Wise vs N26: what each company's own licence page actually says

The feature-counting version of this comparison already exists here from a different angle: the travel-debit-card guide puts Wise, Revolut and N26 side by side on card markup and ATM allowances, and Revolut vs N26 runs two of them through everyday nomad scenarios. The gap worth filling is narrower: which of these two can be your account itself, the one where a balance sits between invoices. That question has a clean answer, and it does not come from us — it comes from the wording each company uses on its own regulatory page.

What each company's own page calls itself

Start with Wise. Its help-centre article is organised country by country, and the entry for the United Kingdom reads: “Wise Payments Limited is authorised as an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) with registration number 900507.” A second UK entity, Wise Assets Limited, is listed separately as authorised by the FCA for investment activities. The Belgian entry is the one that covers most European readers: “Wise Europe SA, is a Payment Institution authorised by the National Bank of Belgium”, incorporated in Belgium with a registered number and a Brussels address, “with passporting rights across the EEA.”

Two different labels, then, for the two entities most nomads will actually be dealing with: electronic money institution in Britain, payment institution in Europe. Neither of them is the word “bank”. And the page is not shy about the word when it applies to someone else — describing US coverage, it says that in some US states and territories “money transmission services are offered by our partner financial institution Community Federal Savings Bank, which is supervised by the Office of the Comptroller of Currency.” In the one place the page names a bank inside Wise's own structure, it is a partner institution, not Wise.

The article carries on like that for around twenty countries and regions, from Australia through Japan, Mexico and Singapore to the United Arab Emirates. It is a genuinely useful document. It is also, structurally, a list of permissions to move money.

The one sentence on N26's page that decides it

N26's money-protection page is less geographic, and one passage on it carries more weight than anything else on the two pages we read. It reads: “The 'Compensation Scheme of German Private Banks' protects all deposits up to €100.000 held in the member states of the European Union. As the holder of a banking license, N26 Bank is legally required to be a member of a compensation scheme. N26 is a member of the Compensation Scheme of German Private Banks.”

The figure is written there with a dot as the thousands separator; for an English reader that is €100,000, and it is the number the page itself gives. The more interesting part is the middle sentence, and specifically the word required. N26 is not presenting scheme membership as a feature it chose, a perk of a plan tier, or a marketing promise it could quietly withdraw. It presents it as a legal consequence of the category it sits in. Hold a banking licence, belong to a compensation scheme.

That causal link is what makes the comparison tractable. You do not have to form a view on which company is better run or nicer to deal with. You only have to read what category each company puts itself in, and what that category obliges it to do.

The silence on Wise's page, and what it does not mean

Here is where comparisons like this usually go wrong, so we want to be slow about it.

The Wise regulation article, read end to end, does not mention a deposit guarantee scheme. Not for the UK entity, not for the Belgian one, not for any of the other jurisdictions it lists. What it gives instead is the authorisation itself: who licensed which entity, under what category, with what registration number.

The honest way to report that is to report it exactly as it stands — a page that describes authorisations and not deposit cover — and to leave it there. Saying “Wise deposits are not protected” would be converting a silence into a claim, and this page was not the place to find out either way. Wise publishes separate material on how it safeguards customer funds; one such article is linked from the regulation page, and we did not open it, so we are not going to describe what is in it. That is a real limitation of this comparison and we would rather state it than paper over it.

So the comparison is not “protected versus unprotected”. It is an asymmetry in what the two companies chose to put on the page they wrote about their own legal standing. N26's page ties cover to the licence, in a sentence, with a number. Wise's page describes what its entities are authorised to do and goes no further on that question. Two documents, two shapes, and the reader can see the shapes for themselves.

If you want our own longer take on each product, it is in the Wise review and the N26 review. Those were written earlier and against different sources, and where they go beyond what the two licence pages say, treat them as that: earlier work, not part of what was checked here.

The two pages, side by side

Everything below is drawn from the two official pages and nothing else. Blank-looking cells are not omissions on our part; they are things the page in question simply does not address.

Who N26 will actually take — and why we can't tell you today

A banking licence is only worth something to you if you can open the account, and that is exactly where this comparison runs out of verified ground.

We tried two official addresses for N26's supported-country information while writing, and both returned 404. No current official list was obtained, so none is printed here — not a count, not a set of countries, not a rule. What we can say is that our own N26 review, written earlier, describes a residency requirement tied to an eligible registered address in a supported country, and calls this N26's biggest limitation for nomads. Treat that as this site's prior work rather than as something confirmed today, and check the current position with N26 before you plan around it.

Wise's regulation page is not an eligibility list either and should not be read as one, but the geographic spread of its entity list and the shape of N26's EU-facing page do point in fairly different directions. For the broader question of opening accounts without a fixed base, our non-resident account guide and the proof-of-address piece are the right starting points.

What we didn't check, and why

A short list, because the omissions are part of the method rather than an accident of it.

• How Wise safeguards customer money. There is a separate Wise article on this, linked from the regulation page. It was not opened, so it is not described.
• N26's eligible countries. Covered above: the official sources did not resolve.
• Fees, cards, ATM allowances, currency coverage and opening steps. None of that was checked for this page. Our travel debit card guide covers the card side, on its own date.

You can read that list as a weakness. We would rather it be the strongest thing on the page. A comparison that only asserts what it actually saw is a comparison you can check.

Which one should hold your balance

Suppose you read nothing else about either company. What can you responsibly conclude?

If your question is where a euro balance should live between invoices, N26's page answers it more directly than Wise's does. It states a category, states an obligation that follows from the category, names the scheme and gives a figure. Whether you can get through the door is a separate matter, and one we could not settle today.

If your question is what moves money across borders and currencies, Wise's page is the one describing a network built for exactly that: separate authorised entities in country after country, with passporting across the EEA from the Belgian one. That is a different kind of document, and the fact that the regulation page never mentions deposit cover is a clue about what the product is for rather than a verdict on how safe it is.

The two pages read as if they were answering different questions, because they were. Neither document is trying to be the other.

Our own working habit, for what it is worth as an editorial preference rather than a recommendation: read the licence page before the fee page. The fee page tells you what this month costs. The licence page tells you what you are actually holding. When those two point in different directions, the second one is the one that should decide where a balance sleeps.

The sources for everything above: Wise's “How is Wise regulated in each country and region?” and N26's page on how it protects your money. Both were read in full, and both are worth ten minutes of your own time before you commit to either account.

The two official pages behind this comparison were read on 20 September 2026. We re-check our comparisons on a rolling schedule; see how we test and update.

Section：Side-by-Side