What BaaS actually costs, and why nobody publishes a price
Setup, per-account, per-transaction, FX margin and the monthly minimum. The five components of a BaaS fee schedule, and what moves each one.
Search for Banking-as-a-Service pricing and you will find feature pages, contact forms and no numbers. That is not evasion. A BaaS programme is underwritten, not listed, and the price is an output of the underwriting. What can be published is the structure, and the structure is consistent enough to plan against.
The five components
- Setup. A one-off fee covering diligence, programme configuration and integration support. It scales with how unusual your model is, not with your volume.
- Recurring platform and per-account fees. A monthly platform charge, plus a per-account or per-active-user charge once your users are live. This is the line that grows with your user base whether or not they transact.
- Per-transaction pricing. Priced per payment for SEPA and SWIFT, and per authorisation or as a margin on volume for cards. Inbound and outbound are usually priced differently.
- FX margin. Charged in basis points on converted volume. On multi-currency programmes this is frequently the largest single line on both sides of the deal.
- Monthly minimum. A floor the programme bills whether you reach it or not. It is how the partner covers the fixed cost of carrying you, and it is the term most worth negotiating before launch.
What moves the numbers
Volume is the obvious lever, and the least interesting one. The factors that move a schedule furthest are risk profile, jurisdictional footprint, the share of your flow that is cross-border, whether card issuing is in scope, and how much operational load your model puts on the partner's compliance team. Two platforms with identical volume can receive materially different schedules for those reasons alone.
Why the price is not the decision
The headline per-transaction rate is a poor proxy for programme cost. A cheap per-payment rate paired with a high minimum and an aggressive FX margin will cost a multi-currency platform more than the reverse. Compare total modelled cost against your actual mix, not line against line.
The revenue side deserves the same discipline. What you charge your own users - account fees, payment fees, card interchange share, FX spread - determines whether any schedule works. Model your programme revenue on your own pricing first, then judge the cost side against it.
How to get a real number
A partner quotes once it can see the model: users, volumes, currencies, regions, capabilities and risk controls. Crosswire assembles that picture, runs it across the eligible programmes and negotiates the schedule, then returns an indicative structure before anything is signed. Start on the Banking-as-a-Service hub.
Written and reviewed by the Crosswire advisory team, which designs and places Banking-as-a-Service programmes for platforms in Europe. Reviewed 15 August 2026.
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Published by Crosswire - financial infrastructure for the businesses others won't bank.