Comparing providers by price sounds simple until you open two tariff pages and find that they count different things. One shows a monthly fee and hides the transfers. Another shows transfers and stays quiet about opening.
Here is the full business IBAN cost at SharPay, line by line — opening, closing, transfers in and out, and the extras that only appear when you need them. And, because these get mixed up constantly, the separate figures for a private account.
Two price columns, and they get confused
There are two different products with two different price lists: an account for a company and an account for a private individual. The numbers are not close to each other, and quoting one while meaning the other is the single most common mistake in this comparison.
Everything below marked “business” applies to a legal entity. The private figures are in their own section further down, clearly labelled.
The private account, for contrast
Different product, different numbers. Opening — 10,00 EUR. Maintenance — 3,00 EUR per month. Closing — 25,00 EUR. Internal payments — free. Incoming and outgoing SEPA — 1,00 EUR + 0,35% each. Faster Payments and CHAPS — 3 GBP. Currency conversion carries a 1,00% markup. Details on the personal IBAN page.
Put the two side by side and the gap is obvious: 10 EUR against 1 000 EUR to open, free internal transfers against 10 EUR. Which is why “an account costs 10 EUR” is true and useless if you are a company.
Business account: opening and closing
- Opening the account — 1 000,00 EUR.
- Closing the account — 100,00 EUR.
- Reactivation — 100,00 EUR.
- Account maintenance — not stated on the tariff page.
That last line is deliberate. The maintenance fee is not published for the business column, so we do not invent one: it is a question for the application, not something to guess from the personal tariff. Everything that is published sits on the pricing page.
What the account itself does — multi-currency balances, SEPA in and out, statements — is described under business IBAN.
Business account: payments
- Internal payments — 10,00 EUR.
- Incoming SEPA — 10 EUR + 0,30%.
- Outgoing SEPA — 10 EUR + 0,30%.
- Faster Payments and CHAPS (UK), incoming and outgoing — 15 GBP.
- Incoming SWIFT in EUR — 50 EUR + 0,35%.
The percentage part is what decides the real cost. On a 50 000 EUR incoming SEPA the flat 10 EUR is noise; the 0,30% is 150 EUR. Companies that receive few large payments and companies that receive many small ones end up with completely different monthly bills from the same tariff.
Working the monthly cost out on real numbers
Take a company receiving 40 incoming SEPA payments a month, average 2 500 EUR each — 100 000 EUR in total. The fixed part is 40 × 10 EUR = 400 EUR. The percentage part is 0,30% of 100 000 = 300 EUR. Monthly total: 700 EUR, of which more than half is the flat fee.
Now the same 100 000 EUR arriving as 4 payments of 25 000 EUR. Fixed part: 40 EUR. Percentage: the same 300 EUR. Total 340 EUR — less than half the first figure, at identical turnover and an identical tariff.
What an account in the company’s name actually changes for an international business is set out separately in our piece on reasons to use an IBAN account.
Extras that appear when you need them
- Sending documents by post — 20,00 EUR plus actual costs.
- Copies of archived documents — 25,00 EUR.
- Statement on a closed account — 35,00 EUR.
- SWIFT correspondence — 50,00 EUR.
These are the lines nobody compares in advance and everybody meets later — usually during an audit, a bank request or a dispute.
What the tariff does not include
Two things are regularly assumed to be part of an account and are not.
Card acceptance. An IBAN receives transfers. Taking card payments from customers is a separate service with its own rate, reserve and settlement term. Budgeting for one and needing both is the most common planning error in this area.
Outgoing payouts. Sending money to cards, in bulk or in batches is a separate mechanism with its own prices, described under payouts.
Instalments and credit. There are none: no deferred payment, no instalment plans, no credit products. SharPay is not a banking institution and does not issue credit — worth knowing before building a pricing model that assumes it.
What to count before deciding
The tariff alone does not answer the question. Three things do.
- Your actual payment mix. Ten large SEPA transfers and three hundred small ones cost very different amounts under the same percentage.
- Whether you also need to accept card payments. That is a separate service with its own pricing — a merchant account, not an IBAN. Companies routinely budget for one and discover they need both.
- Whether you pay money out. Payouts are priced separately again.
The order of steps, from documents to the first incoming payment, is laid out in our piece on how to open a bank account in Europe.
In short
The business IBAN cost is 1 000 EUR to open, 100 EUR to close, 10 EUR for internal payments and 10 EUR plus 0,30% on SEPA in either direction; the maintenance fee is not published and is settled on application. The private account is a different product at 10 EUR to open and 3 EUR a month — quoting that figure to a company is where most comparisons go wrong. Count your own payment mix before comparing anyone’s tariff to anyone else’s. Two companies on the same tariff pay very different amounts, and the difference is in the mix, not in the headline number.