We no longer charge any fees for holding money in your Wise Account if you live in Australia.
Before June 2023 we charged a daily fee for holding large amounts in your balances if you live in Australia.
Why was I charged this fee?
In Australia, we’re authorised as a Purchased Payment Facility (PPF). To align with our regulations, we have to hold extra money (regulatory capital) in addition to the money that we hold for you in your account. So, when you hold large amounts of money with us — it cost us a bit more.
This daily fee contributed to the cost of holding the extra capital so we could continue letting you hold large amounts in your account.
Why did you remove the fee in June 2023?
Global interest rates rose through the first half of 2023, so our earnings on funds held with banks offsets the cost of holding the extra capital. This meant we could remove the fee for holding large amounts.
How much could I hold before I got charged?
Each currency you held had its own free allowance limit — the free allowance included your balance plus any amount of that currency you held in a Jar.
If you had both a personal and business account, the amounts you held in your personal account didn't affect the free allowances in your business account (and vice versa).
How did the fee work?
If you went over your free allowance for more than 3 days, we started charging the annual fee of 1.6%.
This is equivalent to approximately 0.00437% daily.
This applied to all currencies, except for Euros, which was charged at 0.4% annually. Equivalent to approximately 0.00109% daily.
After this, we charged you for any days in the month where you held over your free allowance. We added up your daily fees, and took the total from your account at the end of each month.
For example: if you had 24,000 AUD in your account for a month, then you exceeded the allowance by 1,000 AUD. So, we took approximately 1.30 AUD at the end of the month as a fee.
What are the free allowances per currency?
You could hold up to the following amounts for free:
AUD — 23,000
EUR — 15,000
GBP — 13,000
USD — 18,000