Wise closed my account because of crypto. Where do I bank now?

Recognition: this is you if

The closure email pointed at the Customer Agreement or the Acceptable Use Policy, and one bullet jumped out: “Trading in cryptocurrency.” Maybe you funded an exchange from the account, took a payout back to fiat, or run a business with BTC in the name. Nothing you did was illegal. The account is still gone, and the same email says you generally won’t be able to open another one.

The temptation now is to conclude the whole fiat system is closed to you and to go looking for the one provider that “allows crypto” — or to reapply somewhere new with the crypto scrubbed out of the story. Both moves tend to shorten the life of the next account, not extend it.

Funds still stuck in the closed account? Money out and records saved come before any of this. The 72-hour playbook has the exact sequence and a free escalation letter template. Then come back for the rebuild.

Why legal activity still closes accounts

Fintechs like Wise are money-services businesses that depend on their own banking partners, and those partners set categorical rules. Crypto activity is not evaluated deal by deal; it is a category the policy prohibits wholesale — and at Wise the prohibition is effectively global, across every entity and account type. Sending money to an exchange, receiving proceeds from one, funding P2P trades, running a crypto business through the account: all of it is out, and Wise’s own help pages name Binance and Coinbase as senders it cannot accept from. The carve-outs are narrow and specific — a salary paid by a crypto company, fees for professional services you rendered to one, spending on the Wise card at a crypto platform, and inbound payments from EU/UK-regulated platforms at Wise’s discretion. The decision that closed your account was an automated pattern match against that policy, not a judgment that you personally did something wrong. That distinction matters, because it tells you what the fix is: not a better explanation, but a structure that doesn’t trip the pattern.

The retry mistakes that make it permanent

Three moves reliably make the file worse. Reapplying at the same or a sibling provider under a fresh email and a cleaner story — the footprint matches, and now the record shows a closure plus an evasion attempt. Opening the next account with crypto in the legal name — an application that leads with “BTC” is asking a compliance analyst to approve on sight what their policy tells them to decline. And routing exchange flows through an account that was opened for “consulting” — that mismatch between declared activity and actual flows is precisely what the monitoring exists to catch, and it converts a rejection risk into another closure.

Closures also leave traces that outlive the account. Applying carelessly in week one is how one negative mark becomes two. The week-one playbook covers the immediate sequence; the short version is: money and records first, applications later.

How crypto-touching founders actually structure fiat

The founders who keep fiat banking for years don’t find a magically tolerant provider. They separate concerns. Operating fiat — payroll, suppliers, rent — lives at a chartered bank, in an account that never touches an exchange directly. Crypto on- and off-ramps run through institutions where the activity is declared on the application and accepted in policy, so there is no mismatch to detect. And crypto-native flows stay on crypto-native rails until they need to become fiat, at which point they cross at the declared ramp, not through the operating account.

Declared and boring beats clever and hidden every time, because the failure mode is never the activity itself — it is the gap between what the account was opened for and what runs through it. The fintech-vs-real-bank freeze data shows the durability half of this; the redundancy playbook covers keeping a warm backup rail so no single policy change can strand you again.

Rebuild in the right order

If the account that closed was carrying your whole financial life, the rebuild is a sequencing problem before it is a provider-selection problem: entity, tax ID, chartered bank, declared ramps — in that order, so no application contradicts the last one. Mapping that sequence to your exact situation, passport, and corridors is what the US banking for foreign founders page is for.