Wise moves money between currencies and countries. It launched in 2011 as TransferWise, founded by Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus, listed in London in 2021, and in May 2026 moved its primary listing to Nasdaq, keeping a secondary listing in London.
For its financial year ending March 2026 it reported 19 million active customers, up 21%, and $243 billion of cross-border payments. Three quarters of its payments in the final quarter arrived in under 20 seconds.
Wise Business
A Wise Business account holds and converts more than 40 currencies, with local account details for getting paid in 22 of them, such as a US routing number or a euro IBAN. Suppliers abroad can be paid one by one or in a batch of up to 1,000 at a time.
It connects to accounting software including QuickBooks, Xero, FreeAgent, Zoho Books and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. In the UK, Wise is authorised by the FCA as an electronic money institution and keeps customers’ money separate from its own.
One Xero account per Wise currency
In Xero, every Wise currency needs a bank account of its own. The integration links one Wise currency to one Xero account, and each account needs a unique name. A business holding pounds and euros in Wise sees two bank feeds in Xero, and it chooses how often they sync, anywhere from every four hours to once a month.
A conversion between balances shows up on both feeds: money leaves the sterling account and arrives in the euro one. In the books, that’s a transfer between two of the business’s own accounts, with the rate on the day deciding how many euros arrive for the pounds that left. Wise marks its fees as bank charges in Xero to make them easier to reconcile.
Paying Xero bills from Wise
UK businesses can import unpaid bills from Xero into Wise and pay them from there. Once a bill is paid through Wise, it’s marked paid in Xero automatically, with Wise’s fee recorded as a bank charge. The feature needs a Xero plan that supports multi-currency, and bills already marked paid in Xero aren’t imported, so a bill settled some other way doesn’t get paid twice.
The Wise API
Business accounts use a personal API token to reach part of the Wise Platform API: quotes, recipients, transfers and batch groups, plus updates on each transfer. Larger partners connect with OAuth 2.0.
For UK accounts, the API drafts transfers and batches, and each one is then approved and funded inside Wise, a step that keeps a person in control of the money leaving. Some actions in the UK and EEA also ask for strong customer authentication. A full sandbox mirrors the live service for testing.
Webhooks report a transfer changing state and a balance updating. Since July 2026, the API has also had dated versions, released quarterly.
Payments in, books out
Wise’s API and its Xero link leave room to automate most of the money that moves through it. Money arriving in several currencies can be matched to the invoices and marketplace payouts it belongs to, and batches of supplier payments can be drafted from the purchase ledger, ready for someone to approve in Wise.
The hours that matching takes by hand can be costed in a few lines. Money copied by hand from one system to another is a known risk, and finance tools add up quickly too.