The Actual Costs of Opening a Virtual Account with a Payment Gateway

Virtual accounts can help enhance your ability to manage multiple streams of cash without the need to register your business with a local business entity.

Being directly linked to your main business account, having a virtual account is essentially no different from making a payment via bank transfer. That being said, it does add another layer towards the payment processing process in a bank transfer, so it is correct to assume that costs come with it as well.

With that being said, it is time to see what the actual costs are in opening a virtual account with a payment gateway.

Typical Costs of a Virtual Account in a Payment Gateway

No matter what payment gateway you choose, there are a set number of costs that come with it. These include:

• Platform fees
• Setup fees
• Management fees
• FX fees

Platform Fees

First and foremost are platform fees, which represent the fees or cost of using a given payment platform. Since virtual accounts are tied to banks, the platform fees for using a virtual account should be dependent on the bank used. Then there are payment method costs, which are incurred when using any type of payment method in a payment gateway.

Setup Fees

Setting up a virtual account may be described as easy, simple, and painless but what about the costs of setting one up? The fees that come with setting up a virtual account vary from bank to bank and differ whether you are a sole proprietor/partnership/SME or other form of corporate entity that are not the prior listed three. That being said, the setup fee for virtual accounts is on a one-time basis so you need not worry about adding recurring costs to your business.

Management Fees

Since virtual accounts are an extension of your main business account the same way your email sub-alias is an extension of your main primary business email address, it is therefore under the purview of the bank you have chosen to maintain the necessary upkeep needed to ensure the virtual accounts function as intended and manage the funds appropriately. The bank shoulders the responsibility and burden of managing your virtual accounts in exchange for a set fee. The management fees for virtual accounts differ depending on which bank you use and the type of business you run similar to setup fees. However, unlike setup fees, management is a continuous process and therefore the fees reflect that by recurring on a monthly basis.

FX fees

The FX fees for using virtual accounts should not be any different from the FX fees incurred when making a payment via local bank transfer or bank redirect. That being said, when using a third-party payment gateway such as Tazapay, you can expect those fees to also vary based on the proffered rates the payment gateway offers.

Putting all of this together, you can expect the costs for choosing to open and use a virtual account with a payment gateway as such:

As an enterprise business, you've managed to negotiate with the payment gateway to have your setup fee for a named virtual account lowered to just $10 USD as a one-off payment fee. For each transaction, you can expect the fee breakdown to look like this:

3.0% Card fees + 0.5% virtual account management fees

If the business decides to withdraw the transaction into their own bank account, the fee breakdown will roughly be like this:

Fixed platform fee for withdrawals + FX conversion fees

Now that you know more about the costs associated with opening a virtual account with a payment gateway, you can now take advantage of it with confidence. To add on to it, why not grab a robust and reliable payment gateway like Tazapay? Tazapay’s FX rates are not only competitive but they also match rates if you could bring up a lower rate. What’s more is that they have an impressive selection of over 175 countries to choose from with more than 80 of them being localised.