How to Get Paid in Multiple Currencies Without Losing 3% Every Time

A business invoicing across borders does not pay one fee. It pays up to four, at different points, mostly invisibly, and the total commonly lands somewhere around three per cent of the invoice. The useful thing about that number is how much of it is structural rather than unavoidable.

The four places money leaks

One: the arrival conversion. Your client sends dollars, your bank credits euros, and the rate used contains a margin you never see quoted. This is usually the largest single cost and the hardest to notice, because there is nothing on the statement labelled as a fee.

Two: correspondent fees. An international payment can pass through intermediary banks, each entitled to deduct a handling charge. This is why the amount landing differs from the amount sent by an unpredictable margin — and unpredictability is its own cost, because you cannot match receipts to invoices cleanly.

Three: the return trip. Money that arrived as euros and must be spent in dollars gets converted a second time, paying a second margin on the same funds.

Four: card spending abroad. Every foreign-currency card transaction carries its own conversion cost. This is where the card you issue to your team matters — Wallester converts at "Visa Exchange Rate + 2%" on all plans, for instance, which is fine occasionally and expensive as a default.

Fix the first one and most of it goes away

The structural fix is to stop the conversion happening on arrival, and the mechanism is local account details: account credentials inside your client's own banking system, so they pay you as a domestic transfer.

A US client paying US details sends a domestic payment. No conversion, no correspondent chain, no shortfall — the full amount arrives, and it arrives as dollars. You now hold a currency balance and have inherited a decision you did not previously have: when, whether and at what rate to convert.

That decision is worth real money. If you have dollar costs — contractors, software, advertising — you can pay them from the dollar balance and never convert at all. Anything you do convert, you convert visibly at a published rate rather than accepting whatever margin applied at the instant the money landed.

Providers offering this include Airwallex, whose pricing page describes "Accounts with local bank details in 20+ currencies" and quotes conversion at "0.5% above interbank rates for major currencies", and Wise, which states it uses "the mid-market rate without any mark-ups" and charges a visible conversion fee instead. Both figures read on 9 August 2026; both change, so verify before committing.

The check that decides whether this works for you

The headline currency counts these providers publish are close to useless, because they usually count currencies you can hold, not currencies you can be paid in locally. Only the second list removes the conversion. Which currencies you can actually be paid in covers that distinction in full, and the check is short:

• List the currencies your clients actually pay in, ranked by volume.
• For each, confirm it appears on the provider's local bank details list.
• Confirm your client's bank can pay those details as a domestic transfer in their country.
• Only then compare conversion markups, for the pairs you will genuinely run.

If your top receiving currency fails the second or third test, that provider does not solve your problem no matter how good its rates are.

Then structure what you spend

Once receiving is fixed, spending is the smaller half but still worth doing properly.

• Hold and spend the same currency where you can. Every conversion avoided is the whole margin saved, not a better rate on it.
• Give the team cards that do not tax foreign spend. A 2% conversion markup on company card spending is invisible per transaction and substantial per year.
• Separate control from currency. Card-issuing platforms are excellent at limits and per-vendor isolation and generally poor at cheap conversion. Multi-currency accounts are the reverse. Wallester vs Airwallex sets out that division of labour, and both have free entry tiers, so running both is normal rather than extravagant.

What this looks like as a sequence

The order matters, because each step makes the next one cheaper.

First, find out what you are actually paying. Take three recent international invoices and compare what you billed with what landed, converting at the interbank rate on the day. The gap is your real cost, and it is almost always larger than anyone expects — this is the step people skip, and it is the one that makes the rest feel urgent.

Second, open an account that issues local details in your top receiving currency. Not all of them; the one that carries the most invoice value. The saving is concentrated there, and adding currencies later is trivial.

Third, tell your clients once. Send the new details with the next invoice and mark them clearly as domestic. Most clients prefer it — a domestic transfer is easier and cheaper for them too, so this is rarely a difficult conversation.

Fourth, stop converting reflexively. Let balances sit in the currency they arrived in, and pay costs in that currency wherever you can. Convert what is genuinely left over, when you choose to.

Fifth, fix the cards. Once receiving is sorted, look at what your team's cards cost on foreign transactions, because that is now the largest remaining leak.

None of this requires changing bank, and none of it is a one-way door. Both of the accounts named above have free or near-free entry tiers, so the whole structure can be tested against a single real invoice before you move anything that matters.

Two things worth getting right on the invoice

Invoice in your client's currency. It wins work, and more importantly it moves the conversion decision to your side, where you can control the timing and see the rate. Invoicing in your own currency does not avoid the cost — it hands it to the client, who prices it back into what they will pay you.

Put the local details on the invoice, clearly. The saving only materialises if the client actually uses the domestic rail. A client who defaults to an international transfer out of habit reintroduces every cost you just removed.

The honest summary

You will not get to zero. Conversion has a real cost and someone pays it. But the difference between a well-structured setup and a default bank arrangement is commonly two to three per cent of every cross-border invoice, which for most small businesses is a larger sum than any software subscription they agonise over.

Start with how the money arrives. Everything else is optimisation. For the wider picture, our business cards hub links every guide in this cluster, and Airwallex vs Wise Business is the head-to-head if you have already decided that receiving locally is the fix.