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Comment by anonymoushn | Hacker News Reader

Hello, that's great that your selection of countries and banks work well with Wise. For me, moving about $10,000 (the maximum allowed by Wise) from the US to Japan through Wise takes about 5 days, costs like $70, and requires me to take a phone call at 2 in the morning from my US bank.

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You can up those limits.

Those are typically risk factors concerning fraud. Which is a feature.

And in practice your converting 10 k $ -> btc -> yen would be a lot more expensive ;). Those crypto exchanges have enormous fees too.

> You can up those limits.

You can't. That's a hard cap imposed by Wise for all transfers into Japan.

> And in practice your converting 10 k $ -> btc -> yen would be a lot more expensive ;). Those crypto exchanges have enormous fees too.

Nobody proposed using bitcoin.

Maybe you mean the worst fee tiers on US exchanges like Coinbase? I pay 1.5bps taker fees and receive maker rebates at my primary exchange. My primary exchange and one of my Japanese banks also provide extremely competitive OTC forex rates which I cannot currently use because my primary exchange does not have fiat withdrawals in Japan and because Wise is not willing to send dollars to my Japanese bank (I wonder why).

Yes you can: https://wise.com/us/blog/international-wire-over-10000

If you want to avoid those regulations, they propose sending multiple transfers.

Crypto exchanges are broader more than Bitcoin ofc.

Hello, you linked an article about the $10,000 threshold for IRS reporting requirements, which is unrelated to (and larger than) the 1M JPY cap Wise has historically imposed on transfers to Japan. Wise's article about this topic is here: https://wise.com/help/articles/2932156/guide-to-jpy-transfer... and currently claims that I can send larger amounts via SWIFT, so this may have just been some sort of UI issue where after saving a recipient that had all the information needed for a domestic wire but not a SWIFT code they refused to show the option for SWIFT transfers in the UI. They won't even show their UI for this stuff while you don't have a sufficiently large balance with them, so it would take me several days to check the accuracy of their article and to suss out whether my current saved recipient (myself) is only unable to receive large JPY transfers because it has no saved SWIFT code.

I don't think sending larger transfers would save much on fees though. The fees paid to Wise are dominated by the percentage fees for forex conversion.

I linked the that article, because you are going from USD to JPY. Which falls under IRS regulations... The cap should be 10.000 $ and is the cap you'll have without extra identification information. As such, the article is totally relevant. As you noticed by now, you can use Swift to transfer more than your mentioned amount ( which would be till 10 k. $ without extra verification)

Larger transfers are cheaper... ( calculator: https://wise.com/gb/pricing/borderless-convert )

Forex conversion is not exactly how Wise works. They have balances in multiple currencies and trade between that mostly...

Ugh...

Right. The relevant Japanese law was apparently amended last year, and within the last couple months Wise has begun to transfer amounts greater than 1M JPY.

The calculator you linked says they'll charge 45bps on transfers of 1000 usd and 45bps on transfers of 100,000 usd. That's a lot. I don't want to pay 45bps. If they charge 45bps either way then paying additional fees to my Japanese bank for sending a SWIFT transfer instead of many small domestic wires won't save me anything.

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