Slash and Payset: Two Alternatives to Mercury and Wise

01 - FoundationWho holds your money

All four look the same from the outside: an app, a balance, account details for receiving money. The difference sits one level down, and it determines everything else. The question is not whose interface is nicer, it is where your money physically sits and by what rules it comes back if the service or its bank stops operating.

None of the four is a bank, but there are two different ways of not being one. Slash and Mercury are US fintechs that open an account for the client at a partner bank. Slash puts it plainly: "Slash Financial, Inc. is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services are provided by Column N.A., Member FDIC" - slash.com. Mercury has two such banks, Choice Financial Group and Column N.A. In both cases the money sits on deposit at an FDIC member bank, and if that bank fails the payout comes from the federal deposit insurance fund.

Wise and Payset operate as electronic money institutions. This is not a lightweight version of a bank, it is a different construction: an EMI is prohibited by law from lending out client money, so it never builds a loan book that can go bad. Client funds are one hundred percent separated from the company's own money and sit in segregated accounts at credit institutions or in secure liquid assets. Wise describes its model as "a mix of cash in leading commercial banks and investments in secure liquid assets, primarily government bonds", and holds its cash at JPMorgan Chase.

This construction is exactly what explains the line in Payset's documents that unsettles so many people. "Protection available by Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) does not apply to client funds held by EMIs" - payset.io - does not mean the money is unprotected. It means a mechanism designed for a different risk does not apply to it. Deposit insurance schemes exist because a bank lends deposits out and may fail to return them. An EMI carries no such risk by design, so the money is protected not by insurance but by a prohibition on touching it.

The practical difference between the two models does not show up in quiet times. It shows up in two specific situations. The first is the failure of the bank holding the money: deposit insurance covers precisely this case, safeguarding does not, because safeguarding protects against the insolvency of the EMI itself rather than of its bank. The second is speed. Under insurance the fund pays out within a set period; on the liquidation of an EMI an administrator returns the money from the segregated pool, and that takes months rather than days.

02 - First serviceSlash: a dollar account with subaccounts and crypto

Slash is a US fintech operating through Column N.A. The company claims more than 10,000 businesses served and $35 billion in annual payment volume, and builds its product around e-commerce, agencies and Web3.

A primary account is open to any company incorporated in the US: "Slash is currently only open to incorporated US entities (LLCs, Limited Partnerships, C Corps, and S Corps)". Unincorporated sole proprietors and individuals are not served. For companies incorporated outside the US, Slash has a separate product, Slash Global USD, and its requirement is the opposite: it opens only for non-US entities.

Money in the primary account sits on deposit at Column N.A. and is distributed across a sweep network of participating banks, which lifts FDIC coverage above the standard $250,000 per depositor per bank. The mechanism is the same as Mercury's, and the two services share one of the banks.

Subaccounts with their own account details

Mercury and Wise both offer additional accounts in the form of jars, but at Slash the feature runs deeper. There is no cap on any plan: "There's no cap on how many subaccounts you can create, regardless of your Slash plan". The key difference is that every subaccount gets its own account number and routing number, so money can be received into it as though it were a separate account. Mercury does open additional accounts, but does not disclose either a limit or whether they carry their own details, and at Wise separate account details for jars are not available to a US business account.

For a seller working across several platforms this solves a concrete problem: Amazon payouts, Stripe settlements and money from one particular client land on different account details inside a single account. There is also a commission take rate feature that automatically diverts a percentage of incoming payments to the primary account. All subaccounts are dollar accounts.

The card side is generous: unlimited virtual cards with instant issue, physical cards with configurable limits, no issuing fee, and cash back of up to 2% with no cap and no category restrictions. Cards are issued by Column N.A. on the Visa network, and limits can be set by amount, by MCC category and by individual merchant. Separately there is the Slash Platinum Card, which works as a charge card: the limit equals the primary account balance, the balance is swept daily, and no interest accrues.

03 - Second servicePayset: multi-currency on a UK license

Payset is built differently in every respect. It is Pay Set Limited, a company registered in England and Wales under number 11529161, holding the status of Authorised Electronic Money Institution with FCA reference number 900920. That is a full license, not a Small EMI registration and not payment agent status: formally, Payset's regulatory standing is higher than Slash's, which holds no license of its own at all.

The company does not have to be American. Payset accepts roughly 52 jurisdictions of incorporation, including the US, the UK, EEA countries, the UAE, Ukraine, the BVI, the Seychelles and Belize, which makes it an option for founders who do not have a US company.

Its main functional advantage is currencies. Payset supports 34 currencies and exchanges across 38 currency pairs, and issues local account details in several of them: UK account number and sort code with Faster Payments, BACS and CHAPS; a European IBAN with UK and Malta variants; a US routing number with ACH and Fedwire; and local accounts in Singapore and Hong Kong dollars.

Behind Payset's US account details stands Community Federal Savings Bank: routing number 026073150 for ACH and 026073008 for Fedwire, at 5 Penn Plaza, New York. The same bank issues dollar account details for Wise and Payoneer, so counterparties see that routing number often and understand that a provider account sits behind it rather than the client's own bank account.

What Payset does not have

There are no cards. They are mentioned on the website, but they are absent from the fee schedule, the help center has no card section, and support answers a direct question by saying there are currently no cards and giving no timeline for any. You cannot plan card spending on Payset, and if cards are a working tool for you, that job goes to another service.

There is no multi-accounting either: you cannot open two balances in the same currency or create subaccounts inside the company. The model here is one balance per currency. Yield on balances does not exist and cannot, because the user agreement defines the accounts as "non-interest-bearing payment account(s)": for an EMI that is a requirement of law rather than a company decision.

What does exist is an inactivity fee, and its terms are worth reading before you open. Under the Terms and Conditions an account becomes dormant after four months without transactions, and a servicing fee is charged monthly from the fifth month and taken from the balance until the account becomes active again or the balance reaches zero. The size of that fee is not stated in the public documents. A separate clause in the same document reserves the right to terminate the agreement after three months of inactivity, so the timelines inside Payset's own documents disagree with each other, and this is not a service to keep an account with in reserve.

04 - GeographyWhat each service checks before it says no

Geography is worth checking before you compare fees, because it eliminates options harshly. But before you look at any list, you need to understand what exactly a service checks: citizenship, place of residence, or the company's address. These are three different tests, and they get confused constantly.

The base rule is the same everywhere: what decides is where the owner lives, not what the passport says. Mercury states this verbatim and applies it across the whole list uniformly, with no carve-outs for particular countries: "we're unable to open accounts for founders living in any of the countries and regions listed below. This is based on your country of residence, not your citizenship or nationality", and immediately adds: "If you're a citizen of one of the countries below but currently reside elsewhere, your application may still be eligible" - support.mercury.com.

A passport from a listed country does not close an application by itself. Living in such a country closes it, and documented residence somewhere else opens it: a long-term residence permit, a national visa, a local driver's license, a utility bill in your own name. The benchmark for permanent residence is the 183-day threshold, and a document evidencing lawful residence works better than evidence of merely being present. That is the sense in which "by residence" appears in the table below; "no restrictions" means the country is not on any public list the service maintains.

The other three work differently. Wise filters on the registered address of the profile, and checks personal and business accounts separately. Payset maintains no public list covering owners at all: both of its lists are about something else, namely which jurisdictions of incorporation it accepts and which countries money cannot be sent to. Slash publishes no list either, and confines itself to requiring US incorporation plus a reference to sanctions lists.

Only a few directions actually differ

Lay the lists side by side and it turns out that for the overwhelming majority of countries all four services behave identically: the owner evidences an address with a document and passes verification on ordinary terms. A row of its own is warranted only where at least one service refuses to open an account. There are three of those, plus Mercury's own list.

Mercury's list by region

Mercury's list deserves separate treatment, because it is long and does not follow any obvious logic: 48 countries of residence plus four sanctioned entries, and inclusion tracks neither sanctions nor a country's income level. None of the other three maintains anything comparable: the countries below are served by all of them.

Ukraine: Wise works differently here

A Ukrainian passport is not the obstacle at Wise. The obstacle is a Ukrainian address: a profile will not be registered on one. As soon as an applicant evidences residence in another country with a residence permit, a national visa or a local license, the account opens on ordinary terms and citizenship plays no part. Mercury works the same way, only expressed through a list: a Ukrainian address falls on the prohibited list, while a Ukrainian holding Polish or Spanish residency applies as a Polish or Spanish resident and the prohibition does not reach them. Payset and Slash both accept Ukrainian owners.

Citizenship of a sanctioned country and place of residence are not the same thing

There is a widespread belief that a Russian or Belarusian citizen cannot open an account anywhere. Sanctions programs do not work that way. OFAC maintains no country list of persons you are barred from dealing with: "The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) does not maintain a specific list of countries that U.S. persons cannot do business with" - ofac.treasury.gov. The prohibitions are addressed to named persons on the lists, and to persons located or ordinarily resident in those countries: OFAC's own guidance uses the phrase "individuals ordinarily resident in the Russian Federation".

The practical conclusion: a Russian or Belarusian citizen who permanently lives elsewhere and is not on any sanctions list is an eligible applicant as far as Mercury is concerned, because Mercury checks residence and expressly addresses the citizenship case. Wise is stricter: it does not serve citizens of those countries, and residency in a third country does not change that. Payset and Slash publish no citizenship list, so their decision cannot be predicted before an application is filed; what is known is that Payset's transfers to and from Russia and Belarus are closed in both directions.

Türkiye sits in the table separately because of Wise. You can formally open an account on a Turkish address, but you cannot use it: since 31 May 2023, such profiles cannot top up, receive money, convert currency or obtain new account details, and the rule is tied to the address specifically - "These restrictions are based on your registered address. We check the addresses for personal and business accounts separately" - wise.com. In practice this is a refusal, simply not framed as one.

Two Payset restrictions that have nothing to do with opening an account

This is where the confusion that makes people think Payset is closed to whole countries usually starts. Neither of its lists describes the owner; they describe the company and the money.

The distinction matters. A Kazakh citizen with a US company will open a Payset account, but will not be able to send money to Kazakh account details through it. A Turkish or Kazakh company, on the other hand, will not open an account at all, and where its owner lives has nothing to do with it.

05 - MoneyFees across all four

A head-to-head "who is cheaper" comparison is meaningless: each of them is expensive at something different. The cheapest will be whichever model matches your payment profile, so the table below is read along your own row of costs rather than from the top down.

The role of paid plans is usually overstated. Mercury's $29.90 plan adds invoicing and bill pay, and the $299 plan adds a dedicated manager. On Slash's Pro plan at $25 a month, ACH, domestic wires and instant transfers carry no fee, whereas the free plan charges for them. For a company with an ordinary payment profile the base free tier is enough at both, and a paid plan is worth pricing only when the saving on fees exceeds the subscription.

What this means on a specific turnover

Take a company that receives $40,000 a month from US clients by ACH and sends €5,000 three times a month to contractors in Europe. At Mercury, inbound ACH is free, and each euro payment costs 1% of the amount, so roughly $150 across three payments. At Wise, sending starts at 0.23%, and the same three payments run about $35, but an inbound dollar payment by SWIFT is chargeable, and no interest accrues on the balance unless the separate program is enabled.

Flip the profile around: the same company receives euros from European clients and spends them there. Slash and Mercury lose on principle here, because they force a conversion of euros into dollars on the way in and back again on the way out. Two conversions at 1% each turn the saving on free wires into a loss that exceeds any subscription fee.

06 - OnboardingDocuments and timelines

The base document package is identical across all four, and there is no point looking for differences in it. For a US company each service asks for the formation certificate, the EIN, the owner's passport and a selfie verification, and none of them requires an SSN or ITIN. The divergence sits in one place, and for an owner living outside the US it is the decisive one: the company's address.

All four ask for both the company's official address and the actual place of business, and these are different fields. The confusion arises because applicants put the registered agent's address into both. As the official address of the company, the agent's address is accepted by all four: it is what appears in the formation documents. As the actual address it is accepted nowhere, and Mercury spells this out: "We don't accept a P.O. box, virtual address, commercial mail receiving agency, mail center, or registered agent address".

There is exactly one divergence between the services, and it concerns virtual addresses. Wise and Payset accept a virtual address as the company's official address; Mercury and Slash do not. For a registered agent's address there is no such divergence: all four accept it. The actual address is required by all four, and here there is a detail that matters for a non-resident: it can be the owner's residential address outside the US, the place you genuinely run the business from. You do not need to set up an office in the US; you need an address you are prepared to evidence with a document.

One more item: Payset's application asks whether the company has a presence in its country of incorporation. For a US company with no office and no staff in the US the answer is no; that does not mean an automatic refusal, but it is worth being ready for follow-up questions.

On timelines: Mercury's stated 0-2 business days and Payset's promised 48 hours apply to a straightforward application with no additional requests. Slash and Wise publish no timelines at all. If you need the account by a specific date, plan with room to spare. Anyone opening a US account for the first time will find the general walkthrough of the procedure for non-residents useful: preparing the document package is the same for every service.

07 - CapabilitiesYield, cards and crypto

Here the ranking shifts, and the service that lost the previous sections moves ahead.

Slash is the only one of the four that offers yield on balances and full crypto support at the same time. Slash Treasury places idle funds in money market funds at a stated yield of up to 3.85% a year. There is an important caveat: that money is no longer a deposit, so FDIC does not extend to it. SIPC coverage of up to $500,000 applies, which protects against the failure of the broker but not against a fall in the value of the assets, and the service says so plainly: "Not FDIC Insured, Not Bank Guaranteed, May Lose Value".

Mercury has an equivalent product, but access to Mercury Treasury opens at a balance of $250,000 across all accounts, which settles the question for a small company. Payset has no yield by definition, since EMI accounts cannot bear interest.

Wise is subtler than it is usually taken to be. Interest on dollars, pounds and euros does exist there, and it is available to business accounts too: the conditions are a US profile address, an EIN for the business and US person status. Wise takes its definition of US person from the instructions to Form W-9, under which "a partnership, corporation, company, or association created or organized in the United States" qualifies, meaning a US company qualifies in its own right regardless of where its owner lives. The binding constraint is the profile address: it has to be in the US, and accounts registered in New York and Alaska are separately excluded.

On crypto the ranking inverts: small Slash is stronger than the other three. It receives and sends USDC and USDT across eight networks, including Ethereum, Solana, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum and Stellar, and converts them into dollars inside the account. The crypto application is filed separately, on top of an already approved account.

Payset looks contradictory here, but the contradiction disappears once you separate two different actions. Crypto never sits on a Payset account: it neither receives nor sends coins. What is at issue is fiat money arriving from a crypto exchange after an asset has been sold, and Payset will accept such a payment from three platforms only: Safelynx, Bitstamp and Circle, with the caveat that not all partner banks accept funds from crypto exchanges. Wise prohibits the whole direction, and its policy wording is broader than a ban on crypto businesses: it catches the payments made to buy crypto as well.

08 - ConclusionThe order of choosing

The choice is made by successive elimination, not by working through services one at a time. The order of the steps matters: start with fees and you can spend an evening comparing the pricing of a service that will refuse you on country of residence.

What should come out of this is not "the best service" but a configuration of one or two accounts with a clear division of roles. The durable pairing looks like this: a primary operating account with cards and deposit insurance, plus, if your turnover is multi-currency, a separate service for European and Asian counterparties that is not used to store balances.

Slash takes the place of the primary dollar account in that structure, for a company working with US platforms, running several revenue streams, and interested in yield on idle balances or in stablecoin transactions. Payset takes the place of the multi-currency layer, for a client whose citizenship or country of residence closes the door to Mercury, and for the case where there is no US company at all.

If neither fits your situation, the question is not which of these two to choose but which pair of services covers your geography and your currencies. It is also worth reading the review of payment acceptance alternatives: holding an account and accepting payments from customers are two separate jobs, and one service does not always do both.

09 - FAQFrequently asked questions