However, it usually takes at least a day to withdraw money from these accounts/funds.
Booster’s “Savvy” product is an exception. Like Wise Interest, it allows users to access their investments instantly using a debit card. Booster is currently offering a return of 2.65% per annum.
Wise is offering 1.93% on New Zealand dollars, 3.27% on US dollars, and 1.70% on euros.
If someone kept US dollars in their Wise account to earn more interest, but used their Wise card to make purchases in New Zealand dollars, they would be charged a currency conversion fee of at least 0.22%.
Some banks and fund managers offer higher returns on New Zealand dollar investments compared to those offered by Wise.
Kernel’s Cash Plus fund and Wedge’s Savings Fund are among the highest-paying, offering 3.27% and 3.25% respectively. Meanwhile, Heartland’s Cash PIE is paying 2.40%.
But again, users can’t instantly withdraw money from these accounts.
Of course, money can instantly be withdrawn from regular bank accounts.
However, banks tend to pay no, or very little, interest on money held in transaction accounts. Meanwhile customers often need to meet various conditions to receive interest on money in savings accounts.
For example, ANZ offers “premium” interest of 2% on its Serious Saver account when customers make no withdrawals and deposit at least $20 every month.
Wise has recently started paying users who keep cash in their Wise accounts, “cashbacks”, ranging from 0.51% on euros, to 0.92% on New Zealand dollars and 2.19% on Australian dollars.
Users who don’t opt to have their money invested in government-issued assets via Wise Interest will continue automatically receiving cashbacks on their funds.
Banks’ treatments of the large sums of money lying idle in transaction accounts have been the subject of much debate and scrutiny, including by Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee.
However, the key difference between banks and payments platforms, like Wise, or fund managers, like Kernel, Wedge and Booster, is that banks are regulated by the Reserve Bank.
Banks, licensed credit unions, finance companies, and building societies need to hold certain amounts of capital.
They also need to pay to participate in the Reserve Bank’s Depositor Compensation Scheme, which guarantees $100,000 of deposits per depositor, per institution.
So, someone with $200,000 in a guaranteed bank deposit would get $100,000 back if their bank collapsed, whereas someone who kept their money in a Wise account could get nothing back if Wise folded.
Wise is a London-headquartered technology company, known to Kiwi travellers for making it cheap and easy to make payments in different currencies.
In the 2026 financial year, Wise processed more than US$240 billion (NZ$427b) in cross-border transactions.
It declined to disclose how many users it had in New Zealand.
Jenée Tibshraeny is the Herald’s Wellington business editor, based in the parliamentary press gallery. She specialises in government and Reserve Bank policymaking, economics and banking.
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