Your money, in the currency it needs to be in

Ask a business that operates in six currencies how many banking relationships it has, and the answer is usually six. Six onboardings. Six sets of documents, filed at six different times, with six different people asking near-identical questions. And at the end of it, six accounts — one per currency, each holding everything that currency does.

That last part is the one that quietly costs the most. All the dollars land in the dollar account: card settlement, customer deposits, the float you are holding against refunds, the reserve you promised a partner you would not touch. They are indistinguishable the moment they arrive, and telling them apart again becomes somebody's spreadsheet.

We have just shipped multi-currency accounts and FX conversion in the Magellan portal. You can open an account in any currency we support, keep as many separate accounts per currency as your business actually needs, hold balances in them, and convert between them at a live rate. One relationship, one onboarding.

Open an account in the currency you need

Opening one takes a moment and no paperwork. You pick the currency, give the account a name, and it exists — with its own balance, its own history, and deposit details you can hand to whoever is paying you. There is no new bank to approach, no separate application per market, and no waiting on somebody else's onboarding queue.

Here is where you can hold money today:

That list grows. It is driven by the currencies we hold live banking coverage in rather than by anything fixed in the product, so new ones appear as we add them — you do not need to upgrade to anything.

Ten accounts per currency, so your flows stay apart

This is the part we would most like you to notice. You are not limited to one account per currency. You can open up to ten.

So: one USD account for card settlement, another for outbound payouts, a third holding a reserve you have committed not to spend, a fourth for a specific client whose funds should never sit next to anybody else's. Same for euros, same for pounds. Name them however your business is actually organised, because you are the one naming them.

These are real, separate accounts — each with its own balance and its own transaction history — not tags on a single pot, and not sub-ledgers you maintain by hand in a spreadsheet next to the real thing. Which means "how much of this is the reserve?" stops being a question somebody reconstructs at month end and becomes a number you read off the screen. If you run a platform paying out on behalf of others, or you hold client funds that need to be demonstrably apart, that difference is the whole ballgame.

Hold it, don't just move it

These are balances, not transit accounts. Money can sit in them.

That sounds obvious and mostly is not how payment accounts work. The usual arrangement converts everything into your home currency the moment it arrives, and then converts it back when you need to pay somebody in the currency it started in — two conversions, two spreads, for the privilege of ending up where you began. If you invoice in euros and pay suppliers in euros, hold euros. If you know you owe 400,000 pesos in March, hold pesos.

Each account shows what is available and what is on hold, so you always know what you can actually spend as opposed to what the headline figure says.

Convert between them, on a rate with a clock on it

When you do need to move between currencies, you pick the account you are selling from and the account you are buying into, and enter an amount. Same currency in and out is a transfer, not a conversion, so we do not offer it here.

You can enter either side. Sometimes you know what you want to spend — convert this 50,000 and tell me what arrives. Sometimes you know what has to arrive — the invoice is for 900,000 and I need exactly that on the other end, work out what it costs me. Enter whichever one you actually know, and we derive the other.

The quote comes back with the amount that will arrive, the rate stated plainly, the amount leaving your balance, and a countdown ticking in seconds. That countdown is not decoration: it is the window our liquidity partner has committed to that price for, passed straight through to you. While it runs, the rate is yours. When it hits zero the quote expires and the execute button becomes a refresh button — you get a new quote at a new honest rate and decide again. Nothing reprices behind your back.

The rate you see is the all-in rate. Our margin is in the spread, where it belongs, and there is no separate fee line waiting to be discovered on a statement later. Execute while the quote is live and it lands as a transfer with a reference, visible alongside every other movement of money rather than siloed in an FX corner of the product. Your balance is checked first, so a conversion cannot leave you short.

One number across all of it

Holding money in a dozen accounts across eight currencies makes one simple question surprisingly hard: how much do we have? So everything rolls up into a total in a display currency you choose — split between available and on hold, broken down by currency, with each individual account showing its native balance and an approximate figure in your chosen currency underneath.

Two things about that conversion. If there is no direct rate between two currencies, we route through one that exists, the same way you would by hand. And if we genuinely cannot find a path, we say so and name the currency we left out rather than folding a guess into your total. A rolled-up number is only worth having if you know exactly what went into it.

Available now

Multi-currency accounts and FX conversion are live in the portal today. There is more coming — we have written about where currency sits in the wider treasury picture on our FX solution page — but the foundation had to be right first: accounts you can open yourself, kept as separate as your business needs them, holding balances that move only when you say so.

Have a look at the API documentation, or talk to us about getting set up.