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Introduction To Funding

Before you can start creating virtual cards and making payments with Nium, you need to add money to your Nium account. The process of adding money to your account is also called funding your account.

You can fund your account by sending a bank transfer to one of our banking providers’ bank accounts based on the region you are operating. These are safeguarded accounts where we securely hold our clients’ funds. Once your money is received by our banking providers, it is automatically routed to one of your Nium funding accounts.

What are funding accounts?​

After you send a bank transfer to fund your account, that money is added to a funding account in Nium. You can then use this money to top-up your virtual cards.

We will set up funding accounts for you when we onboard you to Nium. You will have a funding account for every available currency that you plan to make card purchases with. By default, you will get one funding account per currency, however, you can also request secondary funding accounts if you need to depending on the region and model being used.

If you have a funding account in a particular currency, that means you can create and top up virtual cards in that currency. For example, if you have a GBP funding account, you will use the money in this account to top up all the GBP virtual cards you create.

How do virtual cards work?​

Once money is available in your funding accounts, you can create and use virtual cards. Nium supports two types of virtual cards:

  1. Single-use cards can be used for purchases one time only. This type of card is automatically deleted on settlement. If you don't spend the entire balance of a single-use card, any money remaining on the card after its one-time use is transferred back to the card's corresponding funding account.

  2. Multi-use cards can be used for as many purchases as you wish. This card type needs to be manually deleted when no longer in use.

Bank account approval​

To recap, you will add money to your Nium account by sending a bank transfer from your bank account (also called a funding source) to one of our banking providers’ bank accounts. Your money will then be transferred from our banking providers’ bank account to one of your funding accounts in Nium.

As part of our regulatory requirements, we need to verify all the bank accounts (funding sources) that you use to transfer money to our platform before we can accept them as an approved funding source. To do this, during your onboarding process we will ask you to provide some information related to your bank accounts in a KYB questionnaire.

If you change banks or need to add an alternative bank account, you will need to request us to approve this new funding source.

To have your bank account approved as a funding source, follow these steps:

  1. Obtain a bank statement from your bank

The statement must meet the following criteria:

  • It must be recent (up to 3 months old)
  • It must have your account holder name
  • It must have your IBAN/Account number
  • It must have the bank logo
  1. Send the bank statement to the following emails by regions: