When we started our business 15 years ago, our first customer was based in the United States. At that time, Canadian banks did not support receiving payments using the common Automated Clearing House (ACH) used by banks in the U.S. so we resorted to going the cheque route. Over time, some companies suggested convoluted routes to solve the problem but it generally required setting up a U.S. bank account which can be problematic if you don’t have a physical presence in that country. 

Vault Payments Inc. Comes to the Rescue. 

Vault Payments Inc. or Vault (and not to be confused with Vaultpay) for short is a Canadian financial institution that was designed specifically to solve that problem and help support Canadian businesses with doing business in the U.S. With Vault, you can sign up for a free account (yes it is free – more on that) and they will then automatically set you up with a U.S. bank account (via Community Federal Savings Bank), a Canadian bank account (via Peoples Trust Company), a UK account and a Euro account (both via The Currency Cloud Limited) that you can then use to receive funds. No more cheques! Yay! When you are ready to transfer the money back to Canada, you can either convert the money from the foreign account to your Canadian account and then send a FREE e-transfer to current Canadian bank account or if you have a US account within your current Canadian bank account, a SWIFT wire transfer for a fee of $10 USD. 

Exchange Rate

The exchange rate offered by Vault depends on the account you have selected. For the free account, they charge an additional 0.45% off the standard exchange rate. The rate gets lower if you decide to subscribe to a paid account ($20 / month or $100 / month). That is one place where Vault makes their money.

Credit Cards

With their free account, you can sign up for up to 20 virtual prepaid credit cards and 3 physical cards in the currency of your choice. This feature is where Vault saves you more money. You can then use the virtual cards to pay your foreign vendors such as Atlassian, Trello, Harvest, Hubspot (think of all the monthly services that you subscribe to). The funds come out straight from the account for that currency saving you the exorbitant fees that credit cards will typically charge you on the exchange rate. For each card, you can set up Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly fees so that if a vendor raises their rate without proper notice, they will be blocked and you have a chance to address it. The physical cards work the same way but are actual cards you can use when you travel for business. 

Is It Really Free?

Yes and no. You can sign up for a free account and then you only pay for SWIFT transfers. They also take a percentage when you convert money between currencies. I believe that the bulk of their revenue comes from the credit card fees. They charge merchants 2% and keep 1% and the other 1% is given as a cashback. Note that they do have other services like GICs and accounting services but we haven’t looked at those yet.

Is It Safe?

That’s a very good question and one we asked ourselves as well. Although the funds are not CDIC insured (they are working on it), they are regulated by FINTRAC. Long story short, your funds are safe but I recommend you read more about it here.

Support for Other Countries

As you probably read, Vault supports CAD, USD, GBP, and EUR currencies so you can collect payments in those currencies; however, we so far have only been using CAD and USD. 

Easy to Use – Feature Rich

The online interface for Vault is generally easy to figure out. There are a few places where the UI could be improved but in general you can find what you need without needing help. The platform is also feature rich and well thought out. They also support integration with Quickbooks and Xero. They likely had a serious amount of investment into the company as this type of system would be rather expensive to develop. 

Conclusion

Vault has been very good for us. It helped make it easier for us to deal with US customers, makes it easy to save money and is very easy to use. We highly recommend signing up for it.

Note that Wise offers a similar service; however, they are not Canadian based so they are not as laser focussed on the Canadian market like Vault is. 

Note: This article was not sponsored by Vault and the comments here are our own. That being said, Vault has a nice referral program so if you are interested to sign up for Vault after reading this article, we would appreciate it if you contacted us so we can send you a referral. Note that even without their referral program, we would have written the article anyway. We really like it!