Novo Review 2026

The $0 monthly fee is straightforward. No minimum balance, no maintenance charges, no monthly subscription tiers. ACH transfers (in and out) are free, and incoming wires cost nothing.

The fees that do exist are transactional. Outgoing domestic wires run up to $30 each. International purchases get hit with a 1% fee. Returned items and insufficient funds cost $27. None of these are unusual for business banking, but they add up if you send a lot of wires.

Novo also refunds up to $7 per month in ATM fees. That covers roughly one or two withdrawals at most out-of-network ATMs.

We completed the entire signup in under 10 minutes. Novo asked for a business name, EIN, business type, and a photo ID. No paperwork to mail, no branch visit.

Approval came quickly, and we had access to the dashboard the same day. The virtual debit card was available immediately. The physical Mastercard debit card shipped separately and arrived within a week.

ACH transfers worked without issues in our testing. Mobile check deposit is available through the app. Clearing times for deposited checks were a common complaint in user reviews, with some reporting holds of several business days.

There is no cash deposit option at all. This is the single biggest limitation. If your business takes in any physical cash, you need a workaround or a different bank.

The Mastercard debit card comes in both physical and virtual formats. Virtual cards are useful for online subscriptions where you want a separate card number.

Novo connects directly with QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe, Shopify, and Amazon. We linked a Stripe account and transactions synced into the Novo dashboard automatically.

The built-in invoicing tool lets you create and send invoices from inside your banking app. For a solo freelancer, this eliminates the need for a separate invoicing subscription. Novo also includes AI-powered bookkeeping features that categorize transactions, though we found the categorization needed manual corrections on about one in five entries.

The iOS app holds a 4.8 rating and the Android app sits at 4.6. In our use, the app was clean and fast. Checking balances, initiating transfers, and depositing checks all worked without friction.

Push notifications for transactions came through instantly, which is useful for fraud monitoring.

Novo's contact page offers two channels, a ticket inside the app where you chat with a support agent, and email for when you cannot log in. There is no phone number to call.

We submitted a test support inquiry and received a response within about 18 hours. That's fine for a routine question. It is not fine if your account gets frozen or you suspect fraud. Reddit threads are full of users describing days-long waits during urgent situations with no way to escalate by phone.

With a Trustpilot score of 3.9 from 4,469 reviews, overall sentiment is positive, but the negative reviews almost universally mention support speed.

Novo is not a bank. It is a software company. As of September 25, 2026, the money in your Novo account sits at Middlesex Federal Savings, F.A., a federal savings bank in Massachusetts and a member of the FDIC. We read the bank name in the small print on its home page and checked the bank's regulator on FDIC BankFind.

That setup matters in two ways. FDIC insurance pays out when a bank fails. It does not pay out when Novo fails, freezes your account or closes it. The cover is also pass-through insurance. It reaches you only if the records that show which dollars are yours are kept right, as the FDIC explains in its guide to banking with third-party apps.

Those records have failed before. Synapse, a firm that linked several finance apps to their banks, went bankrupt in April 2024. The banks held $60 million to $90 million less than its records showed, and many customers waited weeks or months for their money, according to the CFPB. That was a different company, but Novo rests on the same split between app and bank.

Closure and freeze stories about apps like Novo read the same way. Work through these steps in order.