How your funds are held
Where your money sits after a crypto deposit, who holds it, what safeguarding means, and why it is not the same as deposit insurance.
People ask two questions before they trust an app with money: who actually holds it, and what happens if the company fails. Here are plain answers.
Fundly does not hold your money
Fundly is not a bank, and Fundly itself does not hold customer funds. Your balance is held by [PARTNER], a licensed electronic money or payment institution. Cards are issued by [PARTNER] and the EUR IBAN account is provided by [PARTNER]. Fundly is the web app and the customer relationship on top of those services.
What happens to your crypto
When you deposit crypto, it is converted to your account currency (EUR or USD) at the published rate shown before you confirm. After that, you hold a fiat balance, not crypto. Fundly does not run a wallet that keeps your ETH, USDT or BTC for you.
The deposit addresses in the app belong to Fundly's crypto processing partner. The crypto you send is converted and the resulting fiat is passed to [PARTNER] and credited to your balance. This is why Fundly is not a crypto exchange and does not offer trading, staking or crypto withdrawals.
Safeguarding
Licensed electronic money and payment institutions in Europe must keep customer funds separate from their own money. This is called safeguarding. In practice it means:
- Customer funds are held in segregated client accounts at credit institutions, or in low-risk assets, separate from [PARTNER]'s operating money.
- [PARTNER] cannot use customer funds to pay its own bills or debts.
- If [PARTNER] became insolvent, safeguarded funds are ring-fenced for customers and are not available to the company's other creditors.
Safeguarding is not deposit insurance
This is important and we want to say it plainly. A balance in Fundly is not a bank deposit. It is not covered by a deposit guarantee scheme such as the ones that protect bank deposits up to 100,000 EUR in the EU.
| Bank deposit | Fundly balance | |
|---|---|---|
| Held by | A bank | [PARTNER], a licensed non-bank institution |
| Protection | Deposit guarantee scheme | Safeguarding of client funds |
| Pays interest | Sometimes | No |
| If the institution fails | Scheme pays out up to the cap | Ring-fenced funds are returned through the insolvency process, which can take time |
Safeguarding is a strong protection, but it is a different one. The main practical difference is timing: a guarantee scheme pays quickly, while an insolvency process can take months.
What Fundly's own failure would mean
If Fundly the company stopped operating, your funds would still sit with [PARTNER] under its safeguarding rules. [PARTNER] would contact you directly to return your balance or to continue service. Your money does not depend on Fundly's balance sheet.
Questions
If you want to know which institution serves your account, open Account, then Account details. The legal name, licence number and regulator of [PARTNER] are listed there and in Terms and policies.
Fundly is a financial technology company, not a bank. Limits and fees described as “at launch” are proposals and may change.