Foreign-currency accounts and Wise for business in Japan

SWIFT is disabled by default on corporate accounts and requires a separate application, review, and possible refusal; the transfer fee runs to "several tens of thousands of yen." The typical setup: first open a foreign-currency account and deposit a small amount in the transfer currency (the fee gets deducted), then receive the first transfer, at which point the bank will request additional documents; no separate foreign-currency account is needed if the transfer currency is yen. Wise operates legally in Japan under license; transfers arrive from the Wise legal entity, and it does not work directly with rubles (rubles have to be routed through third countries/banks). In 2025 Wise became the first non-bank to gain direct API access to Japan's Zengin payment system, making transfers faster (down to about 10 seconds). Top-up details: わいず / ワイズ・ペイメンツ・ジャパン / WISE / bank code 0200. The standard holding limit on a Wise business/personal account in Japan is 1 million yen; any excess must be withdrawn within 30 days. The limit can reportedly be raised to 20 million yen with periodic (twice-yearly) reconfirmation of "temporary storage." The withdrawal limit is about 1 million yen. Opening a Wise corporate account is fast — a couple of hours if documents are uploaded online without a branch visit — or anywhere from 15 minutes to several days if verification is complicated by a name mismatch between the zairyu and the articles of incorporation. There are known cases of Wise refusing or banning corporate applications without explanation (including a permanent reject after applying to receive SWIFT); Wise "dislikes" small companies, refusals are fairly common, and sometimes paper document mailing is required. A typical scheme for receiving transfers from abroad: open a Wise corporate account, create a USD account (a one-off fee of about 3,000 yen to get SWIFT details), then convert to yen and make an internal transfer to the Japanese corporate account (when choosing a transfer reason, it's better to pick "Other business expenses," since "internal transfer" isn't available). To let Wise receive/send yen to/from a Japanese corporate account, formal account "linking" isn't required — matching the company name in Wise and with the recipient is enough. Wise is also used as an intermediary account for marketing expenses, because Japanese banks (e.g., SBI) often auto-block payments to ad platforms (TikTok, Facebook, Line) via "auto-security." Wise is not suitable as a primary "bank" for long-term corporate fund storage because of its holding limits. A public/partner Wise Business API is hard to get (available mainly to large fintech clients); a personal API plus a generated public key is possible but requires careful secret handling. An unofficial tool for importing Wise transactions into Freee is renflo.jp, which only works with Wise business accounts (personal Wise accounts don't expose API keys); it's free for manual import and paid for auto-import via webhook. An official Wise-to-freee会計 integration also launched in 2025 in the freee store (auto-import of transactions); a coupon for a free lifetime subscription was mentioned. No direct Wise-MoneyForward integration has been found by chat participants. Source: https://thefintechtimes.com/wise-becomes-first-non-bank-to-gain-direct-api-access-to-japans-zengin-system/ — News on Wise gaining direct API access to Japan's Zengin payment system. Source: https://wise.com/help/articles/3GBSRou4DTXxYz1piNbzN5/holding-limits-if-you-live-in-japan — Official Wise help article on holding limits for Japan residents. Source: https://renflo.jp/blog/renflo-setup-guide — Setup guide for renflo.jp, an unofficial Wise-to-freee transaction importer. Source: https://app.secure.freee.co.jp/applications/55199 — Coupon/link for a free subscription tied to the official Wise-freee integration launch.