Our Verdict on the Modulr Business Account
Modulr is not a bank, and everything else follows from that. It’s Modulr FS Limited, an FCA-authorised electronic money institution under FRN 900573, and what it sells is a subscription payments platform with sort codes attached: accounts payable, spend management and payroll, wired into your accounting software.
Your money is safeguarded under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011 rather than protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. In practice that means it’s held in segregated accounts at authorised credit institutions or with the Bank of England, ring-fenced from Modulr’s own balance sheet, but with no compensation scheme behind it. If FSCS cover to £120,000 is a hard requirement for client money or reserves, this is the wrong product and Starling is the obvious comparison.
Modulr cannot replace your main business bank account. It offers no overdraft or other credit, because an e-money institution is not permitted to lend customer funds. You also get no debit card for your own spending: its virtual company cards are designed for staff, with limits and receipt capture attached.
We rate Modulr for businesses making regular supplier or payroll payments that need more than one person’s approval. Its subscription pays for automation rather than cheaper transfers, so it makes sense only when the manual work has become the larger cost. You will still need a licensed bank account for everyday card spending, borrowing and deposit protection.
Key Pros and Cons
Modulr should be compared with the cost of running payments manually, not with the monthly fee on an ordinary current account. You are paying for invoices, approvals and reconciliation to move through one system. If those jobs still take little staff time, the subscription is difficult to justify.
Modulr at a glance
- A direct participant in Faster Payments and Bacs, with its own Bank of England settlement accounts.
- Two-way Xero, QuickBooks, Sage and BrightPay integrations, not read-only feeds.
- Unlimited approval workflows on every tier, so payments need the right sign-off.
- Virtual company cards with category controls, limits and in-app receipts.
- Free transfers between your own Modulr accounts, and unlimited card payments.
- No FSCS protection; funds are safeguarded under e-money rules instead.
- No overdraft, credit facility or lending of any kind.
- No owner debit card, which rules out most sole-trader use.
- No free tier: the cheapest plan is £16.25 a month before any payments.
- No published response-time commitment for general support.
Plans and fees verified from modulrfinance.com/pricing, 20 August 2026.
Who Modulr Is Best For
The right customer has outgrown ad-hoc transfers. A few dozen payments a month, more than one person who has to approve them, and a genuine need to stop rekeying invoices or payroll files. At a 40-person agency running month-end, that looks like a bookkeeper queuing 120 contractor invoices, a director approving from a phone, and a Faster Payments batch settling in one run rather than 120.
Don’t buy Modulr to undercut a high-street tariff on transaction cost, because it won’t. Bronze at £20 a month with 35 payments included is more expensive than a typical £8.50-a-month account charging 30p a payment at any realistic volume, and high-street tariffs vary, so price your own before you decide. What you’re buying is the automation.
You are the wrong customer if you’re a sole trader who needs one account and a card in your pocket. Tide, Starling and Mettle all beat Modulr on cost and convenience for that. You’re also the wrong customer if deposit protection is a hard line, or if you’ll need an overdraft: neither is available here at any price, and both are easier to arrange before you have moved your payment operations than after.
Modulr Account Eligibility and Application
Who Can Open a Modulr Account
Modulr accepts UK limited companies, limited liability partnerships, ordinary partnerships and sole traders, which is broader than Mettle and much the same shape as Tide and Starling. Charities are the exception worth reading twice: you qualify only as a limited company by guarantee registered with the Charity Commission, so unregistered charities and societies cannot apply.
The direct plans have no minimum trading volume or revenue threshold. A small business can therefore subscribe if its payment workload justifies the monthly fee; it does not have to reach a published turnover level first.
Sector and jurisdiction are the real filters. Modulr blocks a strict list of jurisdictions, including Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Russia and Syria, and treats adult, gambling and some crypto businesses case by case. That screening happens before identity checks even open, so a grey-area business can lose a week assembling documents nobody will look at. If there’s any doubt about your sector, call sales before you start.
What You Need to Apply
Have the ownership and identity documents ready before you begin the portal application. Modulr asks for the Companies House number, identification for each director and details of every Person with Significant Control (PSC), along with the registered office, business structure and ultimate beneficial owners.
Larger or higher-risk businesses go further. Modulr reviews the financial-crime controls you run yourself, meaning the systems you have in place for money laundering, sanctions and fraud risk. That is more demanding than a current-account application and it’s not a form you finish in an afternoon.
Build in a week or two for documents and follow-up questions. When you submit the pack and a question comes back about a beneficial owner, the clock is on your side of the table, not Modulr’s. If you’re switching your payment operations to a date, that lead time is the part that slips, and it slips before anyone has told you what is missing.
Modulr Account Fees and Pricing
Monthly Fees and Plan Options
Modulr sells three product lines and three tiers within each, and the right starting point is your real monthly payment count rather than the headline price. We verified every figure below against the pricing page in August 2026.
| Plan | Bronze | Silver | Platinum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accounts Payable and Spend Management | £20 (35 payments) | £75 (200) | £320 (1,100) |
| Bundle, adding Payroll | £30 (80 payments) | £110 (500) | £500 (3,000) |
| Payroll Payments only | £16.25 (35 payments) | £67.20 (200) | £300 (1,100) |
| Each payment above the allowance | 80p | 40p | 32p |
| Source: https://www.modulrfinance.com/pricing, all three plan tabs. Verified 20 August 2026. | |||
We found no free tier at all, which is the plainest difference from Mettle. The cheapest way in is Payroll Payments Bronze at £16.25 a month, and even that sits above a typical high-street account at £8.50 a month plus per-transaction fees. If you want application programming interface access rather than the portal, you leave this table entirely and go onto Modulr’s quote-based platform pricing.
The subscription earns its place only when it costs less than the work it removes. Add up the time spent rekeying invoices, chasing approvals and reconciling completed payments, then compare that staff cost with the relevant plan. A lightly used account will struggle to justify the fee; a shared payment process has more to gain from the automation.
Transaction Fees and Charges
Once you pass the included allowance the overage clock starts, at 80p a payment on Bronze, 40p on Silver and 32p on Platinum. Sterling Faster Payments and Bacs and euro SEPA and SEPA Instant payments all draw on that same allowance, so euro payments over the cap are charged at the same per-payment rate as sterling ones.
We priced CHAPS separately: it sits outside the allowance at £17.50 a payment on every tier, which makes it an expensive habit for anything that is not genuinely same-day and high value. International payments in other currencies cost £3 each plus the exchange margin and any SWIFT fees, and those SWIFT fees are shown and charged at the point of the transaction rather than bundled.
Transfers between your own Modulr accounts are free, and card payments through Spend Management are unlimited and included in the subscription, so a business issuing a lot of employee cards is not paying twice.
The overage arithmetic is where most of the money is won or lost. Run 250 supplier invoices in a month on Bundle Bronze and you pay the £30 fee plus 170 payments at 80p, which is £136 of overage and £166 in total. Bundle Silver is £110 with 500 payments included, so the upgrade saves £56 that month and removes the overage entirely. When a busy quarter pushes you 50 payments over on Bronze twice, the tier you chose at signup is the one costing you money.
Modulr Features and Business Banking Tools
Invoicing and Expense Management
We found no customer invoicing here at all. Modulr handles money going out, not money coming in, so if you need to raise invoices and chase aged debt inside the same app, this is the wrong tool and Tide is the closest match for that workflow.
What you get instead is supplier-invoice intake by three routes: upload to the portal, forward to a dedicated mailbox, or sync from Xero, QuickBooks or Sage. Artificial intelligence reads invoice totals on Bronze, and line-item extraction arrives on Silver and Platinum. You build the payment run, approvers confirm it, Faster Payments releases the money, and the reconciliation pushes back to your ledger without anyone matching entries by hand at month-end.
For staff spending, Spend Management issues virtual company cards with category controls and preset limits, and the team captures receipts in the app as they go. That’s the part that stops the expenses conversation happening three weeks late.
Integrations and Accounting Software
The integrations with Xero, QuickBooks, Sage and BrightPay are two-way, and that’s the genuine upgrade over a bank. A high-street account lets Xero import your transactions. Modulr lets invoices flow in, payments execute, and the executed payments reconcile back into the ledger, with no exported files and no quarter-end matching exercise.
On payroll the same shape applies: upload a batch through the BrightPay sync, approve it on a phone, fire Faster Payments to every employee in one run, and see the reconciled payments land back in BrightPay for the year-end records.
Comparing that two-way process with a standard bank feed, we rate it as the clearest reason to pay for Modulr. The bank feed reports what has happened; Modulr can carry an invoice through approval, payment and reconciliation. Embedding payments in your own product requires Modulr’s separately quoted platform service, not one of the direct plans reviewed here.
Modulr Card Usage and Payments
Spending, Transfers and Limits
The missing owner debit card is where most solo directors stop reading. The cards live inside Spend Management: virtual company cards you issue to employees, with category controls, per-card limits and receipt capture against every spend. For your own cash machine trips and card terminals, pair Modulr with Tide or Starling.
The transfers tell a better story. Modulr is a direct participant in UK Faster Payments and Bacs and holds its own Bank of England settlement accounts, rather than routing through a partner bank, and it documents processing around the clock with uniquely issued sort codes and account numbers per customer or sub-account. When a supplier rings at 5:55pm on a Friday chasing payment, you queue the Faster Payment in the portal and it settles in under 90 seconds.
Confirmation of Payee is enrolled in both directions, and Modulr was the first non-bank in the UK to launch it, in September 2020. Multi-payee checking is included at no extra cost, which matters more than it sounds: one wrong account number in a payroll batch is one salary paid to a stranger, and checking the batch is the only point at which that is cheap to fix.
Overseas Payments and FX Fees
Euro payments through SEPA and SEPA Instant draw on the same monthly allowance as your sterling payments, and are charged at the same per-payment overage rate once you pass it: 80p on Bronze, 40p on Silver, 32p on Platinum. Modulr states this directly on its pricing page, which counts pay-ins and pay-outs in sterling and euro against one number.
Everything else is a separate arrangement. Payments in 19 other currencies, including US and Australian dollars, Canadian dollars, Swedish and Norwegian krone, Polish złoty and Indian rupees, cost £3 each plus a currency margin of 0.5% to 1.2% depending on the pair and the amount, with SWIFT fees shown and charged at the point of transaction on top. Both the foreign exchange and the international payments are provided by The Currency Cloud Limited rather than by Modulr, and both are available on the Accounts Payable product only, which is easy to miss if you buy a payroll-only plan and then need to pay an overseas contractor.
A margin of 0.5% to 1.2% is reasonable for occasional payments and loose at volume. If you settle overseas suppliers weekly, we rate splitting the stack as the cheaper arrangement: Modulr for sterling accounts payable and payroll, a specialist such as Wise or Airwallex for the cross-border leg. For a handful of payments a quarter, keeping everything inside one approval workflow is worth more than the spread.
Modulr Customer Reviews and Ratings
We read the Trustpilot profile on 20 August 2026: 4.5 out of 5 from 158 reviews, up from 143 in May, with the score unchanged. That is “Excellent” on the scale, on a modest base, which is what a business-to-business platform usually looks like.
Read that base carefully, though, because not every reviewer is a Modulr customer. A meaningful share are end users of embedded-finance partners who build their own branded products on Modulr’s rails, and their experience is of the partner brand rather than of the portal you would be buying. Plutus is named explicitly in the reviews.
Among reviews clearly written by direct customers, including an accountant, a transport firm and an employer using BrightPay, we found consistent praise for the Xero and BrightPay integrations, onboarding after identity checks and bulk payment execution. Complaints focus more on slow answers to onboarding questions than on failed payment runs. If you are moving payroll on a fixed date, the unresolved query is therefore the risk to plan around.
One piece of regulatory history is worth knowing because most reviews skip it. In October 2023 the FCA imposed a voluntary requirement on Modulr that paused onboarding of new agent and distributor partners, meaning firms issuing their own branded products on Modulr’s infrastructure. It never applied to direct business customers and never touched the EU operation, and the FCA lifted it in July 2024 subject to a ten business-day notification condition for new partners. If you’re a direct applicant, it doesn’t affect you.
On support, Modulr publishes a fraud line on 159 around the clock and a service status page, but there is no published response-time commitment for general business support. If your payment operations depend on a contracted response window, ask sales for one in writing before you sign, because it isn’t something you can add afterwards.
Modulr Alternatives to Consider
We set Modulr against licensed banks and free e-money accounts for the same jobs, and nothing gives you its automation and deposit protection in one account, which is why most businesses that use it run something else alongside. Starling holds a full banking licence, so deposits are covered to £120,000 and an overdraft is at least possible. Tide is the better fit for a sole trader who wants one account, a card and invoicing. Revolut is worth pricing if the cross-border leg is the expensive part of your month.
FAQs
Is Modulr a bank?
No. Modulr is an FCA-authorised electronic money institution, Modulr FS Limited, firm reference number 900573. Customer funds are safeguarded under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011, held in segregated accounts at authorised credit institutions or directly with the Bank of England, and are not protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Modulr’s own terms disclose that in an insolvency the insolvency practitioner’s costs may be deducted from safeguarded funds before customers are paid.
How much does Modulr cost?
Accounts Payable and Spend Management is £20 a month for 35 payments, £75 for 200 and £320 for 1,100. The Bundle adding Payroll is £30, £110 and £500. Payroll Payments alone is £16.25, £67.20 and £300. Payments above the allowance cost 80p, 40p or 32p depending on tier. CHAPS is £17.50 each. International payments are £3 plus a 0.5% to 1.2% margin and any SWIFT fees. Verified from modulrfinance.com/pricing on 20 August 2026.
What is the difference between Modulr and a bank like Starling?
A licensed bank holds your money as a deposit on its own balance sheet and protects eligible deposits through the FSCS up to £120,000. Modulr is an e-money institution: it can’t hold your money as a deposit and can’t lend it, so it must safeguard it in segregated accounts at credit institutions or with the Bank of England. The practical result is tight ring-fencing from Modulr’s own balance sheet, but no overdraft, no credit and no FSCS.
Does Modulr offer an overdraft or any credit?
No. As an electronic money institution Modulr is prohibited from lending customer funds, so there are no overdrafts, credit facilities or business loans. If you need short-term borrowing alongside your payment operations, run a licensed bank account or a specialist finance provider in parallel.
How are euro and international payments charged?
Euro payments through SEPA and SEPA Instant draw on the same monthly allowance as sterling Faster Payments and Bacs, and are charged at the same overage rate once you pass it: 80p, 40p or 32p by tier. Payments in 19 other currencies cost £3 each plus a margin of 0.5% to 1.2%, with SWIFT fees charged at the point of transaction. Foreign exchange and international payments are provided by The Currency Cloud Limited and are available on the Accounts Payable product only.
What was the 2023 FCA restriction on Modulr?
In October 2023 the FCA imposed a voluntary requirement that paused Modulr from onboarding new agent and distributor partners, meaning firms using its infrastructure to issue their own branded products. It did not affect onboarding of direct business or corporate customers and did not affect the EU operation. The FCA lifted it in July 2024, subject to a ten business-day prior notification condition for new partner onboarding.
How we reviewed Modulr
Ranking criteria. We assessed Modulr on published plan pricing and overage, what each product line includes, eligibility and onboarding, accounting integration depth, payment scheme participation, international pricing, regulatory status and how customer funds are held, then set it against licensed banks and free e-money accounts for the same jobs.
Data sources. We read every plan price and payment allowance from all three tabs of modulrfinance.com/pricing in August 2026, alongside the published currency list and the note that foreign exchange is provided by The Currency Cloud Limited. We took the regulatory status from the FCA register: Modulr FS Limited, FRN 900573. No aggregator data was used.
Update cadence. We re-verify this page when Modulr changes pricing, plan structure or terms, and the verification date reflects the most recent full review. BusinessExpert earns no commission from Modulr. Tide and Revolut in the also-consider strip are affiliate partners; Starling is not. See our editorial policy.