Zen Review

These include multi-currency accounts, payment processing, and expense management, with a focus on simplifying financial operations for businesses and individuals.

In this article, we will be reviewing Zen and taking a closer look at its features, pricing, ease of use, customer service, and how it stacks up against its competition.

We aim to give you all the information you need to choose the best bank account for your business.

Overview

Zen fees & general costs

Zen has two tiers for users, a Smart Plan and an Enterprise Plan.

Using the Smart plan is best for lower amounts of cross-border transfers, you'll pay a lower fee but more per transaction. On Enterprise, the monthly cost is higher (€100), but costs are much lower.

This is better than some platforms like Rapyd which charges $99/month for all plans, but still worse than GoCardless which is free to start with and offers better exchange rates.

Zen also offers a free 3-month trial with no card details needed, so you can always try it before signing up.

Top up & processing fees

For payment gateways and accepting different types of payments, the cost of Zen differs. This being said the wide range of acceptance is one of the best on the market.

Other fees

Eligibility

Legitimacy

Zen was founded in 2018 and is located in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Zen is regulated in the EU by the Bank of Lithuania (304749651), which is required for handling payments within the EU.

In the UK, Zen is FCA (900889) authorised and registered with HMRC as Zen UK Limited (13953648).

Zen is not a publicly traded company, and there are no investors, meaning that the company is likely to be self-funded.

They’ve recently partnered up with ClearBank to secure their UK Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license, allowing them to operate as a financial institution.

It’s worth noting, that ZEN is not a bank, meaning your money is not FSCS-protected.

Taking all this into account, the company is legitimate, however, they have no investors or information on their profits meaning if something were to go wrong, it might be difficult to recover your funds.

Products offered by Zen

Payment gateway

The payment gateway is the key product offered by ZEN.

Through their payment gateway, you get access to instant transaction settlements, multiple local and global payment networks, customizable checkout options, and integrations.

One unique offering is the instant settlements, which is particularly useful for e-commerce and fintech businesses. With this, money is credited to your account instantly without any delays (even if the money hasn’t reached your account yet).

Instant settlements are supported by payments made with Visa, MasterCard, bank transfer, Skrill, and other payment methods.

Once the money has been sent to your ZEN account and instantly credited, you can easily withdraw it to any other account at no additional cost.

Payment methods and transfer speed

ZEN offers nearly 100 payment methods, ranging from local and global options.

Here are a few examples:

• In the EU, payments are settled via SEPA (SEPA Instant is not supported yet)

• In Ukraine, payments are settled via PrivatMoney

• In Poland, via Elixir

• In the UK, via FPS (Faster Payments System)

• For other countries, SWIFT is used for payments and cross-border transfers

In addition to these, ZEN offers Zen Pay and Zen Buddy payments.

ZEN Pay is used to make payments directly from your business account, similarly, your customers can pay you via Zen Pay and money will land in your account.

Zen Buddy is a P2P system used for instant and free transfers between ZEN accounts. Very similar to the one offered by other cross-border platforms.

One thing to note is that the payment system will affect the speed of the transfer. Here’s an example of what you can expect from ZEN in terms of transfer times:

ZEN currently doesn’t offer SEPA Instant transfers, which is a big downside for those businesses making a lot of payments to the EU.

If speed matters to you, and your business primarily operates in the EU, consider using alternatives such as Payabl.

ZEN multi-currency account & money transfers

In addition to the payment gateway, with ZEN you get access to a multi-currency account.

With their business multi-currency account, you can hold, convert, transfer, and make payments in different currencies.

They support 28 currencies that you can hold, transfer, and convert. This covers around 58 countries. In addition, you get access to 4 local account options including EUR.

This is more of a supplementary offering and is worse than other multi-currency accounts out there.

For example, with Airwallex you get 12 local accounts and access to over 130 currencies and with Payoneer, you get 9 local accounts.

ZEN is not transparent about their exchange rates, as they claim to offer “no spread on foreign currency fees”, “[transfers] without additional exchange fees” and “competitive currency exchange rates”.

This usually means that there is an additional markup on top of the currency exchange rate. In addition, ZEN uses MasterCard rates instead of mid-market exchange rates, which are slightly worse.

If you think your business will benefit from frequent currency conversion, we’d recommend looking at a Wise business account. They offer conversions at the mid-market rate (0% markup) and have low fees from 0.33%.

Considering the fairly low reach and the fees involved, ZEN is better suited for companies that don’t make much use of international money transfers and do not need to exchange large amounts of foreign currencies.

If that’s what you need, we’d recommend looking for an alternative.

ZEN Mastercard

ZEN business accounts come with physical or virtual debit MasterCard, that can be given out to the team members for easier spend, and managed via granular controls.

One great advantage over other companies is that you get an unlimited number of cards to give out to your team. Other companies like Revolut have a limit of 200 virtual cards.

NOTICE

You will need to contact ZEN support if you need to add additional users to your account. Sometimes, this may require notarized authorization.

With every ZEN card, you also get a few additional perks:

• ZEN Care Shopping Protection: Protection against shopping issues. If something goes wrong with the purchase, ZEN will handle and resolve all the issues from their end.

• Extended electronics warranty - You get up to 2 years of additional warranty on electronics.

• Instant cashback - You get up to 15% cashback in partnered stores.

Integrations

ZEN developed offers a set of integrations, including e-commerce integrations, customizable checkout pages, and an API.

E-commerce

With ZEN e-commerce plugins, your business can start collecting payments via ZEN in seconds with no coding required at all.

They support multiple e-commerce platforms, including:

• Magento

• Opencart

• OsCommerce

• Prestashop 1.6

• Prestashop 1.7

• Shopper

• WooCommerce

• ZenCart

Checkout integrations

Checkout integration is another great code-free option for sites without commerce functionality, especially useful for agencies, membership sites, streaming sites, and similar.

With checkout integration your business can configure payment methods (including PayPal), take payments, which will then feed back into ZEN, and automatically reconcile, and update transaction statuses.

The checkout integration can either be hosted on ZEN, where users will be redirected to, or can be added to the website directly via iFrame.

It’s a great and fully customizable option for those looking to add payment functionality without writing a single line of code.

API

ZEN also offers an API for those who need the most versatile option.

It fully integrates into any CMS and ERP systems, with all ZEN features to automate any processes for your business.

With their API integration, you can make and take payments, make refunds, conditionally use payment methods, generate payment links, track customers, generate reports, and much more.

This is truly the most customizable option but requires a lot of coding skills to implement.

To learn more about the solutions offered by the cross border payment solutions, have a look the the following guides:

Signing up for Zen

Customer service and contact options

ZEN offers a few support options, including:

• App

• Email: hello@zen.com

• Via web form here

The support is available in 29 languages, however, most of the reviews online are really negative regarding their support.

Companies using Zen

Many companies can benefit from Zen, for example, e-commerce, crowdfunding, gaming, and fintech. Here's a quick roundup of how Zen can solve their needs.

If you want to know more about the solutions offered by the cross-border payments, have a look at the following guides.

The alternatives

GoCardless

Rapyd

Flywire

Payabl

Fondy