Virtual account fees and KYB requirements, rail by rail

Virtual account fees are the charges on a local account number issued in a customer's name: an issuance fee, a monthly maintenance fee, a flat fee per payment on each rail, and a conversion cost. Entry requires a KYB (know your business, the verification of a company) or KYC (know your customer, the verification of an individual) file.

This guide goes rail by rail for BRL, MXN, COP and USD accounts: which fees exist, what the holder must supply, how long activation takes and which limits start. For the basics of the product, start with what a named virtual account is.

Which fees can a virtual account carry, and who pays each?

Up to nine lines can sit between a payer's bank and the holder's balance. The table separates what the provider bills from what other banks deduct, because the second group never appears on a price list.

Fees on a virtual account, by who pays and where the amount is set.

The payment fee is flat, so the cost per payment falls as the ticket grows. Returned ACH payments and wire investigations carry their own handling fees, so ask for that schedule before comparing headline prices. For the payout side of the same pricing, see how stablecoin payout pricing works.

For scale, BlindPay publishes one monthly number: $1.50 per active US account, per its virtual account fees article, read on November 1, 2026. Lumx quotes the amounts, because the conversion tier depends on volume.

On Lumx, the platform pays, not the end customer. The standard agreement has a fee per verification, charged once at onboarding, a fee per account opened, charged once for each currency, a monthly fee per active account, a flat fee per payment on each rail (SEPA included), conversion on volume tiers reviewed every quarter, and a monthly minimum that a ramp-up period waives for the first months. The amounts arrive in the proposal. A partner fee is configured once and shows up inside the locked-rate quote the customer sees.

What does a 10,000 USD SWIFT invoice cost, and how do fees add up at scale?

A SWIFT payment carries one of three charge instructions. OUR means the sender pays every fee, so the invoice arrives whole. SHA (shared) means the sender pays its own bank and the beneficiary absorbs what intermediaries deduct. BEN means the beneficiary pays everything, including the sender's bank. Every number below is an illustrative placeholder, deliberately low, not a Lumx rate or a bank quote. On Lumx the sender does not choose the charge instruction, and the fee is deducted from the sender.

Credited amount on a 10,000 USD invoice, with placeholder fees of 10 USD at the sender's bank and 5 USD at intermediaries.

The account's own fees stack on top, and they scale with the number of accounts more than with the money moved. Monthly cost is accounts times the monthly fee, plus payments times the flat payment fee. With a placeholder monthly fee of 0.50 USD, 1,000 accounts cost 500 USD a month, and if 600 of them never receive a payment, 300 USD of that buys nothing.

Three habits lower the cost. Provision an account when a payer is waiting for it. Keep one account per currency a customer really uses. Review the volume tier at renewal, because conversion is the line that moves with volume. On Lumx, list only the currencies that customer will use, and the tiers are reviewed every quarter.

How do the rails differ for a BRL, MXN, COP or USD account?

The fee schedule has the same shape on every rail. What changes is how the payer reaches the account, how fast it activates, whose name it shows and when the rail stops. The payer's route is Pix (Brazil's instant payment system) for BRL, SPEI (Mexico's interbank transfer system) to a CLABE (the 18-digit Mexican bank account number) for MXN, Bre-B (Colombia's instant payment system) or PSE (its online bank-transfer network) for COP, and ACH, FEDWIRE (the Federal Reserve's same-day wire system) or SWIFT for USD.

Rail, activation and cut-off by currency, as of November 1, 2026.

The Bre-B ceiling, set by the Banco de la República (Circular DSP-465, Asunto 18, numeral 3.2), is COP 12,110,000 per transaction for 2026. It binds every provider alike.

The USD row has a cost no provider sets. A SWIFT payment passes through intermediary banks that can deduct fees on the way, so the credited amount can land below the invoice. Ask for the instruction under which the sender covers every fee, and compare the credited amount with the invoice before marking it paid. When a deposit does not match at all, the guide to deposits that do not arrive covers the diagnosis.

On Lumx, the currencies are requested when the customer is created, and the payment instructions come back for each expected deposit: a Pix code, a CLABE, or wire details with routing and account numbers. The coverage page lists the rails as they stand.

What KYB asks of the company that holds the account

Verification is customer-level. The company is verified once, and each currency account then gets its own review, so the file is the same for Pix, SPEI or a dollar account.

What a business and an individual supply for standard verification.

The 25 percent line is in what KYB is, and the order to collect the paper is in designing a business onboarding flow.

Most rejections are clerical: missing pages, an ID past its validity or issued more than 10 years ago, a proof of address older than 90 days, or a name that differs between the ID and the ownership documents. Each sends the file back and restarts the review clock.

Lumx runs this review itself, with KYC through Sumsub and stablecoin transfer screening through Chainalysis. The company can complete it in a guided flow from a link, or the platform can submit data and documents through the API.

The tax ID changes by country, the file does not

The tax ID field takes the local identifier of the country where the customer is based. The Lumx docs list the accepted identifiers for individuals by country of residence. For companies, the tax ID must be valid in the country of incorporation, so the column gives the usual local number as an example. A wrong or malformed value is the usual way a customer lands in an RFI (request for information, a compliance hold that asks for a document before a transaction clears).

Tax IDs by country for the four account currencies.

A company keeps its own country's ID even when it wants an account elsewhere, so a US company holding a BRL account needs no local entity in Brazil. The individual identifiers come from the Lumx tax ID list, which also names the fallbacks for most countries and says to contact compliance when a country is not listed.

How long activation takes and which limits start

Two clocks run in sequence. The first is the customer's verification, which Lumx targets at one business day for KYB once every document is in. An enhanced review, needed for limits above the standard ones, takes longer: the docs publish three business days for KYB and two for KYC, as targets. Any RFI restarts the clock when the documents are resubmitted.

The second clock is the account's own activation, shown in the rail table: immediate for BRL and MXN, right after approval for COP, and up to one business day for USD.

Once the account is active, the customer's verification level sets what it can move. The table shows Lumx's default limits. They are global, so they are the same for a customer in any country.

Lumx's default limits by verification level, in US dollars.

On Lumx, each transaction type counts against its own limits, the API shows remaining headroom, and the Enhanced route raises the ceiling. Limits and cut-offs by rail covers how to raise them.

Where the cost actually lands

I would ask a provider for three numbers per rail before signing anything: the fee per payment, the fee on a return or an investigation, and the monthly fee for the account type your customers will hold. If a provider will not put those on paper, the quote is not a quote. I would send the KYB file complete the first time, because a file returned for a mismatched name costs more days than any line on the fee schedule.

When a virtual account is the wrong tool

A company that receives two or three payments a year does not earn back a monthly fee, and a payer that can send a stablecoin directly avoids the account altogether.

Some companies cannot hold one at all. Lumx publishes a list of prohibited business activities, and a structure that holds money belonging to someone who has not been onboarded is on it, the case where a pooled account is often proposed instead. Companies in high-risk categories, such as payment processors, go through Enhanced Due Diligence and should plan beyond the standard window. Customers in restricted jurisdictions are not onboarded; see supported countries.

What provisioning a BRL, MXN, COP or USD account looks like on Lumx

Lumx is stablecoin payments infrastructure for businesses that move money between Latin America and the rest of the world: one API to collect, hold, convert, and pay out in BRL, MXN, COP, USD, EUR, and GBP or in USDC and USDT, over local rails such as PIX, SPEI, PSE, Bre-B, ACH, FEDWIRE, SEPA, and Faster Payments, with SWIFT and on-behalf-of payments and collections (POBO and COBO) in USD, EUR, and GBP, plus named virtual accounts, custodial wallets, and KYB/KYC built in.

The platform lists the currencies when it creates the customer. Each account waits until verification is approved, then moves through requested and provisioning to active, and an event fires the moment it can receive funds. That event is the one to build against, because it is when payment details can go on an invoice. If the banking partner needs more, the account moves to RFI and the status reason says what is missing.

A company outside Brazil and Mexico can hold named BRL and MXN accounts without a local entity. The COP account is available to any customer: it is named when the customer is Colombian, and otherwise the holder shown is the banking partner, because COP runs through the partner's sponsored program. USD accounts are open to any individual or company in a supported country.

Fees follow the structure in the first table. The named virtual accounts page lists the account formats, and using them for B2B collections shows what the matching looks like once the account is live.

Methodology and sources

Product facts were read on November 1, 2026 from the Lumx docs pages on verification, limits, coverage, cut-offs, tax IDs and prohibited activities. The fee structure comes from the pricing section of the Lumx public description, and the per-item fees were confirmed by Lumx on November 2, 2026. Worked-example fees are placeholders. The BlindPay figure is from its virtual account fees article, last updated October 8, 2026. The Bre-B ceiling is from the Banco de la República's Circular Reglamentaria Externa DSP-465 of August 6, 2026, Asunto 18, numeral 3.2.

Verified on November 1, 2026. Operational context, not legal, tax, or investment advice.

Cover photo: Lance Chang on Unsplash.