Wise is licensed to hold your money, and as part of keeping it safe, we follow strict rules set out by the regulators in the countries where we operate.
As of 30 September 2024, our customers are trusting us with the equivalent of 14.7 billion GBP in their Wise accounts.
If you keep money with us, our regulatory obligation is to hold all of it in cash, secure liquid assets, or insured by a comparable guarantee.
We don’t lend out your money. Banks do. This is why governments require them to insure their deposits by participating in country-specific deposit insurance schemes, like the FSCS in the UK. Because we’re not lending your money, we handle it differently by safeguarding it.
Safeguarding means we look after your money by keeping it separate from our own money, and making it available to you whenever you need it.
How we hold your money can vary by country, for example:
• Wise Payments Ltd (UK)
• Wise Europe SA (EEA)
• Wise US Inc (USA)
• Wise Payments Japan KK (Japan)
Wise Brasil Instituição de Pagamento Ltda (Brazil)
We make sure your money is safe and readily available to you. Most of your money is in secure liquid assets — such as EU, UK and US Government bonds, and money market funds as of 1 April 2024.
For a government bond to fail, the government would need to default on their loan payments, which almost never happens with stable governments.
The bonds we hold are mostly short-term bonds, so we’re not materially exposed to increasing interest rates, making us more resilient.
The average duration of the bonds we hold is under 6 months, with the majority of bonds having a remaining term of 3 months or less.
The money that we put into banks, we hold it in several reputable banks with strong liquidity.
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