At the 2026 US Expats Financial Conference, Nadia Costanzo, Director of Banking and Expansion – MEA & LatAm at Wise, discusses international currency transfer considerations and strategies for US expats in 2026. Wise is a global technology company building the best way to move and manage money internationally, offering multi-currency accounts that let expats hold, send, and receive in dozens of currencies at the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.
The following transcript was generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Hugo: Welcome, everyone. We’ll just wait a couple of minutes before diving in, to give as many people as possible a chance to join. So Nadia, you’re in the UK too.
Nadia: I am, yeah. I’ve been here for a while now — I’m a citizen now. A dual citizen, actually. Well, I have three citizenships.
Hugo: Oh, wow. What’s the third?
Nadia: Italian.
Hugo: Right — your name probably should have been a clue.
Nadia: Yeah.
Hugo: Were you born in the US?
Nadia: I was, yeah. Born and raised there, and then I’ve bounced around a lot throughout my life, but mostly born and raised in the US.
Hugo: And now you’re in London. I’ve visited Wise’s office in London — an amazing new office. How long ago was that move? It must be a couple of years old now.
Nadia: It’s about a year. I think we moved around this time last year. It’s definitely been an exciting move for us as we grow as a company. It’s really cool.
Hugo: Do you travel much as part of the job?
Nadia: I do, yeah. I lead our international expansion for emerging markets primarily, so I’m on the road at least 30% of the time. I could be on the road 50% of the time if I wanted to. It gets a bit tiring sometimes, but yeah, I travel a lot.
Hugo: Well, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. I think the number of people joining is leveling out, so I’ll just read a little introduction and then hand over.
Hello, and welcome to day two of the 2026 US Expats Financial Conference, sponsored by Expat Focus, Wise, Global Citizen Solutions, and Advanced AI Services. We have a fantastic schedule for you, consisting of 17 sessions over four days, covering multiple aspects of financial information for Americans living abroad, with perspectives from some of the world’s leading experts in their fields.
Today is the second day of the conference, and for our third session of the day, I’m delighted to be joined by Nadia Costanzo, who’ll be discussing international currency transfer considerations and strategies for US expats in 2026. Nadia leads market expansion for Wise across developing markets. An international expat herself, Nadia develops bank partnerships to enable seamless international money transfers in underserved regions.
Before we start, please bear in mind that the information presented is for educational purposes only, and you should always seek your own personalized financial advice. Nadia will be answering your questions after her presentation, so please add them in the Q&A pop-up at the foot of your screen throughout, and we’ll try to answer them all, time permitting. So without further ado, over to you, Nadia.
Nadia: Thanks so much, Hugo. Hi, everyone — nice to meet you. I’m going to share my screen so you can see my slides.
So, hi everyone. I’m Nadia, Director of Banking and Expansion at Wise, and I’ve been at Wise for around eight years. As I mentioned, I’m also a US expat, and I’ve been living and traveling abroad for most of my life.
Today we’re going to look at a few different things. I really want to focus on the bigger challenges that expats — specifically US expats — might face when sending, receiving, or converting money while living or traveling abroad. I’ll start by telling you a little about Wise, where I work and what we do, and then I’ll go into the main challenge areas we see.
The first is foreign exchange hidden fees, then transparency in payment processes and speed, then complex tax reporting. After that, I’ll explain how Wise might be able to help you respond to some of these challenges. And then, as Hugo mentioned, we’ll have a bit of a Q&A.
So to kick it off: what is Wise? Wise is the world’s most international account, where you can hold, spend, and receive in multiple currencies, all from one single account. With Wise, you can hold up to 40 different currencies in different balances. You can also get account details in around eight different currencies, so you can get paid into those details — including salary payments, or payments from friends, family, or yourself.
And very importantly, you’ll get transparent rates, so you always know what you’re paying for and how much you’re going to receive on the other end. We have some special discounts for large transactions, and you can also get a debit card so you can spend like a local while traveling abroad.
Wise is a global technology firm — we’re building the best way to move and manage money around the world. We were founded in 2011, so we just celebrated our 15-year anniversary. The vision was to make international money movement fast, affordable, and convenient.
Just to give you a sense of our size: we currently serve over 15 million customers, both personal and business — so you can have both a personal account and a business account, should you require it. We move around $50 billion across borders every single quarter. We have more than 6,000 people working for us, from around 125 different nationalities, in 11 key offices — though we have more offices globally, so you’ll always have the support you need.
And most importantly — I think this is the most important figure — we saved our customers around $3 billion last year compared to banks on international payments.
Wise is regulated globally, and we’re licensed to make sure we’re keeping your money safe and keeping it moving according to the strict rules operating in the different countries we’re in. We safeguard all of the funds that are put into our customers’ accounts. That means we hold customer funds separately from our own funds — we’re ring-fencing those funds to make sure they’re safe and secure — and we hold them in really strong financial institutions, the likes of JPMorgan.
Similarly, we focus a lot on security, and we’re constantly investing in the technology behind it: things like two-factor authentication to protect your account, and constant monitoring checks to prevent scams and fraud. We notify you when we believe there might be risky activity on your account, to make sure you’re protected and aware of what’s happening.
So that’s a bit about Wise. Now I want to go into the challenges, which I think is maybe a bit more interesting — the things you’ll face when living abroad. There are three main challenges, and I’ll talk through a few tips as well, about how you can keep track of them and deal with them.
The first is hidden exchange fees. This is probably the biggest and most understated challenge people face when moving across borders, both for relocations and for traveling in general. It can be very expensive to move money across borders, and exchange rates can be very volatile, so you need to take a lot of care when converting currencies. I’ll talk more about why that’s a challenge.
There’s also a problem around transparency in payment processing and speed. International payments can be very slow, and often the process is opaque. When you’re sending from one country to another, you often don’t know when the money will arrive — and that lack of transparency can be really difficult to navigate.
And then, of course — I’m not going to give any tax advice — there are tax reporting complexities you must be aware of when living abroad. Making sure you have accurate statements to submit your taxes to the authorities is very important.
So, starting with foreign exchange fees — this is really a bulky piece. When you’re sending money abroad — let’s say from the US to France, or anywhere in the world — you have to be very careful about the exchange rates the banks are going to provide you.
Traditional players might do things like advertise no fees when they make the transfer for you, but what they’ll often do is hide the exchange rate, or mislead you on the exchange rate they’re applying to the currency conversion. A lot of people struggle to understand what the currency rate should be, but the best way to think about it is this: you can just Google what the current rate is — say, US dollars to euros on a given day — and then compare that with what the bank, or the provider in general, is offering you.
Now, the reality is that sometimes you might not know that, and sometimes the bank partner or provider might not be able to show it to you. So it’s really important to pay very close attention to this, because this is where you can lose thousands of dollars. If they don’t have it transparently written up front, I’d be careful — try to ask your bank what exchange rate they’re going to use, and discuss it with them.
How it works in practice is that banks are essentially purchasing currencies in bulk on a daily basis at a discounted rate, and then adding a margin on top when they enable the transaction for you as a consumer or business. You might not understand what that rate is — or you might, but it’s not transparent and clear — and that’s how a lot of players get away with charging you this rate. They might not charge you a fee, but they’re actually making a lot of money on the exchange rate, and you’re losing out.
So when you’re looking to make payments across borders, it’s really important to look for a provider that offers transparency in fees and pricing structures. If you can see directly what the exchange rate is going to be — and if not, if you can ask them to provide that information — that will be key to deciding whether to use that provider or another one.
Always compare providers as well, because while you might think you’re getting a good deal, you don’t actually know until you compare it with others. So it’s really important to constantly shop around. With Wise, we’ve built a few tools to support you in that, and I’ll show you in the next slide.
You could use Wise’s price comparison tool, or simply use Wise — you get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees, which is what we offer our customers. The comparison tool we’ve built shows you the transfer fee and the exchange rate, and we pull this information from a bunch of different websites, based on what you might be charged when you want to send money across borders.
We’ll always tell you which is the cheapest option — including when Wise isn’t the cheapest. We’ll let you know, and you might find we’re number two or three down the row. That’s really important to us because, as part of our mission and ethos, what we care about is transparency. We want you to get the best exchange rate possible. We’ll always offer you the mid-market exchange rate, but our fee might be slightly higher.
The other thing to look at is exchange rate volatility. Exchange rates can fluctuate constantly throughout the day, and they can change due to many different factors — geopolitical events, market conditions, and so on. So you need to be really careful, especially with a traditional provider, about the timing of your transactions and the speed they take.
For example, if you’re sending a payment from the US to somewhere like Morocco, where it might take a couple of days to get the money from one side to the other, there’s a real risk that — due to exchange rate volatility — you might get a very different amount at the end than you were planning to send at the beginning. So it’s important to understand that, and maybe not send during a very volatile time, or to find a provider that can guarantee you the exchange rate.
If you can — and I know this can be a bit overwhelming — it would be really helpful, when you’re planning your conversions, to track the exchange rates so you can get an understanding of where the market is going.
We do offer some support with Wise here. First of all, we guarantee the exchange rate. If you’re overwhelmed by the idea of having to track exchange rates, we’ll provide you with a guaranteed exchange rate that you lock in at the time you’re sending.
We offer live exchange rate tracking and alerts, so if the rate hits your desired level, we can alert you. That lets you plan for future transfers, budget for international expenses, and manage your cash flow — by having that understanding of “okay, this rate has now been hit,” without you having to constantly track the rates yourself, which can be overwhelming if you’re checking Google every day for the rate.
Another thing that can be quite helpful is auto conversions, which Wise does offer. You can go into our tool and tell it, “I want to convert X amount at Y rate.” You put it in there, and we won’t do anything until the exchange rate hits your desired rate. Once it does, we’ll make the conversion directly for you within your balance. Through that, you can have a better understanding of historical trends and be a bit more forward-thinking, according to your financial needs.
Of course, if you have the possibility of waiting to make certain conversions, that’s an ideal way to manage exchange rate volatility. Recently we’ve been seeing that the US dollar, for example, has been a bit more volatile, so this could be a way to mitigate losing out on poorer US dollar rates against other currencies — by forward planning.
So just to wrap up on that one: I really suggest you do regular monitoring of exchange rates to stay informed of market trends, plan your transfers to make the most of favorable rates where you can, and — should you want to — take more control by using Wise’s tools, so you can lock in rates and make sure conversions happen at the rate you want.
The next big challenge in international payments is a lack of transparency when sending money. Why is it slow, or not transparent? Typically, in international payments, when someone is sending across borders, there’s what we call a correspondent banking network in the middle, which makes the transfers a lot slower and more expensive.
What that means is that when you’re sending from your originating bank, that bank doesn’t necessarily have a relationship with the final bank. So there are a number of different banks in between that communicate with one another to pass through the information and, ultimately, the funds from one bank to the other.
That slows things down, because each of these banks might need to do its own checks. Every bank is regulated, so it’s important for them to perform their checks to make sure the transaction is safe and abiding by regulation. That slows down the process — and you might not have visibility over who is in this correspondent banking chain. We often don’t have that visibility either.
On top of that, what often happens is that a lot of these banks take a small or larger cut of the actual transaction as they process it through, as a kind of fee to process the payment. So this is why, in traditional banking, your transfers for an international payment can be quite slow and untransparent — and you might not know exactly how much money you’re going to get on the other side. We spoke about exchange rates; that’s one piece of it. But this is another really chunky part of it.
So what we’ve done is focus on building a domestic infrastructure. We hold accounts, or access to payment systems, in all the different countries we operate in. We can easily collect funds in the country you’re trying to send from, and then we have our relationships on the other side already, domestically, to do the payouts directly in that country.
By using only the domestic payment system, we can cut out that long gap in information sharing — as well as the money being taken throughout the process — and make it as instant as possible. I showed you this slide earlier: what’s really important to us is that 74% of all our transfers are instant.
That means you don’t have to stress about the money — where it is and how fast it’s going to arrive. I think that’s a really important part of living abroad and dealing with international payments. Especially the larger the transaction, it can get quite nerve-wracking. Having the ability to send instantly is pretty key.
So how do we make the payment process as transparent as possible, to avoid all those intermediary banks taking time and money? We give you real-time tracking of your transfer, so you know by the minute what’s happening with it and when it’s going to arrive — or, if it hasn’t arrived yet, why, and what’s happening.
We also give you upfront rates and fees. As I mentioned, we’ll always charge you the mid-market exchange rate. We do charge a small fee to cover some of our costs, but that fee is as cheap as possible — our focus is always to bring it down as much as possible. And we’ll guarantee the delivery amount, unlike in that correspondent banking network process, and we’ll guarantee, as much as we can, the time you’ll receive the funds.
The third main area is complex tax reporting. This is a major concern for a lot of US expats and can be a major source of stress. If you’re a US expat, you likely have tax reporting obligations, and it’s really important for the tax authorities that you have accuracy and detail in your reporting.
It can be a significant burden to gather and collect all the information on your foreign income and account activities into one place. You also might have to submit an FBAR on top of your tax reports. There’s a lot of information you need to report back to the US when you’re living internationally, so it’s really important to understand your responsibilities to avoid penalties and have seamless financial management. We definitely recommend you speak to a tax professional to assist you.
But there are certain things you can do to make sure you’re as covered as possible from an information-gathering perspective. Within Wise, we’ll give you access to all of your reports. If you go into your account, you can get statements and reports specific to your account, so you understand how much money you’re holding at any given time, and any returns you might be making within the account.
You can click on the tax statements — and as you can see here, there are a number of different types of statements you could download. Usually, for tax reporting, you’d go to tax statements for your specific tax country. The useful thing is that you can request it for a specific time period. Here, you can see it’s from November 14th, 2023 to November 13th, 2024 — but you can customize that and set the period you want your information for. Having really detailed, accurate statements is going to be critical when you’re doing your filings.
So, again, top tips: keep thorough financial records throughout the year to ensure accuracy; use the statements you have at your fingertips as easily as possible; and definitely consult with a tax professional who understands the intricacies of an expat tax life, depending on the jurisdiction you’re living in. Make sure you’re covering your bases from both the US perspective and your local country perspective.
So, I’ve talked a bit about the different areas you should be careful about when managing your international payments and finances. Now I’m going to go into a more practical, step-by-step look at how Wise works, and how you can get access to the tools I mentioned.
Firstly — very easy — you sign up to Wise. You provide your email, phone number, country of residence, and key information about yourself to create an account. Then, depending on where you live, you might need to provide specific pieces of information — a passport, a driver’s license, a selfie, proof of address — and that will verify you. All financial institutions need to do this, by the way, so it’s not just a Wise thing. Whoever you’re working with — and you also want to make sure they can accept US people — will have to ask you for your information to onboard you. This should all be done within a couple of minutes.
If you go into the account and one of your main purposes is to receive money internationally, you can go into the “Get account details” section, select the currency you’d like to add, and then add the currency. As you can see here, there are a few different currencies highlighted. For account details, as I mentioned, you can get around eight different currencies; and if you want just a balance where you can do in-balance conversions, you can also get those.
So you’d click on the account details, and then you’ll have to top up. This top-up is not a fee — it’s an equivalent amount that you’ll then be holding and can use for spending, sending internationally, or whatever you need that money for. It’s really just to activate your account. You can pay in using different methods — a debit card, or other payment methods. Here, we’ve defaulted to debit card, as it’s usually the fastest, so we try to optimize for you to have the fastest mechanism. But sometimes it might be cheaper for you to pay in with a wire transfer.
So that’s something to be aware of, and in general, when you’re doing an international payment, look at these details: how are you paying for these international transfers? Those are really important things that could make a big difference in terms of either the speed or the cost. So whether it’s with Wise or any other provider, I definitely encourage you to pay close attention to that. Once you’re happy with the payment method you’ve selected, you can confirm and top up your account.
In this example, I used the GBP account details, but you can have the same account details for euros, for dollars — and within that, you can also set up direct debits, so you can meet your obligations locally if you need to. You’d just click under the balance of the currency you’d like to select, and then add the account details.
Then there are the rate alerts I was talking about earlier — where you get an alert when the rate has matched the rate you’re interested in, at which point you’d like to send money. It’s very simple. You click on the account with your name on it — on desktop it’s on the top right, or on the app it’s on the top left — then you scroll down to notifications, click on exchange rate alerts, and go through that process to determine the exchange rate you want. It’s pretty simple, and you can get notified by email or on the app — you decide how you’d like to be notified.
The auto conversion I referred to earlier is equally quite simple. You click on the balance you’d like to convert from — let’s say, in this example, you wanted to convert from euros to US dollars. You go into that balance, write the amount you want to convert, scroll down, and click the auto-convert button. Choose your rate and just leave it there, and whenever the rate gets hit, your conversion will automatically happen — we’ll take care of everything behind the scenes.
A couple of last things I wanted to highlight, knowing how complex it can be to be an expat or to be traveling internationally. One is the debit card. That’s another thing you want to be really careful about, especially the exchange rate when you’re paying with your card internationally.
You might be spending abroad and your bank might tell you there are no foreign transaction fees — I’m sure many of you have seen this before. But I’d encourage you, once you’ve spent with a card, to take a look at the actual exchange rate they’re charging you, because that is a very strong way that banks actually rip you off. I really encourage you to look at that and make sure you’re not getting a really bad exchange rate. Something I’ve done in the past is make a payment with a card and then immediately go into my statement, and go on Google to see what rate they’re charging me — just to cross-compare. So definitely be very conscious of that.
You also want to think through which currencies you’re being charged in. You’ve probably all seen the option to pay either in local currency or in your home currency. Always select local currency, because you want to avoid multiple different players adding a different exchange rate, or whatnot, to your card transaction. So whenever you have to click that option, definitely go with the local currency. That’s a really big way you need to be careful when spending money internationally.
We have a card that allows you to spend like a local, so you always have the right currency in place and you’re always spending with the local currency in mind. If you have the Wise card and you have a local currency balance — let’s say you’re traveling to South Africa and you have a rand balance — we’d pull directly from that rand balance, so you’d just be paying for your rand transaction in rand. It would be a like-for-like transaction.
Now, in cases where you don’t have that balance — let’s say you’re traveling to South Africa and you don’t have a rand balance, but you have a US dollar and a euro balance — we’ll be able to do something we call smart conversion. We’ll convert directly from the balance you hold at the rate that’s best for you. Whatever the best rate, we’ll convert directly from there for your card.
You can use both the physical and digital card. The digital card you can enable almost instantly, so you can access that without having to wait for your physical card, and you can also connect the card to your mobile wallets — whether it’s Google Pay, Apple Pay, you name it.
And then, finally, the limits when you’re sending money internationally are really important. Most transfers aren’t reaching these numbers, but sometimes they are, so it’s really important — with any provider — to be conscious of the limits you’re trying to send within. If you’re trying to send especially a large amount, or to specific currencies, it could be that when you’re sending to a specific country there are limits on the amount of money you can send. So I definitely encourage you to read the fine print or the FAQs, or get in touch with the bank, depending on where you’re trying to send the money, to make sure you know how much you can actually send — so you don’t come up against a roadblock and have your transaction blocked.
For us, within the Wise account, we don’t have actual limits on receiving. But on the sending side, because of some compliance and regulatory requirements, we might have sending limits. Here are some examples in the main currencies we operate in: USD, pounds, and euros. Again, it’s something to look into, because while it may not lose you money, it can be really frustrating if you don’t know how much you can send and you get blocked along the way when you need to make a transfer.
So, just to close it up: who can use Wise? Anyone, really — anyone who’s moving or traveling internationally. Whether you’re relocating, purchasing a property, sending money to friends or family, or traveling, as I mentioned with the travel card use case — essentially, any time you have a need to transact from one currency to another, we’re here to help you.
The product is really built by people like me — people who have the same pains as you might have. It’s really important for us to support you throughout your journey of relocating and living internationally, because all of us — as I mentioned, we’re 125 nationalities — a lot of us feel your pain and know how difficult it can be. So we’re really trying to build the best product for you, the best international account.
So yeah, that’s it from me. I went a bit over time, but hopefully that’s okay — and I think we can now open it up to questions.
Hugo: Thanks very much. Just before we dive into the questions, a quick word about our sponsors.
We have four sponsors for the conference. Expat Focus is the web’s favorite destination for anyone moving or living abroad — you can find out more at expatfocus.com. Wise is a leading provider of fast, local, international money transfer services and multi-currency accounts — find out more at wise.com. Global Citizen Solutions provides second citizenship, residency, and relocation strategies for those planning across borders — find out more at globalcitizensolutions.com. And finally, Advanced AI Services provides automated customer response solutions for businesses — find out more at advancedaiservices.com.
So thank you very much, Nadia, for that fantastic presentation. We’ve got quite a few questions, so let’s start at the beginning. Aaron says: “Can I have both a US and European Wise account? Can I receive an IRS payment into a Wise account?”
Nadia: Yeah, so you can. Because it’s one full international account, what you can have is the multiple account details, as I was explaining, in any currency of your choosing. So if you’re a US person, you can get US dollar account details, euro account details, GBP account details — and you’ll see different box-like balances within your account, and you’ll be able to scroll through all the different balances. You can hold funds in any of those different currencies.
So yes — and through the account details mechanism, you can receive payments. You’ll have local account details associated with your account, so for any incoming payments — that could be an IRS payment — you’d provide them with those account details, and they would send it there.
Hugo: Thank you. So somebody asks: “We have funds in high-yield, interest-bearing accounts in the US, and can’t find comparable rates in Europe. We’re worried about the dollar weakening as a long-term trend. Do you have any thoughts on how to weigh these issues?”
Nadia: Well, I’m not able to give you investment advice, so just to caveat it with that. One of the things you could look into — and it would depend on your situation, your tax residency, and where you’re from — is being able to open an interest-bearing account within Wise. All the accounts I was referring to are just cash accounts, essentially, where you can hold funds. But we do also have a product that’s interest-generating: one option is investing in money market funds, and one is more of a stocks product. We have those in different currencies, so you can hold the funds in pounds or euros.
So if you were concerned about the US dollar weakening — which I do think is a major concern, it’s very real at this given time — you could consider converting those funds into pounds or euros, and then holding an interest-bearing account in pounds or euros. Wise does offer that option. Again, you’d definitely have to look at your specific situation and whether you can hold those funds there, so I’d read through the account requirements to kick it off — but that is an option for you.
Hugo: Thank you. So there are a couple of questions about Wise in general. Are customer funds protected with federal or government guarantees in the different countries?
Nadia: So we don’t have insurance — if you’re talking about something like FDIC insurance, we don’t have that. But what we do have, and I was referring to it earlier, is safeguarding. There are safeguarding requirements in the places we’re regulated, and what that means is that our customer funds must be held protected and away from all our other funds that we use on a daily basis for our company. Our customer funds must be safeguarded in a separate account, which is ring-fenced from all our other funds. All of those funds are held in really strong financial institutions like JPMorgan, Barclays, and so on, and those funds are essentially untouched, for our customers.
Hugo: If Wise became insolvent, those funds wouldn’t be affected?
Nadia: Correct.
Hugo: Any plans regarding crypto for Wise?
Nadia: As with any potential financial product, we’re always looking around the horizon and seeing what makes sense for us as a financial institution to offer. At this point, it’s not a top priority area for us, because we still see that international payments are still very much broken — there’s a lot to fix in the global arena around international payments, holding money, and spending money abroad. So our main focus is around those areas. But we’re definitely following any developments in the crypto space.
Hugo: So somebody asks: is there a way to make an educated prediction on how exchange rates will move in the near future?
Nadia: That’s a tricky one. There’s always the ability to look at historical rates and historical trends, but then it can get quite complex — what happened at a given time, and understanding how the currency fluctuated at that particular time. If you wanted to, you could do that. A currency might fluctuate around election time, or around a big political event, or anything really, so it depends on the country. If you wanted to, you could look through the historical rates and also upcoming events that might be happening.
But it’s always a prediction, and a prediction could always be wrong. So we don’t offer predictive tools or anything like that. It’s really something that some people spend a lot of time digging into as individuals — they might make those predictions and try to make plans — but it’s really difficult to actually predict anything like that. That’s what makes the foreign exchange business quite complex to operate in: you can never predict it, so there’s always the chance the rate might change by 0.1% tomorrow, and a financial institution could lose a lot of money in that process. Banks definitely try to come up with models and so on, but as an individual, probably the best thing you can do is look at historical rates, keep track, understand what kind of events triggered certain rates to move — and use tools like the alerts, so that if you don’t want to track on a daily basis, at least you can be alerted when the rate changes.
Hugo: Thank you. So, if you have an account with Wise and the custodian in the US is JPMorgan Chase, what would be the minimum balance to be maintained? Is there a minimum balance, or not?
Nadia: No. To top up when you’re creating the account in the beginning, you’ll have to top up with the £20 equivalent — but that’s your balance, and you can spend it. You can also have less than a £20 or $20 balance. Once your account is already open and you’re operating in it, there are no minimums.
Hugo: Thank you. Here’s a good question: do Wise balances count towards FBAR reporting?
Nadia: Yeah. So, with FBAR reporting — and again, please consult with your tax consultants, but I can give you my personal experience — essentially, if you’re holding over $10,000 in any account offshore, so outside of the United States, you need to report that to the IRS. So absolutely, it would qualify there, because it’s money that we’re holding — it’s not any other kind of asset, it’s a money equivalent — so you would definitely need to report those.
Hugo: Actually, I think the same question came up in a tax session yesterday — exactly that, whether Wise accounts need to be reported on FBAR — and the presenter said: if in doubt, report it. So basically, if you’re not sure, always report it on the FBAR, because it’s better to be safe than sorry. There are no penalties for over-reporting, but there are penalties for under-reporting.
Nadia: Exactly.
Hugo: But it’s good to hear it from you. So somebody says: “Are you an EMI — electronic money institution?”
Nadia: Yes, we are. We’re licensed by the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK, the FCA.
Hugo: And in the US, what’s the equivalent?
Nadia: In the US, we’re currently a money transfer business, and we’re regulated in 48 of the states in the United States — we have a license for each one of those states.
Hugo: Which two states, out of interest?
Nadia: I think Nevada is one we’re not regulated in, and — I’m sorry, I’m blanking on the other one — but there are just two we’re not regulated in. I think there are passporting rules that allow us to still operate in some of those states.
Hugo: So somebody mentioned they’ve struggled with Wise’s two-factor authentication. Is it possible to turn it off when you’re in a different country that doesn’t allow you to access your cell number for a text code, for example?
Nadia: I would suggest you contact customer support, but yeah, you should be able to turn off two-factor authentication. We obviously don’t advise that, just because it makes your account less secure, but you should be able to turn it off.
Hugo: So, do you need a US address for an account, or can you use a Portuguese address, for example? And the same with mobile numbers for authentication.
Nadia: Yeah, absolutely, you can use — so, we’re also regulated in Europe. We’re regulated in Belgium, which also allows for passporting rules across the entire European Union. So if your address is based in Europe — well, in Portugal — you can absolutely sign up and use your Portuguese phone number and address. You’d get the account as if you were a Portuguese person, but if you are a US person, you’d still have to notify us of that. So yes, you can absolutely open the account from many different countries, including across Europe.
Hugo: So somebody says: “I live in Cuenca, Ecuador. I will be working in Brazil for a month. If I wanted a Wise card, is it possible to ship it to Ecuador, for example?”
Nadia: If the person is a resident of Ecuador, right now they wouldn’t be able to have access to the cards, because we don’t offer our cards to residents of Ecuador. If they were a resident of the US, or a US person, and they wanted the card to be shipped to a different location, that is something we can do. With that one, I’d just advise you to definitely plan in advance, because if we’re doing an international shipment to Ecuador or Brazil from a US card, it can take a little while. If you’re able to send it to a US address, that would probably be better and preferable. So I’d keep that in mind, just because these international shipments can take some time.
The other thing I’d advise: if you do want the card, and you’re not super tied to only having the physical card — which I know, especially traveling in a place like Brazil or Ecuador, can be quite necessary, in case you want to withdraw cash — you can also get the digital card, so you wouldn’t have to worry about the shipment piece. With the digital card you can make e-commerce payments, but you can also add it to your Apple Wallet or Google Pay, so you can make payments directly on there. At least you’d have something to pay with.
Hugo: Nice. Somebody says: “How does my Wise account change when I move from the US to another country?” That’s an interesting one, because I think some US banks aren’t able to work with non-residents — so when you move, you might have to change bank. What about Wise? If you’re a US resident, you have a Wise account, and you move country — is that fine, if you move to Ecuador, or somewhere Wise perhaps doesn’t operate?
Nadia: Yeah, so some of the functionalities, or some of the access you might have, could eventually change. For example, if you were to move to Ecuador, once your card expires, we wouldn’t be able to give you a new physical card. So that might be something to keep in mind, or something of concern — but you would still have access to your balances and account details. Once you’re a customer, unless there’s a reason why we need to off-board you, in most cases we wouldn’t have to stop offering the services.
There might be cases where the product offering differs according to the country you’re operating in, because there are different regulations locally in different markets, so the way we offer our product might have to be different from one market to another. Or it might just be different product features. If you’re moving from the US to the UK, you might actually have access to more product features in the UK, as that’s usually where we roll them out. It really depends on a lot of factors, including how we’re regulated in each market — but we won’t close your account if you’re moving from one place to another.
Hugo: So somebody said: “Can you pay the IRS with British pounds using Wise?” But I guess the account’s multi-currency, right? So you’d just convert the dollars first if you needed to.
Nadia: Yeah, I mean, you could, if you’re using your card — although, just FYI, the card fees to pay the IRS tend to be more expensive than the wire transfer fees. But in an ideal scenario, you’d probably just convert the funds within the account from GBP to US dollars, and then make that payment directly from your US dollar balance. But you could also use the Wise card, technically, to do that.
Hugo: Thank you. And then — you’ll know the answer to this as a dual citizen — if somebody’s a dual citizen, does it matter which passport they use when they open the account?
Nadia: It doesn’t necessarily matter, but we will ask you if you have a tax residency in another place. So, unfortunately, for US expats — let’s say you have a Spanish passport and an American passport — you can onboard with your Spanish passport, but you’ll still have to disclose the fact that you are a US person.
Hugo: Nice. Another FBAR question — it’s a good one. If somebody opens a Wise account when they’re in the US, moves abroad, and they have a balance in the Wise account, at that point, presumably it doesn’t need reporting — because if it’s in US dollars in the Wise account, it’s not a foreign account. Does that make sense?
Nadia: Yeah, that makes sense. Again, I’d definitely consult with your advisor, but the way I would personally do it: if the balance is held in US dollars, because it’s being held with a local US dollar US bank, then yeah, I’d consider it to be a domestic account or a domestic holding. But the second you convert that $10K-plus into a foreign currency, then you definitely do still report it. Again, consult with your advisor — but in theory it should be fine if you’re holding those funds in US dollars.
Hugo: Good question. So somebody says they have their US Social Security retirement payments transferred directly to a foreign bank — in this case, a UK bank. Would it make sense to get them transferred to a Wise multi-currency account in USD, because the conversion rate would be less to then transfer them to GBP?
Nadia: Yes, absolutely. I don’t know what the exchange rate would be that they’re marking up, but it’s very likely it’s not favorable. So what I’d advise is to get the payments to go into your Wise account — your US dollar account balance. Or, if you really wanted to, you could send it to your local bank and then make a transfer — but that just adds more steps along the way. If you wanted to just receive it into your domestic account in the US and then transfer it to Wise and make a conversion, that’s just more steps and more complicated.
So if you can directly get the payouts to go to your Wise USD account, then you can choose whether to convert it to another currency, or to hold and wait and pre-plan to convert at the rate you’d like. I’d definitely advise doing that, just because you’re going to at least have transparency on the exchange rate and what you’re being charged when you make that conversion.
Hugo: That’s great. So somebody asked about the corporate accounts — but I think they work similarly to the personal accounts?
Nadia: Yes. I guess it depends what we’re talking about in terms of “similarly,” but the product is essentially the same. Of course, there are a few different requirements with the corporate accounts, just because it’s a different nature when you’re onboarding businesses. But we also have different features available for corporate accounts that we might not have for individual accounts. We have integrations for things like accounting and invoice payments. You can also have multi-user access with a business account, so you can get your different employees access to the account and do double approvals of payments. So we have a set of features that are constantly being developed specifically for businesses, that wouldn’t apply to individual consumers.
On the onboarding part, there might be some different information required, depending on the nature and size of the business. But usually, if you’re a small business — which a lot of our business customers are, small and medium businesses — it should be a pretty easy onboarding process. I actually was recently opening an account in the UK for a business, and you just had to put in some basic details about the directors of the entity, the company number, and so on. Honestly, within a couple of minutes you can open it.
Hugo: Thank you. So this is a nice example. Somebody says they want to sell some US stocks and then receive euros in their French bank account. They asked: should they tell their broker to send the money obtained from the sold stocks to a Wise account they’ve already set up? And how does the process work, so it ends up in euros at a French bank?
Nadia: Yeah. Probably the best way to do that — because it’s unlikely the firm would necessarily have an integration with Wise. Some do — I think Interactive Brokers, for example, has an integration with Wise, so they’d already automatically use our exchange rates and our whole payment infrastructure. That’s actually one cool part of Wise: we’re building an underlying infrastructure for different banks, financial institutions, or even other types of companies, like payroll companies, so they can use our infrastructure without the consumers having to leave. But most brokers are not going to be there yet, so it’s doubtful the broker you’re operating with will have that integration already.
So — sorry, that was a long-winded way of saying — in that case, it would be ideal, similar to the previous example on the pensioner, for you to send to your US dollar account within Wise. Once you have that in there, you can either use Wise to pay out directly to the euro account you hold, or convert it within the app to euros. So you can either convert it to the euro balance, or do a “send money” transfer from our app, from US dollars into your local euro account.
Hugo: So I think the concept of these multi-currency accounts is quite new for a lot of people. I’ve used them — it’s fantastic. You essentially have one account, but it’s like having bank accounts in different countries. You can just transfer between them at much better exchange rates than banks would offer. Within your same Wise account, you can hold US dollars and euros and transfer between them, and from the euro part of your Wise account you can then transfer to your French bank, for example. So it makes receiving money and sending money in different countries very simple, from one account.
There are lots of questions along those lines about how the process works — but you essentially open one Wise account. From how many countries can you open one?
Nadia: In terms of countries, you can open it from many different countries — sorry, I don’t have the number off the top of my head, but it’s many more than 40 countries you can open from. The 40 I’m talking about is currencies that we operate in. But almost anywhere in the world, you can open it.
Hugo: Yeah. And then you open the one account, and it’s like having bank accounts in different countries, but all within one account.
Nadia: Yeah.
Hugo: You can hold your money in different currencies and transfer it between them. And with your one account, you get bank details for different countries, right? So you get a US account number and routing number, and, for example, a UK bank detail. Is that right?
Nadia: Yeah, exactly. While we operate in around 40 different currencies, the bank account details are around eight. So you’d be able to get account details — just to name a few, I mentioned US dollars, euros, pounds, but you could also get Australian dollars, Turkish lira, Singaporean dollars, yen. So you can get a number of different account details, specifically so that you can actually receive payments into those accounts.
Hugo: Or send from them, in those countries.
Nadia: Yeah.
Hugo: And somebody says: “Is it possible to have a joint account?”
Nadia: Right now we’re not offering joint accounts — but stay tuned. Hopefully it’s something we’ll offer soon.
Hugo: What about FATCA reporting?
Nadia: Yes. If you are in the US — that’s what I was referring to earlier — you just need to disclose where you’re going to be operating from, and that you’re a US person, to make sure it’s clear that there has to be some reporting done. As a US person in the US, it’s relatively straightforward, and as I said, we’ll have the statements available for you to pull that information to provide for FATCA, and we’ll take care of that.
That’s why it might be a bit more complex if, let’s say, you were a resident in Europe and you wanted access to an interest-bearing account — you might not be able to have access to that as a US person, just because of the complexities of FATCA reporting. So you have to look at your specific case. If your account is based in the US, it’s a bit different — you’ll still be able to have access to multiple different products.
Hugo: So here’s an interesting one. Somebody said that within, for example, different European countries that all use the euro — if somebody’s receiving a payment from a government in, for example, France, they won’t make a payment to a Wise account in Belgium. Are you aware of that, and is there a way around it?
Nadia: Yeah. So that’s what we call IBAN discrimination. It is an issue. For most payments you receive, it shouldn’t be a problem, but there are going to be issues like that, and right now there’s no way around it. The best advice I could give is that if you’re living in France and you need to receive a payment like that, you’ll probably still need a local account.
We are working on it, and trying to figure out how we can better localize our account details offerings, such that if you’re living in France — or signed up to the French entity — you’d be able to receive those payments by having local French IBANs. But we’re not quite there yet. Right now our IBANs within Europe are still Belgium-originated, so there are some limitations from that perspective if there are certain governments or whatnot.
But it’s definitely a problem we’re very aware of. It’s something we’re actually very actively lobbying the European Union about. IBAN discrimination is actually a breach of regulation — it shouldn’t be something that banks or other payment companies allow — but unfortunately it’s definitely market practice in some places.
Hugo: Well, I think we’ve more or less answered all the questions. Thank you very much, Nadia — it was a lot to get through, a fantastic presentation. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Our next session, on investment environments and themes for US expats in 2026, starts in just half an hour, so if you haven’t already, you can register for that at usexpatconference.com.
From personal experience, I know Wise is, in its simplest form, a great solution if you’re going to transfer money internationally — which almost all expats have to. You’ll get more money coming out the other end than if you do it via a bank. So definitely look into it, and the multi-currency accounts are a bonus on top of that basic function, in my experience at least. But thank you very much, everyone, and I hope to see you soon.
Nadia: Bye. Thanks.