Our Verdict on the Transferra Business Account
Transferra suits you if you need a UK sterling IBAN, a euro IBAN and US dollar account details on the same dashboard, with a named contact when a payment stalls. It replaces the awkward split between a UK current account and a separate currency service, but only earns its monthly fee when you use those cross-border features regularly.
Skip it if you trade mostly in sterling, run as a sole trader or a limited liability partnership, or hold balances large enough that deposit protection matters. Transferra Un Limited is an FCA-authorised electronic money institution, company number 13014681, authorised under reference 942346 since December 2021. It isn’t a bank, and the distinction isn’t a technicality: as Transferra puts it in its own footer, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme doesn’t cover electronic money products, and no other compensation scheme covers losses from an electronic money account. Safeguarding is not compensation, and that matters if Transferra fails.
Your funds are held in segregated accounts at regulated credit institutions, separate from Transferra’s own money. That protects them from Transferra’s ordinary creditors, but it does not give you the compensation available on eligible deposits held with a licensed bank.
Transferra now publishes its prices in sterling as well as euros. We checked the working currency switch on its full pricing list: Starter is €49 or £42 a month, with a monthly turnover ceiling of €50,000 or £44,000. That corrects our previous review, which said the sterling view did not work.
Based on the published tariff, we put Transferra firmly in the cross-border account category rather than general UK banking. Starter includes domestic sterling and SEPA payments without a per-transfer fee, which can justify the subscription for regular international trade. A domestic-only limited company has little reason to accept the monthly charge or give up deposit protection of up to £120,000.
Key Pros and Cons
Transferra charges a subscription for multi-currency payments and, on the higher plans, a named account manager. Your plan also changes the payment fees, currency margin and available tools, so choosing the wrong tier can matter more than choosing the provider itself.
Transferra at a glance
- A UK sterling IBAN with Faster Payments, Bacs and CHAPS, so it passes payroll routing checks.
- Balances in more than 40 currencies, with a euro IBAN and US dollar account details.
- Free incoming and outgoing domestic sterling and SEPA payments on the Starter plan.
- A named account manager rather than a chatbot from the Global plan upwards.
- Prices published in both euros and sterling, with closure and dormancy fees stated upfront.
- No FSCS cover, no interest on balances, and no overdraft or credit at all.
- The currency margin is tiered, not flat: 1%, 0.75% and 0.50% by plan.
- Global charges £10 per domestic sterling payment in each direction, and €15 per SEPA payment.
- €100 to close the account, and €100 a month once it has been dormant three months.
- No published list of which business entity types are accepted.
- No application programming interface and no bulk payments on Starter.
Fees verified from transferra.uk/pricing/full-list/, 20 August 2026.
Who Transferra Is Best For
Transferra is aimed at UK and European companies that invoice or pay across borders in euros and dollars. It makes most sense when those payments are frequent enough for a single multi-currency account to save work, and when having a named person to contact about a delayed wire is worth paying for.
Avoid Transferra if you’re a sole trader, a limited liability partnership, or a sterling-only business. The plan structure assumes incorporated cross-border trade, and the entity types outside that assumption are not addressed anywhere in the published policies.
For a domestic-only limited company the comparison is not close. Starling and Tide are materially cheaper and hold banking licences, so deposits are protected to £120,000. The subscription only earns its place when the currency rails and the human support are doing real work every month.
Transferra Account Eligibility and Application
Who Can Open a Transferra Account
Check eligibility before you check the fees, because the published Acceptance Policy controls who can open an account and it is geography-led rather than entity-led. Zone 1 markets, meaning the UK, European Union member states and similar developed economies, are approved. Zone 2 is case by case, Zone 3 requires enhanced due diligence, and the prohibited country list is blocked outright.
What the policy doesn’t do is name which business structures are accepted. We searched the Acceptance Policy, the pricing pages and the site footer in August 2026 and found no entity list: sole trader, limited liability partnership, partnership, charity and community interest company eligibility are simply not addressed. The onboarding flow visibly assumes an incorporated entity with beneficial owners, and that’s the safest reading of it.
Plan choice follows ownership complexity rather than turnover, which is unusual and easy to get wrong. Starter requires direct ownership with no parent company and caps at three beneficial owners. Global allows up to five and one shareholding company in the chain. Specialised opens up to holdings, trusts and multi-layered groups, with manual compliance review priced from €399 a month and a one-off onboarding fee from €999.
Transferra also states that it accepts crypto-related businesses, which is unusual for an electronic money institution and is a genuine point of difference: Wise Business and Revolut Business both apply stricter screens there.
What You Need to Apply
Have company registration documents, proof of the business address, and identity documents for every director and beneficial owner. The process opens with a short online questionnaire, and identity checks run through Sumsub, the same verification provider several of the larger platforms use.
The timing point worth knowing is where the delay actually sits. The verification clock doesn’t start until every beneficial owner has uploaded everything, so when you’re waiting on a proof-of-address letter for one director, the account is not being reviewed at all. Approval typically follows within three business days for a company account and one for an individual one. If you’re switching accounts to a fixed date, count backwards from the day your first payroll run has to clear, not from the day you apply.
You must be 18 or over, and there’s no minimum trading history, so a newly incorporated entity can apply on day one. That’s genuinely useful if you’re standing up a UK subsidiary specifically to invoice in euros.
Transferra Account Fees and Pricing
Monthly Fees and Plan Options
The published tariff shows that your bill is made up of a subscription and plan-specific transaction charges. We therefore assessed the currency margin, sterling and SEPA payments, international wires and card fees by tier. “Free transfers” applies to Starter payments covered by its allowance, not to Transferra as a whole.
| Plan | Starter | Global | Specialised |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly fee | €49 (£42) | €149 | From €399 |
| Monthly turnover ceiling | €50,000 (£44,000) | €300,000 | Unlimited |
| One-off onboarding fee | Free | €499 | From €999 |
| Currency exchange margin | 1% | 0.75% | 0.50% |
| Domestic sterling, in and out | Free | £10 each way | 0.25% (min £50) |
| SEPA and SEPA Instant, in and out | Free | €15 each way | 0.25% (min €50) |
| International wires out | €50 flat | 0.3% (min €50, max €250) | 0.25% (min €100) |
| International wires in | €25 flat | 0.3% (min €50, max €250) | 0.25% (min €100) |
| Card monthly fee | 1 free card | €10 per card | Free |
| Application programming interface and bulk payments | Not included | Included | Included |
| Source: https://transferra.uk/pricing/full-list/, all three tiers in both currencies. Verified 20 August 2026. Non-euro card spending carries a 3% foreign transaction fee on every plan; account closure is €100 and dormancy €100 a month after three months. | |||
Starter only works while your monthly turnover remains below its €50,000 ceiling and you can manage without bulk payments or the application programming interface. A consultancy invoicing roughly €30,000 a month to one European client fits comfortably, but once your turnover reaches €50,000, the plan rules you out even if its payment fees still look attractive.
Move to Global for the interface, bulk payments and a named account manager, and price the onboarding fee in rather than comparing monthly figures. Year one on Global is €1,788 in subscription plus €499 in setup, so €2,287 before you send or receive a payment. Specialised starts at €399 a month with onboarding from €999, which is a year-one subscription from €5,787, and it’s the tier that exists for holdings, trusts and multi-layered groups.
Closing the account costs €100, while an account left dormant for three months costs €100 a month. Both charges are unusual for an electronic money provider in 2026. They may not affect a business using Transferra actively, but they add a material cost when you close a subsidiary or leave the account unused after a project ends.
Transaction Fees and Charges
The Global plan charges for receiving domestic sterling and SEPA payments as well as sending them. It isn’t. Global charges £10 for a domestic sterling payment in each direction, and €15 per SEPA payment each way, so a business that receives as many payments as it sends pays roughly twice what a quick read of the plan suggests. On Global, receiving money costs you the same as sending it. At 100 outgoing sterling payments a month that is £1,000; add 100 incoming and it is £2,000.
Starter is the opposite: domestic sterling and SEPA are free in both directions, and an international wire is a flat €50 out or €25 in. That flat structure suits a low-volume, high-value trader, up to the point where the €50,000 monthly turnover ceiling stops you rather than the fees.
Incoming international pricing is where the previous version of this page was wrong, so it’s worth stating precisely. Starter charges a flat €25. Global charges 0.3% with a €50 minimum and a €250 ceiling. Specialised charges 0.25% with a €100 minimum and no ceiling at all. The €250 cap that makes six-figure trade payments predictable exists on Global, and only on Global.
The currency margin is tiered rather than flat: 1% above interbank on Starter, 0.75% on Global, 0.50% on Specialised. Converting €100,000 into sterling therefore costs roughly £1,000 on Starter, £750 on Global and £500 on Specialised. The 0.5% rate other reviews quote is a Specialised rate, not a Transferra rate. It applies on one plan, from €399 a month, so quoting it as the house rate overstates the case by half.
When you pay 50 European suppliers in a Friday batch on Global, the bill is 50 lots of €15 in SEPA charges, which is €750 before any currency conversion. Bulk payments buy you speed, not a discount. They make the run quicker; they don’t make the per-payment fee smaller. Card spending outside euros carries a flat 3% foreign transaction fee on every plan, and card top-ups are free on Starter and Global but 0.5% on Specialised.
Transferra Features and Business Banking Tools
Invoicing and Expense Management
You won’t find invoicing here, so if you want to raise and chase invoices from the same dashboard you bank in, this is not that product and Tide is the closer match. Most businesses pair Transferra with Xero, QuickBooks or a standalone tool and treat the account purely as the payment rail.
Your expense management is lean rather than absent. The cards capture transactions and feed them into your accounting software, but there’s no native receipt matching, no employee spend rules and no approval workflow. A 20-person agency closing expenses on a Friday afternoon will still want a dedicated expense tool on top; the card programme is a card programme, not an expenses platform.
On the limits themselves, Transferra publishes a card spending ceiling of up to €50,000 a month per card, with two-factor push notifications on both mobile platforms, so a spend-control overlay is not needed for headroom alone.
Integrations and Accounting Software
Reading Transferra’s product and marketing pages in August 2026, we found Xero and QuickBooks named as integration targets but no explanation of how either connection works. Transferra does not say whether the sync uses open banking, a direct bank feed or its own interface. Describing the platform as “designed to integrate seamlessly” is a marketing claim, not a technical specification.
We rate that as a real gap for any business whose month-end depends on feed reliability, because the failure modes of an open banking connection and a direct feed are different, and so is who fixes them. If your accountant works in Sage or FreeAgent, plan on comma-separated exports or a third-party bridge.
Automation starts with Global rather than Starter. There’s no application programming interface at all on Starter, at €49 a month, which is unusual for an electronic money provider built on modern infrastructure in 2026. Global unlocks the payments interface and bulk payments; Specialised adds enhanced compliance hooks. If you intend to automate your payables or sync a ledger, Global is the entry point rather than Starter.
Transferra Card Usage and Payments
Spending, Transfers and Limits
We traced the card issuing: your cards come from Wallester AS under an Estonian licence, with Visa scheme rails on top, rather than by Transferra itself. For almost every transaction that’s invisible. It matters in one situation: a card dispute routes through a different regulator from the one that oversees the underlying account, so a complaint about a chargeback and a complaint about the account don’t go to the same place.
We rate the card line as the one that catches people out, because your middle plan is the expensive one. Starter gives you one free active Visa card and charges €10 a month for each extra. Global charges €10 a month per card with no free allowance at all. Specialised includes every card free. When you issue a card to each of three directors, you pay €20 a month on Starter, €30 on Global, and nothing on Specialised.
When you pay a supplier by domestic sterling transfer, Starter costs nothing and Global costs £10, with SEPA at €15 on Global, and bulk payments are gated to Global and Specialised. What Transferra doesn’t publish anywhere is cash machine fees or withdrawal limits: we looked at the corporate card pages and the full pricing list in August 2026 and neither carries them. Treat the card as unsuitable for cash abroad until Transferra publishes those figures, rather than as an unknown you are meant to chase down yourself.
Overseas Payments and FX Fees
Spending on the card in euros is free, online or through a phone wallet. Every other currency carries a flat 3% foreign transaction fee, on every plan, which puts a £500 hotel bill in dollars at £15 in fees. For anyone who spends non-euro on the card regularly, a paid Wise or Revolut tier stays cheaper.
For wires the plan decides the shape of the cost. Starter pays a flat €50 out. Global pays 0.3% with a hard €250 ceiling, which is precisely why Global works for six-figure trade payments: a £120,000 invoice to a US supplier costs €250 rather than a percentage of the whole. Specialised pays 0.25% with a €100 minimum and no ceiling, so the percentage model rewards volume and stops rewarding size.
Conversion is tiered on top of that: 1% on Starter, 0.75% on Global, 0.50% on Specialised. On Specialised, a predictable 0.5% line compares well against an allowance-and-step-up model once your monthly volume is high enough. On Starter you’re paying double that, and at that point the subscription only makes sense if what you’re buying is the geography-led acceptance and the named contact rather than the exchange rate.
Transferra Customer Reviews and Ratings
Our Trustpilot check only makes sense with the sample size attached. Transferra sat at 4.1 out of 5 from 90 reviews when we checked on 20 August 2026, up from 4.0 from 89 reviews in May. That is a much smaller and more recent base than Wise or Revolut Business, both of which run into six figures, so individual patterns carry more weight than the average does.
We rate human-led support as the dominant positive theme in what you’ll read. Named account managers, an absence of chatbots and fast escalation recur through the five-star reviews, and several reviewers give it as the reason they moved from a larger platform after a frozen payment. If you’ve lost an afternoon inside a chat queue, that’s the feature to price in, and it’s the one Transferra charges for.
We rate delay on early payments as the complaint you are most likely to meet yourself. The pattern clusters on unusual first payments held for compliance review, and it eases once the platform has transaction history to underwrite against. When your first outbound payment is a contractor wire on a salary deadline, a hold of a few hours is not an inconvenience, it’s a problem, so plan the first month around it rather than assuming instant settlement.
Your support is human but not around the clock, and it runs on UK business hours. If your counterparties work on US or Asian clocks, an out-of-hours query waits until the next working day. Set against that, Transferra publishes a phone number, which few electronic money providers do, and it’s consistent with what the reviews describe.
FAQs
Is Transferra a bank?
No. Transferra Un Limited is a UK electronic money institution, registered in England with company number 13014681 and authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under reference 942346 since December 2021. It isn’t a bank, so it can’t hold your money as a deposit or lend it. Funds are safeguarded in segregated accounts at regulated third-party credit institutions under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011.
Is Transferra FSCS protected?
No, and not at any figure. Transferra states it plainly itself: the Financial Services Compensation Scheme doesn’t cover electronic money products, and no other compensation scheme exists to cover losses from an electronic money account. That is a different thing from being covered up to a limit. Your money is instead held in segregated accounts at regulated credit institutions and can’t be lent out. If deposit protection matters to you, hold reserves with a licensed bank, where the FSCS limit is £120,000.
How much does Transferra cost?
Three plans. Starter is €49 a month, shown as £42 on the sterling view, with no onboarding fee and a monthly turnover ceiling of €50,000. Global is €149 a month plus a one-off €499 onboarding fee, with a €300,000 ceiling. Specialised starts at €399 a month with onboarding from €999 and no ceiling. Closing an account costs €100, and a dormant account costs €100 a month after three months. Verified from transferra.uk on 20 August 2026.
Does Transferra publish prices in sterling?
Yes, as of our August 2026 check. The full pricing list carries a currency switch, and the sterling view shows Starter at £42 a month with a £44,000 monthly turnover ceiling. This corrects our previous review and most others still in circulation, which said prices were published only in euros. Because the plans are denominated in euros underneath, your sterling cost still moves with the exchange rate.
Does Transferra accept sole traders or LLPs?
Transferra doesn’t publish an acceptance list by business type. Its Acceptance Policy works by geographic zone rather than by entity, and does not mention sole traders, limited liability partnerships, partnerships, charities or community interest companies at all. The plan structure and the onboarding flow both assume an incorporated business with beneficial owners, so treat anything outside that as unsupported until Transferra says otherwise.
What does an international payment actually cost?
Your plan sets the fee, and incoming and outgoing payments are not always priced alike. On Starter a wire out is a flat €50 and a wire in is a flat €25. On Global both directions are 0.3% with a €50 minimum and a €250 ceiling. On Specialised both are 0.25% with a €100 minimum and no ceiling. Currency conversion is charged separately at 1%, 0.75% or 0.50% by plan.
Does Transferra offer an overdraft, credit or interest?
None of the three. An electronic money institution is not permitted to lend customer funds or to pay interest on electronic money, so there is no overdraft, no credit line, no business loan and no yield on balances. If you hold meaningful reserves and want them to earn, pair Transferra with a separate savings account at a licensed bank.
How we reviewed Transferra
Ranking criteria. We assessed Transferra using its published tariff, acceptance policy and safeguarding information. The review also covers onboarding, accounting connections, card issuing and international payments, before comparing the account with Wise, Revolut Business and Airwallex for the same cross-border work.
Data sources. Every fee on this page was read from transferra.uk/pricing/full-list/ in August 2026, switching through all three tiers in both the euro and sterling views. The legal entity, firm reference number and safeguarding wording were taken from Transferra’s own site footer. Review scores were read from Trustpilot on 20 August 2026. No aggregator data was used.
Update cadence. We re-verify this page when Transferra changes pricing, plan structure or terms, and the verification date reflects the most recent full review. BusinessExpert earns no commission from Transferra. See our editorial policy.