Modulr Review (2026): EMI, Not a Bank — When the Subscription Pays Off

Our Verdict on the Modulr Business Bank Account

You need to read this first: Modulr isn’t a bank. We verified that with the FCA Register in May 2026 — it’s Modulr FS Limited (FRN 900573), an FCA-authorised EMI.

Your locked H2 above says “Business Bank Account.” That’s the section format. The product’s a subscription payments platform: AP, Spend Management and Payroll with sort codes attached.

You should act on this bit: your money’s safeguarded under EMRs 2011, not FSCS-protected. If you need FSCS cover up to £120,000, look at Starling instead.

Choose Modulr when you’re paying dozens of supplier invoices a month, running payroll, or issuing employee cards with spend controls. The subscription buys you the automation.

You should treat it as a payment-operations platform with banking-style sort codes — not a current-account replacement. That’s our frame for the rest of this page.

You won’t get a debit card for your wallet. Modulr’s the engine room, not the front desk. We’d call that the cleanest one-line summary.

Key Pros and Cons

Who Modulr Is Best For

You’re the right fit when ad-hoc bank transfers have stopped scaling. A few dozen payments a month, multiple approvers, real need for AP or payroll automation.

You shouldn’t buy Modulr to undercut a high-street tariff on transaction cost. Bronze (£20/month, 35 included payments) is more expensive than a typical £8.50/month-plus-30p high-street account at most realistic volumes.

You should choose Modulr for the AP and payroll automation, not the per-transfer arithmetic. Different banks (HSBC, Barclays, NatWest) charge different tariffs — model your own bank’s before you decide.

Picture your month-end at a 40-person agency: your bookkeeper queues 120 contractor invoices, your director taps approve on her phone, the Faster Payments batch settles. Bronze Bundle at £30/month covers most of it.

You’re the wrong fit if you’re a sole trader needing one current account and a debit card. Tide, Starling or Mettle beat Modulr on cost there.

You’re also the wrong fit if FSCS protection is a hard line for your client money or capital reserves. Pair Modulr with a licensed bank for FSCS-eligible holdings.

You won’t get an overdraft or credit facility. Plan for both before you sign. We’ve seen finance teams trip on this after signing.

Modulr Account Eligibility and Application

Who Can Open a Modulr Account

You can apply if you’re a UK Limited Company, LLP, Ordinary Partnership or Sole Trader. We verified the list from modulr.com onboarding docs in May 2026.

You’ll find limited companies and partnerships are both in. Broader than Mettle (no LLPs or partnerships). Same shape as Tide and Starling.

Your charity status matters here. You must be a Limited Company by Guarantee registered with the Charities Commission. Unregistered charities and societies can’t apply.

You won’t hit a minimum trading volume or revenue threshold for direct plans — we confirmed that with modulr.com/pricing on 20 May 2026. Your subscription tier is the only gate.

Your sector matters too. Modulr blocks a strict set of jurisdictions (Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, Syria and more) and case-by-cases adult, gambling and certain crypto.

When you submit your application, your sector goes through compliance review before KYB even opens. A week wasted on docs for an unaccepted business is friction your finance team won’t thank you for.

Pick up the phone to Modulr sales first if you’re in any kind of grey-area sector.

What You Need to Apply

You apply through the Modulr Portal. Have your Companies House number, director ID and PSC details to hand before you start.

Your KYB pack needs to cover business structure, registered office, every director, every Person with Significant Control (PSC), and Ultimate Beneficial Owners.

Bigger or higher-risk businesses go through extra: Modulr reviews your own financial-crime control framework — the systems you run to manage money-laundering, sanctions and fraud risk.

You’ll find this more demanding than a typical current-account application. Build in a week or two for documents and questions.

Check the current document list at modulr.com before you apply — KYB requirements move with regulation.

Modulr Account Fees and Pricing

Monthly Fees and Plan Options

Pick the tier that matches your real payment volume. We verified every figure below against modulr.com/pricing on 20 May 2026.

You pay £20/month for AP & Spend Management Bronze (35 payments included). Silver £75/month (200). Platinum £320/month (1,100).

You pay £30/month for Bronze Bundle (AP plus Payroll, 80 payments). Silver Bundle £110/month (500). Platinum Bundle £500/month (3,000).

Payroll-only lands a touch cheaper: Bronze £16.25/month, Silver £67.20/month, Platinum £300/month — same payment counts as the AP-only plans.

Need API access rather than the SaaS portal? You’ll be on Modulr’s custom “Platform Pricing” instead. Quote-based, not on this page.

You won’t find a free tier. Not the same as Mettle.

Your cheapest direct-to-business plan is £16.25/month for Payroll Bronze. Compare that to high-street accounts at £8.50/month plus per-transaction fees, or fully free EMIs like Mettle.

Only sign once your volume and workflow needs justify the platform. Model your numbers first. We mean it — don’t skip this.

Transaction Fees and Charges

Once you blow past your included payments, the overage clock starts. 80p on Bronze, 40p on Silver, 32p on Platinum.

Your Faster Payments, Bacs (GBP) and SEPA / SEPA Instant (EUR) all draw against the same allowance.

You’ll pay CHAPS separately: £17.50 per payment, every tier. Avoid CHAPS for routine same-day transfers if you can.

Your international payments in USD, AUD, CAD and the rest of the SWIFT corridor cost £3 per payment plus FX spread and any SWIFT fees.

Your FX spread runs 0.5% to 1.2% depending on currency pair and amount. Compare against Wise or Airwallex directly before routing significant cross-border volume through Modulr — we haven’t benchmarked the rates side by side and currency-pair pricing can change.

You won’t pay for internal transfers between your own Modulr accounts. Virtual card payments are unlimited and bundled into your subscription.

Worked example: at month-end you’re running 250 supplier invoices on Bronze Bundle. £30 monthly fee plus 170 overage payments at 80p — £136 in overage. Total £166.

Switch to Silver Bundle at £110/month, get 500 payments included, kill the overage entirely. That’s your trigger.

You should model your real volume against the tier table before picking. Don’t default to Bronze and bleed.

Modulr Features and Business Banking Tools

Invoicing and Expense Management

You won’t get customer invoicing here. If you need to raise invoices and chase aged debt inside the banking app, this is the wrong tool.

Choose a current account with built-in invoicing instead — Tide is the closest match for that workflow.

You’ll get supplier-invoice intake with Modulr. Three routes in: upload to the Portal, forward to a dedicated mailbox, or sync from Xero, QuickBooks or Sage.

You get AI extraction reading invoice totals on Bronze; line-item extraction kicks in on Silver and Platinum. You build the payment, approvers tap their phones, Faster Payments releases the funds.

Your reconciliation pushes back to your accounting ledger automatically. No manual matching at month-end.

For your employee expenses, Spend Management gives you virtual company cards with category controls and pre-set limits. Your team captures receipts in-app; spend flows back to your integration.

Integrations and Accounting Software

You get deep native integrations with Xero, QuickBooks, Sage and BrightPay. These aren’t read-only Open Banking feeds — they’re bidirectional.

Your invoices flow in to Modulr; executed payments reconcile back into your ledger automatically. No CSV exports, no quarter-end matching exercises.

On payroll, you can upload a batch via the BrightPay sync, run director approval on mobile, and fire Faster Payments to every employee in one flow.

Your reconciled payments land back in BrightPay for your year-end records. That’s genuine workflow automation, not a status import.

Need API access for custom embedding? You’ll be on Modulr’s quote-based “Platform Pricing” tier, not the SaaS plans on this page.

Choose this if you want to initiate and reconcile payments inside the accounting stack — not just import transactions like your high-street bank lets Xero do. That’s the real upgrade.

Modulr Card Usage and Payments

Spending, Transfers and Limits

You won’t get a single owner debit card. Modulr doesn’t do that. That matters for solo directors.

Your cards live inside Spend Management: virtual company cards you issue to employees, with category controls, per-card limits and in-app receipt capture against every spend.

For your own ATM trips, coffees and in-person terminals as a director, Modulr’s the wrong shape. Pair it with Tide or Starling if you need a headline owner card.

Your transfers tell a different story. Modulr is a direct participant in UK Faster Payments and Bacs, holding its own Bank of England settlement accounts.

You get direct scheme participation rather than routing via a partner bank. Modulr documents 24/7/365 processing and uniquely issued sort codes and account numbers per customer or sub-account.

Friday at 5:55pm, your supplier’s on the phone chasing payment. You queue the Faster Payment in the Portal, it settles in under 90 seconds, the supplier confirms.

Month-end payroll for 25 staff: when you submit the BrightPay batch, all salary payments fire over Faster Payments in one approved run rather than being queued and released individually.

You also get Confirmation of Payee enrolled both ways. Modulr was the first non-bank in the UK to launch CoP (September 2020).

You won’t pay for Multi-Payee Checking (Multi-CoP) — useful when one wrong account number in a payroll batch means one wrong payment.

Overseas Payments and FX Fees

Your SEPA and SEPA Instant Euro payments draw against your monthly payment allowance. Confirm at modulr.com how SEPA overage is charged once you exceed the cap — we haven’t verified whether SEPA above-cap follows the same 80p / 40p / 32p tier as Faster Payments.

For other currencies routing via partner banks, you pay £3 per payment plus a 0.5%–1.2% FX spread, plus any SWIFT fees on the receiving chain.

For high cross-border volume, we’d benchmark Modulr’s FX directly against Wise, Airwallex or your existing FX provider on your actual currency pairs. The 0.5%–1.2% Modulr spread is competitive for occasional payments but we haven’t run a like-for-like rate comparison.

If you’re paying overseas suppliers weekly in any meaningful volume, consider splitting your stack: Modulr for UK AP and payroll, a specialist FX account for cross-border volume.

For your occasional international payments — a handful per quarter — staying inside Modulr’s AP workflow usually outweighs the friction of a second provider.

Your breakeven is volume-dependent. Run your last quarter’s cross-border total against a specialist FX provider before you commit.

Modulr Customer Reviews and Ratings

You should read the score with a caveat. Trustpilot puts Modulr at 4.5/5 from 143 reviews (May 2026, we checked).

You’re looking at “Excellent” on Trustpilot’s scale, with a modest review base. Consistent with Modulr’s B2B audience.

When you read those reviews, note the catch: not every Modulr reviewer is a direct customer. A meaningful share are end-users of embedded-finance partners (Plutus is named explicitly).

You’re not reading about the Portal when you read those reviews. Their experience is mediated by the partner brand, not Modulr’s own UX.

Where you see direct customers — accountants, transport firms, employers running BrightPay — the themes are tight Xero and BrightPay integration, quick onboarding once KYB clears, and reliable bulk-payment execution.

When your score sinks here, it’s usually slow human responses during onboarding queries.

You should know about the October 2023 FCA Voluntary Requirement. Most reviews skip it.

Skip ahead if you’re a direct SME applicant: the VREQ only paused Modulr’s onboarding of new Agent and Distributor (A&D) partners — firms using Modulr’s rails to issue their own branded products.

You can ignore it for direct SME or corporate onboarding. The FCA lifted it in July 2024 with a 10 business-day prior-notification condition for new A&D partners.

For your day-to-day support, Modulr publishes a 24/7 fraud line on 159 and a status page at modulr.statuspage.io. We verified that with modulr.com/contact-us in May 2026.

You won’t find a published response-time SLA for general support. Picture Monday morning, a payment’s stuck, your finance lead is on hold — there’s no contractual response window.

If a written SLA matters to your operation, ask sales for one before you sign. We’d not skip that step.

Modulr Alternatives to Consider

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