Wise is deactivating Business cards in the US on Oct. 31st
wise.com
wise.com
Then they changed the US accounts with three weeks notice and I am like, you can't do this on such a short notice, WTF, I have outstanding invoices now need to be wired elsewhere, this is a gigantic mess. I completely expect at least one partner to screw this up in November, can't wait. Perhaps I should've moved this company to xe as well but I am exhausted.
Why can't we have nice things. (And please, do not recommend Revolut, look up their 2021 audit and the lack of 2022 accounts, so far. Not touching that. If and when they can convince the brits they are gucci I will take a look, not until.)
See [0]. They ore still holding $40k hostage and returned or blocked an entire months revenue. Definitely enough to kill many agencies and would have killed us in our earlier stages.
I have now tried Revolut, Airwallex, Payoneer, Bunq, OFX, and a few other alternatives. I am planning on doing a massive writeup comparing then all sometime soon.
I've had nothing but good experiences, but this has been enough for me to reconsider our exposure.
This is what happens when the company management does not care about clients. Nobody thought it is a problem. They just saw the immediate benefit for themselves in making the change quick and uncomplicated.
Of course it will cost them more in lost trust but that is a lesson that takes time and self reflection to learn (people like that tend to ignore what other people including their clients say).
Revolut meanwhile updated one day and then instantly blocked my account for having a rooted Android device. I closed my account (on the phone to their support number), withdrew all my money, and left.
At least wise has reasonably cheap exchange rates.
I’ve been a Wise customer for a decade. I went to make a transfer I’ve made before and was told I need to provide extra documents. These could only be provided using my mobile phone (I was on a laptop.) Their website requires you send a photo of your passport and a selfie, but it needs to be taken by their page. Naturally I got an error message, and contacted Support.
I sent their support both a copy of my passport and a selfie I took a minute before, and asked why my account was flagged for authentication - had something happened? (I’d wondered if there had been unusual login attempts, for example.) You can imagine what happened next - a round of support requests where they didn’t answer why I’d suddenly needed to provide documentation, where they repeated using their site or app for the photos, where they roundly ignored that it didn’t work, where some replies seem just copy-pasted and inapplicable. The latest email I got did finally semi-answer the question: due to “regulations”, a non-answer.
I live in Estonia, where they’re based, and have twice offered to visit their office with my ID so they can authenticate me. I didn’t expect them to say yes but it makes the failure of their online system clear.
The payment I needed to make was to pay a bill in my home country. This took so long the bill was overdue. The company I owed luckily offered me a Web-1.0, antiquated credit card payment service that I didn’t know they had. No idea how insecure it is, but I got the bill paid. That’s more than Wise has achieved!
My takeaway: Wise is absolutely unreliable. Your account can be prevented from making payments at any time for unknown reasons. Their support is unhelpful. It can drag on for weeks. If you have any time-sensitive payment (and most are, right?), you have no guarantees. I can no longer rely on Wise. It’s a shame for what used to be a wonderful startup and service.
Other than slow support I've not really had any issues though, when I do contact them they usually get it right - ie I asked them to add card transactions to web hooks as for some inexplicable reason it wasn't done, they added it within a few days and that was around a year ago.
Also they're not based in Estonia, they just have a presence to satisfy license requirements, they're still based in the UK (they also have a Belgian presence for some of their licenses too etc)
German neo-banks pretty much all use IDNow for verification, which is your standard human-operated "hold your ID into the camera and wave it around" service.
When attempting to use it with a rooted Android device or jailbroken iOS device, it fails with mysterious errors.
Support pages and human operators are completely blank on this ("have you restarted your phone and reinstalled the app?").
Nowhere (I found) is it documented that you can't use a freed device with IDNow's SDK. So every time I tried another device, of course I'd use another jailbroken one and it would fail again.
Only Nuri's app was so kind to even tell me that the error was due to something in the IDNow SDK and helped me finally find out what the cause of the problem may be.
Error messages matter, y'all. A regular customer would probably just perceive IDNow to be an unreliable piece of shit service and the banks to be too incompetent to get their core customer acquisition flow right.
Do a search on Facebook for Wise and you’ll see multiple groups where people sell their verified accounts and people looking to buy them.
They played fast and loose with the rules at the start and are playing catch up. Likely to avoid be shutdown in a number of countries.
You can find my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075819
In addition, the UX is deliberately designed to take your cash. If your account is currently limited and you can't send money, there is NO indication of this anywhere on the app or website -- not even in the transfer flow. It tells you that your money is now stuck AFTER you've sent it to them. That's right, if you are unable to send money they let you create a transfer and just freeze your cash as soon as you pay. Such an oversight can only be deliberate to pad their float.
Do you know any alternative which doesn't do this? Because I've seen the same trick in all of them.
Support just tells me that contactless works in theory and maybe there's been some specific issue with every time I've tried it so far and so I should just keep trying.
I understand risk mitigation but I am not a moron and it's my responsibility if my card is used without my authorization and thus they can just pass liability onto me I don't care, it's not a credit card I can't spend more than I have on it.
Secondary to that, at least here they never update contactless limits, so it's still 500kc/20 eur, ať which point you are required to enter pin anyway, iirc back home in the UK many terminals allow up to 100 per transaction without pin
Reading between the lines they were told to stop serving US customers by some regulatory agency. Clearly not a technical or upstream bank issue.
A court order or something?
Withdrawing cards 'temporarilly' seems like one of the worst things a bank could do.
But they're giving notice, so it's not like a technical fault preventing the cards from working.
I’d normally guess a contract dispute (with Evolve leveraging their position, and Wise calling their bluff) but the mentions in this thread of overwhelmed verification and fraud, it seems plausible evolve withdrew from the relationship for cause.
Which, to be honest, I should’ve always known, but still.
They're not a bank, even in the UK.
Remitley, xoom, revolut, ofx, Atlantic (?). Lot of others.
Just a straight wire transfer, but depending on your bank you might get wrecked in exchange rate.
Interactive Brokers has extremely good exchange rates and fees. But, it requires you to have accounts on both ends, so it doesn't work the same way. For the top comment in this tree though (individual moving between countries), I'd lean towards IBKR since it sounds like they control accounts on both ends.
I used them a lot for automated transfers, paying bills and keeping cash and they weren't happy about it.
As long as you run an active trading account with them it should be fine for occasional cash movements.
Now that I've been investing with them for a while, they don't seem to mind.
Though, it's also a freaking excellent broker, so you could just... use it for your normal brokerage purposes too. They've also got a CMA with rates as good as basically anything except maybe Fidelity (which sorta cheats by sweeping from a mmf), so you can theoretically just use it for your normal banking as well.
I don't actually maintain a IBKR account myself, but if I were to consolidate somewhere, it'd probably be either there of Fidelity. If I had to do forex more regularly, IBKR would win for me, hands down.
We sent 50 Euro to Bangladesh because wise.com doesn't support that country yet. Our bank charged 49 Euro in fees.
Not exactly a wise halloween treat for its customers.