functions available digitally.

Opening a Wise account: what do you need to do?

The steps to opening a Wise account are simple: registration, personal identification, and then creating the desired foreign currency accounts. Optionally, a card can also be ordered. The process does not require a bank contract or personal appearance.

The account can be used immediately after identification for receiving money, transferring money, and exchanging currency.

Legal and liability statement (aka. disclaimer): My articles contain personal opinions, I write them solely for my own entertainment and that of my readers. The articles published here do NOT in any way exhaust the scope of investment advice. I have never intended, do not intend, and am unlikely to provide such in the future. What is written here is for informational purposes only and should NOT be construed as an offer. The expression of opinion is NOT in any way considered a guarantee to sell or buy financial instruments. You are SOLELY responsible for the decisions you make, and no one else, including me, assumes the risk.