Take a hypothetical example: a finance manager at a 30-person manufacturing firm in Leeds still has to call her bank’s dealing desk for any payment to her supplier in Poland above a few thousand pounds — not because the transfer itself is slow, but because there’s no way to see the rate in advance, compare it, or lock it in with out picking up the phone and accepting whatever she’s quoted.
Multiply that manual step, and the rate uncertainty behind it, across a year of supplier payments, and it becomes the real cost of running an international business on domestic banking infrastructure.
It’s a small story, but not an unusual one. UK small and medium-sized businesses make up 99% of all companies in the country, yet they accounted for just 25% of total UK goods export value in 2023, according to UK government trade statistics.
Some of that gap is about capital and confidence. A good chunk of it comes down to the accounts, transfers, and FX tools that were never built with a 30-person exporter in mind.
The markup nobody puts on the invoice
Ask most SME owners what they pay to send money abroad and they’ll quote a transfer fee: £15, £25, something on an invoice. Ask what the FX markup costs them and most won’t have an answer, because banks don’t itemize it. Published estimates for typical bank FX markups vary considerably: industry analysts often cite a broad range of roughly 1% to 5% above the mid-market rate, with the lower end more common on major currencies at larger banks and the higher end at smaller or regional institutions.
Finsei’s CEO, drawing on the company’s own experience, puts typical charges on Tier 1 currencies closer to 1–1.5%.
To put a number on it: at a 1.5% markup, a company paying £50,000 a month to overseas contractors or suppliers would lose roughly £9,000 a year to FX costs alone, and considerably more at the higher end of the range cited above. It’s not always a dramatic single figure. It’s a slightly worse margin, quarter after quarter, that nobody quite traces back to the bank.
Then there’s the setup itself. Opening a business account with a high-street bank is commonly reported to take any where from several days to a few weeks, once you factor in the paperwork, the branch visit, and compliance checks that seem to reset every time a director changes. For a company that has just landed a client in Germany and needs to invoice in euros next week, that timeline doesn’t work. So, businesses improvise: a personal PayPal, a second bank relationship in another country, a spreadsheet tracking who’s owed what in which currency. It’s not a strategy. It’s duct tape.
What a multi-currency account actually changes
The pitch for multi-currency accounts is usually framed around convenience, which undersells it. The real shift is structural. Instead of one GBP account bolted onto occasional FX conversions, a business can hold balances in multiple currencies under a single account, moving money between them without a fresh conversion each time — rather than a UK sort code being the default identity for every payment it sends, which can trigger extra scrutiny and extra fees on the receiving end. Payments can route through local clearing systems, such as SEPA for euro transfers and Faster Payments for sterling, instead of defaulting to SWIFT for everything, which is both faster and, in many cases, considerably cheaper.
“Traditional banks were built around a single home currency and a single set of rails, and everything international gets bolted on as an exception,” says Artjoms Dozorcevs, CEO of Finsei, the UK-based, FCA-regulated electronic money institution. “For an SME trading with five countries, that exception becomes their entire day-to-day operation. We built Finsei around the opposite assumption: holding and moving money in dozens of currencies isn’t a special case, it’s the baseline.”
That reframing matters because it changes what "normal" costs. Onboarding speed and feature availability vary: Finsei says some accounts can be activated within a day, though the company’s own FAQ notes that timing depends on business structure, jurisdiction and activity, and that dedicated multi-currency IBANs are issued on a case-by-case basis subject to the banking partner’s risk assessment rather than guaranteed on every account.
The company reports having processed over €2.6 billion in client funds since launching, including €1billion in 2024 alone—a company-provided figure that we were not able to independently verify — which suggests demand from SMEs for this kind of infrastructure isn’t marginal.
Where traditional banks still hold the edge
None of this makes high-street banking obsolete, and it’s worth being honest about where it still wins. A relationship manager who knows the business can push through a lending decision that no fintech underwriting model will touch yet. Overdraft facilities, asset-backed loans, and the kind of trust a long-established institution carries with certain suppliers or landlords aren’t things a digital wallet replicates overnight. Most SMEs that adopt multi-currency accounts don’t close their bank account; they keep it for credit and domestic transactions and route international payments through a platform built for that job.
The mistake is treating the two as interchangeable. A business paying suppliers in four currencies and still routing everything through a single-currency account isn’t being cautious. It’s absorbing a cost it doesn’t have to, because nobody has added up what the “exception” is quietly worth.
For the finance manager in Leeds, that call to the dealing desk isn't really about SWIFT processing times. It's about a banking model that was never designed for her supply chain. Fixing it isn't complicated — it just requires admitting that "the way we've always paid suppliers" and "the cheapest, fastest way to pay suppliers" stopped being the same thing a while ago.