Airwallex vs Wise Business: Features and Fees Compared
American companies that expand overseas have to learn about a lot more than new payment rails. They may need to collect euros from customers, pay contractors in pounds, issue cards to a distributed team, and synchronize it all with their accounting app of choice.
Airwallex and Wise Business are two platforms purpose-built to make this type of transition easier. However, they’re a bit different from one another: Wise Business is primarily a multi-currency account and transfer platform built around foreign exchange, while Airwallex is a broader financial platform that combines multi-currency accounts with billing, corporate cards, and expense management.
Below, we compare the two platforms’ fees, features, and best-fit customers. Global finance teams may also want to consider Slash, a business banking platform with banking services provided by Column N.A., Member FDIC. Slash business accounts support payments over local rails, including Pix, Faster Payments, SEPA, and SPEI.¹ Separately, the Slash Global Account gives companies based outside the US access to US dollars without forming an American entity, holding funds in USDC across more than 130 countries.³
Key Takeaways
- Wise wins on currency breadth while Airwallex wins on overall features. Wise holds more than 40 currencies against Airwallex’s ~20, but Airwallex’s balances feed directly into card spending, bill pay, and merchant processing.
- Wise’s card rewards are 0.5% and only available in the UK. It also caps issuance at three cards per team member, where Airwallex includes unlimited cards that earn up to 2% cashback.
- Wise charges a one-time $31 with no subscription, while Airwallex gates features like approvals and purchase orders behind a $12 per user tier. Slash starts fee, and Pro costs a flat $25 per month with no per-user pricing, so the cost stays the same as your team grows.
- Airwallex Yield pays between 3.45% and 3.72% through a J.P. Morgan Asset Management fund, while Wise doesn’t have any sort of treasury product.
- Neither platform meaningfully supports stablecoins. Wise offers none at all, and Airwallex supports USDC in early access for select customers only. Slash supports USDC and USDT payments across 15 blockchains.⁴
What Is Airwallex?
Airwallex is a financial technology platform for businesses that collect, hold, convert, and spend money internationally. Its Global Accounts provide local bank details and let businesses collect and hold more than 20 currencies, with incoming payment coverage from more than 70 countries. Your funds can either remain in the currency you received them in, get converted within the platform, or be used for supplier payments and card spending.
Along with their Global Accounts, Airwallex also offers bill pay, corporate cards, expense management, invoicing, online payment processing, and multi-entity management. Its local payout network reaches more than 120 countries, while SWIFT transfers extend coverage to 200+ in more than 90 currencies.
Given its complexity and feature set, it’s not necessarily a great pick if your team simply needs a way to send money from one country to another. It’s more geared towards those who need to accept customer payments, issue cards, manage approvals, and pay foreign vendors from the same balances. Ecommerce, SaaS, and travel companies are generally the ones looking for those sorts of features.
What Is Wise Business?
Wise Business is the business edition of Wise’s multi-currency account. It lets companies hold more than 40 currencies, unlock local receiving details in 22 currencies, convert money at the mid-market rate (with a separately disclosed fee), and send funds through Wise’s international network. With the ability to send invoices with payment links and make batch payments to up to 1,000 recipients, it can help both accounts payable and receivable teams.
Whereas Airwallex has a couple priced monthly plans, there’s no monthly subscription for Wise Business. You just pay a one time $31 fee to unlock local account details and the full feature set. Transfer and conversion pricing varies by currency and amount, though published sending fees start at a reasonable 0.23%. If your team transfers more than $25,000 in a month, you can also become eligible for volume discounts.
Wise Business is meant for freelancers, agencies, ecommerce sellers, and companies that mainly receive foreign currency payments and/or pay overseas suppliers. While it offers team permissions, card controls, accounting connections, and mass payments, its center remains currency conversion and transfers. It doesn’t quite come with the level of financial management features that platforms like Airwallex or Slash support.
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Airwallex vs Wise Business: Features Compared
Let’s take a look at the features Airwallex and Wise Business have in common to see when one has a leg up on the other and when you might want to consider an alternative to both of them:
Business Account
Airwallex’s business account is the foundation of their three subscription tiers, which range from free to custom-quoted. “Explore” includes multiple accounts per entity, transfers, corporate cards, expenses, bill pay, invoicing, payment acceptance, and AI receipt matching. “Grow” adds advanced approvals, purchase orders, bill automation, and enterprise integrations, while “Accelerate” brings multi-entity and customized workflow capabilities.
Wise Business is more tightly focused on international account details and money movement. Companies can hold currencies, receive local transfers, send batch payments, issue team cards, and share payment links. That could be fine if you’re running an average small business, but you won’t get the same depth of procurement and multi-entity oversight that Airwallex provides.
Another edge Airwallex has is in its “Yield” product. With Airwallex Yield, users can earn between 3.45% and 3.72% on balances held in a fund headed by J.P. Morgan Asset Management. It’s essentially a treasury account by a different name. While helpful, those yield rates fall short of those offered by some fintechs, including Slash. As of November 2026, Slash Treasury offers up to 4.06% annualized yield on idle funds.⁶
Multi-Currency Support
If you’re looking to work with lots of different currencies, Wise is the winner. The platform lets you hold more than 40 currencies and pay a one time fee to receive account details in 22. That depth is useful for teams that collect small payments from a bunch of different markets.
Airwallex supports more than 20 held currencies and local account infrastructure for receiving global payments from more than 70 countries. Those balances connect directly with the rest of the platform. In other words, a business can settle card sales like-for-like, hold the proceeds, pay suppliers, and fund card spending without converting first.
So, while Wise wins on the raw number of currencies, Airwallex is superior when you need to connect foreign currency balances with merchant processing, bills, cards, and treasury workflows.
Payment Rails
Like most global payment solutions, Airwallex and Wise both support ACH, domestic wires, SWIFT, and a wide variety of local rails in different nations. Airwallex takes a step ahead by supporting direct debit, RTP/FedNow, and online card acceptance. Wise does offer a unique feature in BatchTransfer, which can send rapid payments to up to 1,000 recipients at once.
What neither platform fully embraces, however, is cryptocurrency. Since stablecoins are pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar and can travel around the world in seconds, they’re extremely useful and versatile for international teams. Wise Business doesn’t support them at all, and Airwallex only supports USDC in early access for select customers.
Meanwhile, you can send and receive both USDC and USDT across 15 supported blockchains with Slash, giving you more flexibility than you’d get with most other systems.⁴ Slash also supports quite a few major local rails, including Pix, Faster Payments, and SPEI.
Corporate Cards
Airwallex offers a corporate Visa debit card on its free plan that syncs to its platform in real time, giving admins a view of each card transaction across different teams and currencies. The card also offers cashback of up to 2% on eligible purchases. Similarly, Wise Business features corporate debit cards that come with no annual fee, but their cards offer a paltry 0.5% cashback – and only in the UK, curiously.
Teams that use Wise Business can spend from balances in more than 40 currencies, and the card’s accepted in more than 160 countries. However, if the required currency isn’t held, Wise converts another balance and charges the applicable fee. Another downside to Wise’s card program is its limit on issuance, as only 3 cards per team member are allowed. Since both Airwallex and Slash offer unlimited virtual cards with up to 2% cashback, they get the edge.
Software Integrations
Wise supports QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Business Cloud Accounting, NetSuite, Wave, Zoho Books, FreeAgent, Odoo, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and Bonsai. These connections are mostly meant to synchronize balances, transactions, receipts, and documents across different currencies.
Airwallex supports Xero and QuickBooks on Explore, then adds NetSuite and Dynamics 365 Business Central on Grow. Its directory also includes Odoo, Sage, Rillet, Campfire, Workday, BambooHR, Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon, and eBay. These integrations go deeper than Wise’s, allowing users to import bills, map expenses to the chart of accounts, synchronize bank feeds, and connect payment collection with ecommerce systems. All in all, Wise provides decent accounting syncs for a relatively simple account, but Airwallex integrates more with its surrounding workflow.
Fees and Costs Breakdown
Below is a full comparison of the most notable transaction fees and costs between Airwallex and Wise Business, including ones we’ve mentioned above and ones we haven’t. These figures reflect published U.S. pricing as of November 2nd, 2026.
Wise generally has the pricing advantage when you’re mostly looking to convert currency and send international bank payments. Its starting conversion fee is lower than Airwallex’s published 0.50% markup on major currencies, and the mid-market rate is shown separately from the service fee. However, if you run a more sprawling company that uses local rails, accepts customer payments, issues dozens of cards, and controls multiple entities, Airwallex is likely preferable.
How Slash Helps Companies Work Across Borders
While Wise Business and Airwallex both solve international payment problems, neither covers the full breadth of what most global companies may actually need. Both platforms are missing full stablecoin support, working capital financing, and a treasury account that can earn up to 4.06% annualized yield.⁵ Slash has each of those features alongside the tools an international business can use to thrive.
Slash is a financial platform that’s built to help teams manage cross-border finances in the same place as the rest of their domestic operations. With crypto on/off ramps, high cashback charge cards, and SWIFT transfers to 180+ countries, our platform can help companies expand across borders without high transfer fees or unnecessarily complex finance stacks. Slash also allows users to send money through local rails like SEPA, Faster Payments, Pix, and American options like RTP/FedNow.
For founders whose businesses reside outside the United States, our platform also comes with a Global Account that gives users U.S. account and routing details without requiring an American entity. It’s available to businesses in more than 130 countries, and allows users to send and receive funds through available bank transfer and stablecoin rails. Accounts are backed on Bridge by a balance held in USDC, which is designed to maintain a one-to-one value with the US dollar.
Some other Slash features that can help both domestic and international businesses include:
- Card controls and spend policies: Issue unlimited virtual and physical cards, set limits by card, team, or individual, and see every transaction post in real time. Slash texts employees for receipts and matches them automatically to transactions. Eligible business spend earns up to 2% cash back with the Slash Visa Platinum Card.
- Invoicing: With Slash’s invoicing and bill pay features, users can send customized invoices, collect payments, and manage vendor bills all in the same place.
- MCP connections for agents: The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI agents to software tools. Through MCP, agents can connect to Slash directly.
- Multi-entity support: Slash offers multi-entity account management tools without separate logins, allowing businesses to track spending, manage accounts, and download statements across all subsidiaries in one place.
- Business banking: FDIC-insured business checking, protected up to $150M through Column N.A.'s insured cash sweep network.²
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FAQs
Do Airwallex and Wise Business support instant payment methods?
Airwallex supports RTP and FedNow for domestic US transfers alongside direct debit, so a payment to a US counterparty can settle in seconds. Wise moves money through its own network and local schemes rather than connecting you to US instant rails directly, which is why speed varies by corridor. “Instant” at Wise often means instant between Wise accounts or over a local scheme like Faster Payments in the UK. With Slash, you get instant payments through RTP/FedNow and certain local rails, plus stablecoin access.
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What does holding a foreign currency balance actually get me?
It lets you avoid “round-tripping”. If you collect euros from European customers and also pay European suppliers, holding the balance means you convert once at most instead of converting into dollars on the way in and back into euros on the way out, paying a spread each time.
Discover How Multi-Currency Business Accounts Work: Benefits and Top Alternatives
Are these platforms actually banks?
Neither is a bank. Both are licensed money transmitters or e-money institutions depending on the market, and they typically safeguard customer funds in segregated accounts at partner banks rather than holding them as deposits. The same is true of Slash.
