The U.S. dollar is the world’s greatest currency, but almost all international businesses have local currency needs for trade or payroll. An American business selling into Europe might collect in euros from buyers, then turn around and pay euros to European suppliers weeks later. If that business had to convert to dollars on the way in and back into euros on the way out, FX spreads would devour its margins. There is a better way.
Column’s new multicurrency accounts let you receive, hold, and send money in foreign currencies or instantly convert currencies to and from U.S. dollars. You can now:
Use euros, pounds, Canadian dollars, and many other currencies
Settle FX instantly 24/7/365, so converted funds can be spent immediately
Spin up multicurrency accounts from the same dashboard and APIs you use today
Hold funds in individual accounts with a real IBAN or sort code in your customer’s name — never pooled — for cleaner reconciliation and true ownership of funds
Send funds through local instant rails like SEPA Instant in Europe and Faster Payments in the UK
Settle international card spend in local currencies
Hold and transact in local currency
Column customers can now:
Give a UK customer a sterling account with its own sort code and receive a Faster Payments transfer into it in real time, with no intermediary bank and no FX fee
Pay a French supplier over SEPA Instant from a euro account with its own IBAN, so the payment looks and settles like any local transfer
Convert euros to dollars on a Sunday and have the dollars spendable immediately, with no one else's processing window in the way
Reconcile every incoming foreign-currency payment to the right customer, because no two customers share an account number
Full-stack capabilities
Multicurrency accounts works seamlessly with Column's other products.
A customer could receive a euro payment over SEPA Instant on Saturday night, convert it to dollars the moment it lands, send part of it out over FedNow to a U.S. vendor, send part out as USDC to a partner in Southeast Asia, and use the rest to fund a Singapore-dollar account backing a corporate card for a new hire in Singapore — one balance, one ledger, one set of APIs.
Our multicurrency products were built on our own financial primitives and are a step change in capability for anyone building in financial services. Instead of stitching together banks, orchestrators, issuer processors, and a dozen other vendors, you now only need one bank — Column — to build any financial product at the frontier.
