TransferWise doesn’t protect your money in financial protection schemes like the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
Traditional banks are required to put customers' money in a financial protection scheme. This is because they make profit by lending and risking customers' money, and need to insure it up to a certain amount in case something goes wrong.
TransferWise isn't a bank. We don't lend your money or make high-risk investments with it. So, we don't insure it in a financial protection scheme.
Instead, we use safeguarding to protect 100% of your money.
Safeguarding means that, by law, we have to keep all of your money in accounts that are completely separate from the ones we use to run our business. So, if anything were to happen to TransferWise, your money would be safe.
TransferWise keeps your money in established financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase and Barclays. Where your money is depends on which country your TransferWise account address is in — if your account address in the UK, for example, we keep your money in Barclays, or other financial institutions in the EEA.
Because your money is always kept separately from the accounts we use to run TransferWise, it wouldn’t be affected if we were to become insolvent. We’d return all of your money to you.
If something were to happen to one of the banks we store your money in (like Barclays or JP Morgan Chase), then your money wouldn’t be protected. We wouldn’t be able to give your money back in that situation.
TransferWise follows strict rules set by regulators in every country we operate in. These include the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK and EEA, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in the US, the National Bank of Belgium in Belgium, and many other regulators around the world. The address on your TransferWise account determines which regulator you’re covered by.
These agencies are there to protect you. And they make sure that we’re always acting honestly and fairly.