Your account is under review: what happens on our side and where your money sits

There is one screen nobody wants to see. The one saying your transaction is under review. If it happened to you, you probably went looking for an explanation and found silence, or a generic sentence that says nothing.

This is the explanation.

Heads up: part of this process is deliberately slow, part of it depends on third parties we do not control, and there are things we legally cannot tell you. Everything else can be explained, and understanding it changes quite a lot about what you can do.

First, the important bit: where your money is

During a review your balance is frozen. It does not disappear, it is not transferred anywhere, it is not used for anything else, and it stays recorded in your name in your euro account. A review blocks movement, not ownership.

User funds are held separately from the company's own funds, in accounts at the regulated entities that provide the payment service. That separation is exactly what makes "frozen" and "lost" two different things.

What triggers a review

Almost every case falls into one of five boxes.

The name does not match, and it is the number one cause

This is the most common one and the one that has least to do with you. On euro payments the name of the sender, or the recipient, is checked against the account holder. If it does not match, the payment stops so a person can look at it.

This is not a whim of ours. Since October 2025, payment service providers in the euro area have been required to offer verification of payee on euro transfers, precisely to cut impersonation fraud. The side effect is that an accent, a reversed surname or a trading name instead of a registered name creates a mismatch.

Cases that land here every week: your partner pays you from their account instead of you paying from yours. A company pays with its trading name rather than its registered one. Your ID says "María de los Ángeles" and the transfer says "Maria Angeles". Or the transfer comes through an intermediary platform that puts its own name as sender. When the payment arrives over SWIFT, check first what a SWIFT or BIC code is and how to find the right one.

A third-party deposit

This one earns its own section because it is the most frequent avoidable mistake. An account in your name should receive your money. If money arrives in someone else's name, the system cannot assume good faith. It has to ask.

Practical rule: get paid to you, from an account in the payer's own name. If it is your employer, with the company's registered name. If it is family, from their own account. And if there is no alternative, tell us in advance and keep the document that explains the relationship handy.

A movement that does not look like yours

Monitoring is not looking for large transactions. It is looking for different ones. A stable pattern for months and then suddenly a much larger amount, a new destination, or several transactions in a row to different beneficiaries.

It does not mean you did something wrong. It means the system cannot explain the change and needs you to explain it. If you already know it is coming, because you sold a car, received a settlement or closed a large contract, tell us first. The same applies to a euro to Argentine peso conversion far above your usual amount. A heads-up with a receipt turns a multi-day review into a few minutes of work.

A match on a list

Checks are run against sanctions lists and politically exposed persons lists. Very common names produce partial matches that a person has to rule out by hand. It is tedious and it is mandatory.

A request from outside

A competent authority, or the regulated entity executing the payment, can request information or hold a transaction. When the origin is external, the timelines are external too, on top of the normal time a SEPA or SWIFT transfer takes.

What speeds a review up and what changes nothing

What speeds it up: sending the exact document requested, legible and complete. A receipt showing the relationship between the sender and you. Explaining the source of funds in one sentence, with a date and a purpose. And telling us before a transaction that falls outside your usual pattern.

The most repeated process questions are already answered in the FAQ. What does not move the needle: writing through four channels at once, following up daily on the same case, or posting about it on social media.

And one that actively makes it worse: opening another account to get around an active review. That reads as an attempt to circumvent a control.

The document that resolves almost everything

It depends what the money is:

• A third party pays you: the transfer receipt with the sender's full name, plus something showing the relationship (contract, invoice, payslip).
• It is your salary: payslip or employment contract with your name exactly as it appears on your ID, following the steps in getting paid in euros without a European bank account.
• It is a sale: the contract or invoice, and the payment receipt.
• It is savings you brought from home: a statement from the originating account showing where it came from. If the money comes from Argentina, the Argentina corridor page lists what each leg asks for.
• The name does not match: an official document showing your full name, plus the receipt showing the name used in the transfer.

And one piece of advice that sounds minor and is not: send legible files. A photo of a screen, cropped and with glare on it, adds days to the process.

What we cannot do

So as not to create false expectations, three real limits. We cannot guarantee timelines when the decision depends on a regulated third party or an authority. We cannot, under anti-money-laundering rules, tell you whether a report to the authorities was filed: that prohibition exists across the European Union and in Latin America, and it admits no exceptions. And we cannot release a payment whose sender has claimed it as fraudulent without resolving that claim first.

Why we would rather this be inconvenient

A control that never gets in the way is a control that does not work.

The same mechanism that stops your deposit because a name does not match is the one that stops somebody using your identity to receive stolen money. And it is the one that cuts the networks recruiting other people's accounts to launder funds, which are described one by one in the scams that hit Latinos in Spain hardest.

What is on us is making the process understandable and telling you exactly what to send. If you have an open case, write to us from support with the transaction reference and the matching document from the list above.