Wise presses UK on payment fees, but its £9.8bn claim needs care

Wise, the London-listed international money transfer firm, wants the UK government to use its upcoming G20 presidency to force tougher disclosure of cross-border payment costs. Its 2026 G20+ Scorecard report has been reported as saying UK consumers will lose £9.8bn to hidden international-payment fees in 2026. That figure does not appear in Wise's own report, and the claim it is built on differs from the headline in population, currency and evidential certainty.

This matters for anyone in the UK who sends money abroad, whether a small business paying an overseas supplier or a person sending money to family. It also lands at a policy moment: the UK government confirmed on 22 November 2025 that it will host the G20 in 2027, and most of the G20's own targets for cross-border payments fall due at the end of that year. Wise is using its report to argue the presidency should be used to tighten those targets. Whether the government takes up the idea, and what the underlying regulatory picture actually shows, are separate questions.

What Wise's report actually says

Wise's report, produced with analysis from consultancy Edgar, Dunn & Company, projects approximately $12.4bn in UK hidden foreign-exchange markups in 2026, covering consumers and small businesses together, not consumers alone, and presented in dollars, not sterling. A £9.8bn framing is consistent with converting $12.4bn at about $1.27 to the pound, but the report does not show that conversion, and the exchange rate, date and rounding behind £9.8bn have not been established. Readers should treat it as an approximation drawn from a broader dollar estimate, not a figure Wise has published for UK consumers alone.

Wise defines a "hidden fee" as a cost built into the exchange rate rather than shown as an explicit charge. That is Wise's own analytical term, not a definition used in UK financial services law or FCA rules.

Edgar, Dunn & Company carried out the underlying analysis between September and November 2024, using public data and a proprietary model to project figures from 2024 to 2029. The report describes the approach at a high level but does not publish the transaction-volume or markup assumptions needed to reproduce the $12.4bn projection, and it is not clear whether the figure represents gross FX markup revenue, a counterfactual saving against the mid-market rate, or another measure. It is a company-commissioned projection that cannot currently be independently checked, and it should be read as advocacy evidence rather than an official measure of consumer harm.

What the FCA has actually found

Separately, the Financial Conduct Authority has its own evidence that international-payment pricing is not always clearly disclosed to UK customers. Its publication, first issued 1 May 2025 and updated 3 December 2025, says good practice before a customer commits to a transfer is to show the amount transferred, the exchange rate, the markup above a reference rate, fixed and variable fees, the total remittance fee in pounds, and the amount the recipient will receive in local currency.

The FCA reviewed a sample of firms and found transaction fees were not always clear, intermediary-bank charges were often not shown upfront, possible variation in the final amount was not always flagged, and relevant information was sometimes hard to find. It classes as poor practice claiming a transaction is zero-cost when the firm earns an exchange-rate markup, and failing to disclose that a quoted rate contains a retained markup.

These expectations sit under the Consumer Duty, which applied to new and existing retail products and services from 31 July 2023 and requires communications to be clear, fair, not misleading, and to support informed decisions. They apply to retail payment services involving currency conversion under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, the Payment Services Regulations 2017 or the Electronic Money Regulations 2011, but not to every form of consumer currency conversion.

In July 2025, responding to firms' questions at a payments and Consumer Duty webinar, the FCA said comparing an offered exchange rate with a prevailing mid-market rate can help customers understand the margin they are charged, but that firms are not required to display a mid-market benchmark rate. Wise's report calls for mandatory disclosure against an independent mid-market benchmark. That is a policy it is pushing for, not one that currently exists in the UK.

What the mystery shopping showed

Wise commissioned FXC Intelligence to mystery-shop four large UK retail banks and three money-transfer operators in May 2026, simulating $1,000-equivalent transfers and comparing rates against contemporaneous London Stock Exchange Group mid-market rates, within a 0.05 percentage-point tolerance.

These figures are one-off customer-journey snapshots, not a systematic survey; they may not reflect every corridor, channel, customer type or date, and the underlying dataset was not publicly available for checking. The table shows each provider's markup against a mid-market reference rate; it does not show how clearly that markup was disclosed, which is the separate question the FCA's findings address, since a high markup can be clearly disclosed and a low one poorly disclosed.

Settlement access already exists; safeguarding access does not

Wise's report also argues for a change to how non-bank payment firms can hold money at the Bank of England. This is where the existing UK position and Wise's proposal are easiest to conflate.

The Bank of England announced this framework in 2017; the enabling legislative changes took effect on 13 January 2018, and since then eligible authorised payment institutions and electronic money institutions have obtained Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) accounts directly with the Bank, subject to Bank, scheme and FCA requirements. This gives qualifying non-banks direct payment-system access without routing every payment through a commercial bank.

That is different from safeguarding, which is how firms must protect customer money not yet paid out. As of 22 September 2026, non-bank payment service providers must still use commercial-bank relationships for services or customer funds subject to safeguarding requirements; a Bank of England settlement account is not designed to hold safeguarded client money overnight. Money held by a payment or e-money firm is not a bank deposit: neither a settlement account nor compliance with safeguarding rules gives it Financial Services Compensation Scheme protection, and readers should not assume such cover applies. The Bank said on 8 April 2025 that it was exploring whether it could offer non-bank providers settlement accounts with safeguarding facilities, but has not announced such a facility or published eligibility, balance or remuneration terms.

Wise's proposal is to extend central-bank safeguarding facilities to eligible non-banks. Presenting this as something the UK "already allows" would overstate the current position; presenting it as identical to existing settlement-account access would understate what Wise is actually asking for. The two are related but distinct steps, and only the first has been implemented.

Why the 2027 G20 presidency raises the stakes

The G20's cross-border payments targets, coordinated through the Financial Stability Board, call for a global average retail transfer cost of no more than 1%, with no corridor above 3%, alongside a target that 75% of cross-border retail payments reach the recipient within one hour, and minimum standards for cost, fee and delivery-time information given to customers. Most of these targets are due by end-2027.

The Financial Stability Board's October 2025 progress report said that despite substantial policy work, this had not yet produced sufficient improvements for end users globally, and that satisfactory progress against the 2027 timetable was unlikely. That assessment comes from the body coordinating the targets, not from Wise.

The UK government confirmed on 22 November 2025 that it will host the G20 in 2027. Wise's report says the presidency begins in December 2026, but that date was not confirmed in the government announcement reviewed. Wise wants the presidency used to launch a more focused successor to the G20 Roadmap, which it calls "Roadmap 2.0", alongside its disclosure and safeguarding proposals. None of this is government policy: ministers have not adopted Wise's roadmap, benchmark or safeguarding proposals.

Wise's own scorecard gives the UK 5/5 for direct access and 4/5 for price transparency in 2026. These are Wise's ratings under a methodology it revised this year, not assessments carried out by the G20, the FCA or the Bank of England, and are not directly comparable with scores from previous years.

What to watch next

HM Treasury's consultation on modernising payment services regulation, opened 1 July 2026, covers the Payment Services Regulations, Electronic Money Regulations and the retained Cross-Border Payments Regulation; conclusions on currency-conversion disclosure are not yet settled. The FCA listed international payments among its 2026 regulatory priorities, published 25 March 2026. Neither the Bank's exploration of non-bank safeguarding nor the shape of the UK's 2027 G20 agenda has produced a final policy position. Readers wanting current disclosure detail should go to the FCA's own publication rather than to any company's campaign material.