A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down | Hacker News Reader

A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

shaun.nz

332 pointsjemmyw267 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20251030232647/https://shaun.nz/...

At some point customer service died. Businesses of seem to no longer be interested in dealing with customers. Good customers come in all shapes and sizes, and often don't exactly fit a cookie cutter. It's frustrating to see businesses just cut and run the moment something becomes a problem that needs more than a series of pre-scripted responses to be resolved.

That's what you get for the low cost of entry. When most customers are self-signup (and probably low margin) there's no individual responsible for them.

Good in that you never have to speak to a salesperson, bad in that there will be no-one to take care of you if things go sideways.

Yes. I think that is a reasonable point. When cost of retention exceeds the cost of acquisition.

There was a time when the general consensus was that treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time.

It seems like that changed somewhere around the turn of the century, whereby businesses started to decide that it was better to cut down on customer service, and in some cases, go so far as to ban customers. The first cases of this I recall reading about had to do with Best Buy, and specifically their policy of banning people from their stores who made a lot of returns.

I'm not really sure how it ultimately maths out - i.e., whether it's long-term optimal to drop troublesome customers or merely short-term optimal, and this was primarily taken from the perspective of retail.

As such, I'm sure the math changes a little for subscription services. However, I also recall my prior employer's support activity followed a power law distribution across its clients, so it wouldn't surprise me if a policy to drop particularly noisy clients is a net savings there as well.

For brick and mortar retail that isn't fast fashion or supermarkets, dropping troublesome customers is generally extremely sensible.

Profit on most goods is low - single digit % typically - and a single return can eliminate the profit margins on a dozen sales. Sometimes cost can be reclaimed from goods providers - i.e. genuinely defective or manufacturer refurbishment programs - and sometimes they can resell the item as new. But if the item has been used, broken by the customer, etc. the loss is significant. It turns out that some people are more honest than others, and some people are directly trying to scam companies.

When one 'dodgy' customer can eliminate the value of 10 'real' sales with every return the maths say to ban people quickly.

A little anecdote - I have a distant relative who, circa 2005, would buy a vacuum cleaner use it, and then return it. He rotated stores (hardware stores, supermarkets, electronic stores) until he gradually got banned from them all. Once that happened he moved house. Not only had he almost certainly spent more in time and fuel than a reasonable vacuum would have cost him (which I will note he could afford); but the cost and waste he has incurred on both individual companies and society at large through that and similar schemes is staggering. I don't know if he's still at it - or alive - but the people he was surrounding himself with all saw such behaviour as reasonable.

All true, I have no doubt, but this experience has weighted your judgement here IMO. That isn't the force at play in modern customer service policies.

> treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time.

may be true in the past, but a business cannot scale up good customer service - it's at best a linear scaling, where each new customer costs the same fixed amount due to needing high touch/people to manage that customer.

With the internet, businesses have found scaling to work better by ensuring your fixed costs stay fixed even if you scaled up customer count - this includes support/call centers etc. Without doing this, the business cannot scale up exponentially.

It did "math out" because these industries heavily lobbied and regulated that starting an alternative is close to impossible. Think about Wise: How many companies out there have the same service? The closest are Revolut and Airwallex. So in a world of 8 billion people and millions of businesses, there are only 3 companies that do the same thing that Wise do. In comparison, there are thousands of banks around the world.

Wise's USP is a consequence of the way the US banking industry works (possibly as a result of US regulation). Free and instantaneous interbank transfers are ubiquitous in other banking systems, as are low-fee international transfers.

Wise is a British company with lots of customers around the world, the article is by someone in New Zealand.

It is cheaper than British banks for international transfers. Its business accounts are both easier to open and cheaper to run than those of the banks.

You are right that transfers from personal bank accounts in the UK are usually free and rapid (usually immediate, guaranteed to be within two hours), and similar or better in many other places, but Wise still has an offering beyond that.

Low fee international transfers are not ubiquitous unless you're talking about SEPA.

> It seems like that changed somewhere around the turn of the century, whereby businesses started to decide that it was better to cut down on customer service, and in some cases, go so far as to ban customers.

You missed the first step, which is to burn though tons of cash offering your services below cost, driving all competitors out of business. Then once you've done that, where else are they going to go?

> net positive profit-wise over time.

There are definitely many customers you should drop, but business are not even that interested in retaining profitable customers. The problem is with the "over time".

Management are rewarded with bonuses and options that focus on the next few years so they are not really interested in how profitable a customer will be over the next ten years, only over the next one or two. Small businesses and family owned businesses are different, but for a big, widely held, professionally managed business the incentives are all short term.

A family member helped start up a call center for UPS back in the 90's, for their shipping software. The problem she was working on was that the average time for a call to be answered was 60 seconds, and they were trying to get it to 45 seconds. They also had formal tiers of agents that could quickly escalate a call to a technical expert if needed. The golden age of call centers I guess.

On one hand, this makes me incredibly sad. It means that all of us, as consumers, agreed we'd rather save a buck than get acceptable service.

On the other hand, as someone who did customer service in my younger years, 95% of calls were PEBKAC, so it's essentially a giant money drain for things of no real concern to you as a company.

I've often wondered how successful it would be to charge $3 or $5 per call, refunding the money in cases said call was needed.

The worst customer service is usually for things where you don't have a choice, like when your mortgage gets sold to a new servicer.

In principle I agree with the concept of charging for support and refunding if the issue is not at the customer's end. I'd certainly be fine with that myself, even if it cost $50 or so to get a responsible human on the line when there's trouble with a service like banking, payments, or business-critical SaaS providers.

I think Microsoft tried that at one point, but they didn't stick with it for some reason. Maybe it leads to a lot of knock-down, drag-out arguments about whose fault something is.

The problem is dealing with those other 5% of calls. If you are in a 5% situation, you're seemingly SOL these days.

> At some point customer service died.

At some point enforcement died. It used to be that locking someone out of their money would wind up with people in jail.

Now, it's not just a cost of doing business but also viewed as a positive by state actors.

...when exactly would you have gone to jail for this?

Yep. I'd like to see some news stories confirming this magical past.

Lots of banking access laws were put in place after the Great Depression and vestiges still remain although most of them have been repealed.

See, for example, Section 37.002(c) of the Texas finance code: "An office or operation may not remain closed for more than three consecutive days, excluding days on which the bank is customarily closed, without the banking commissioner’s approval."

Laws like these were put in place because failing to disburse someone's money could cause a bank run.

Wise customer service is amazingly good though.

I'd much prefer to use a company that spends 100% of the time on 80% of customers than one that spends 80% of it's time on 20% of the customers

OP can't even provide proof from the tax office of being at that address, it's an angry rant rather than the whole picture.

Would you go into business with him with nothing but a phone bill as proof?

I've had good interactions with Wise twice.

I couldn't log on, got the problem escalated, then they got me to create a logged session in their app, and from that they diagnosed the problem was due to larger text on a smaller screen causing their app to crash. I've rarely had technical faults diagnosed and fixed by any company.

Cough economist and financial times

Did you read the post? The business had just moved. Was it supposed to wait on the tax office for the next tax statement, which could arrive months later?

> Was it supposed to wait on the tax office for the next tax statement, which could arrive months later?

In Australia you can get a Company Extract from ASIC for $10. Apparently it's free in NZ [1].

I believe they haven't actually updated their registered company address for some reason, and that triggered Wise's systems.

[1] https://companies-register.companiesoffice.govt.nz/help-cent...

> OP can't even provide proof from the tax office of being at that address

Well, the article says otherwise. I think "The document was rejected because it was a tax invoice, not a bill." is a pretty lame rejection reason.

That being said, I didn't quite get the solution Wise suggested. Don't they already have a lease document for the new office? It looks like the author has omitted some crucial detail.

Had a transfer frozen by the central bank earlier this year.

Wise was very helpful in getting it resolved, and made it clear that if anything else came up, just reply to the e-mail anytime.

To counter this, I was using my account for years with no issues, then one day I've had my Wise account "closed" for no reason other than "breach of terms".

No other insights or discussion and the appeal process basally took months with nothing but an automated response.

I've given up on all these "fintech" companies and am using tradition banks.. at least there is regulations and they can't randomly decide to close your account and remain unresponsive when you require support.

I've been telling my loved ones to stay away from Wise, PayPal and similar services.

I was thinking the same thing recently (dealing with 2 different companies). As soon as the company get some market share - all customer support is just gone. You only get some automated messages in reply, and if you're lucky to speak with someone on the phone - they still just read the answers from some predefined FAQ.

Completely agree. I run a small company and great customer service has been a competitive advantage in what is more or less a red ocean. Just the ability to speak to a human being goes a long way, and if you actually solve their problem, you not only build loyalty but referrals.

With these companies, if it takes more to keep the 10% of customers that will leave because of bad service than providing good service, then bad service will be delivered.

This was very obviously written with ChatGPT. The structure, emojis, emdashes and contrasting sentences. Surprised nobody is calling it out. IMO save us time and just give us the original short version you wrote to ChatGPT

man didn't even notice it. getting old.

"Let's Recap" is a dead giveaway.

"Their answer?" I absolutely loathe gpt's structure

I don't know the name of this rhetorical device, but I assure you it that using it is older than gpt

Yeah, a version of the construct famously ends the Albert Einstein copypasta, which is at least 10 years old at this point. Though I think stylistically it's considered bad writing, which is likely why it's so jarring when it starts to crop up in ChatGPT-generated text.

Just yesterday, a coworker used "And the best part?" while verbally relating a story.

ChatGPT must have trained on something. Only things I can think of are the many teen angst TV series with spoken "inner monologue" voice over, and narratives from people who are their own main character.

You can tell just from the title alone.

I am currently employing a consultant for something. It's something I don't want to do myself and they are doing what I need, but it's so painfully obvious they are just vanilla ChatGPTing everything it's almost funny at this point.

How can you tell from title alone? I am clueless.

As if shaming people for using ChatGPT to write articles will have any meaningful effect. It's also quite fatiguing having to read the same complaint over and over when the solution is so simple yet many fail to grasp it.

In the UK I have a single person Ltd. I use a virtual office as my registered address (a standard practice) and my home as my trading address. My UK banks and insurance all list my trading address (knowingly - that is the one they want) and my regular bills are personal, not under the company.

When wise ran a KYC, we had quite the confusing back and forth. The only documents I had which they nearly liked were from HMRC - but they didn't like that they were > 1year old.

In the end I rang HMRC and asked for any paper document they could send me with their logo, my company name, my trading address and my registered address on it... the lovely HMRC rep worked out which real document I could trigger. A complete waste of her time obviously.

It feels like particularly in finance, that startups who disrupt traditional players do so without a full understanding of all the corner cases and none of the regulatory accountability which is why those traditional finance players were so expensive in the first place.

Is there any accountability for overly conservative KYC? My understanding from the whole debanking thing is no, at least in the US.

Kinda depends on how you define "accountability" of course, but rejecting paying customers is usually frowned upon in business. You want your KYC processes to be conservative enough not to get fined, but not so conservative that you lose out on potential revenue.

If you're too far off on either side, you either get fined by whatever regulator you fall under, or you get fined by the stock market because your competitors are more profitable.

Closing 1% of accounts instead of .1% of accounts for kyc reasons won't affect your revenue enough to matter to the stock market.

If you are closing 1% of your accounts every year, then you'd better be growing at more than 1% per year just to break even. If you don't have an appeal process, you'll eventually restrict everybody: Given enough time, some business/person will eventually do a weird transaction that flags them out.

There are international mechanismis for verifying that countries enforce AML stuff like KYC, but no mechanisms for measuring either how effectice it is nor what it's negative effects are.

Chesterson's bureaucracy

Not even corner cases. I worked for a fintech that launched a dda-ish product that had 16 digit account numbers, issued sequentially, with no check digits. At launch there didn't seem to be a CS process for dealing with pretty obvious "customer mistyped account number and sent their money to some else's account." problem.

Feature parity with blockchains.

Uh, no, most crypto wallet addresses have either a checksum or some other means of typo detection / prevention.

Not even, in cases where the company couldn't recover funds from misdirected payments they ate the loss. Though obviously I think that's a good thing.

Back in early 2022, a little after the war started, TransferWise blocked transfer (i.e. donation) to the account run by the National Bank of Ukraine for support of the Ukrainian military.

I have and never will forgive them for this.

Looks like it is probably against their acceptable use policy:

1.2.3 Other restricted activities c. Weaponry, military and semi-military goods and services. Weapons (including weapons of historic significance), military software, or any other goods or services intended for military use.

> I have and never will forgive them for this.

Ukraine is well known money laundering machine. Before the conflict started it was a well known fact and many banks didn't want to work with transfers to Ukraine. I am sure TransferWise shared similar risk model.

Everything you say might be technically true.

But if you look at the bigger picture, Ukraine has been invaded and occupied by a bigger countries which buys western banks to do it's money laundering through. Now is not the time to be discipling.

Justice is more than just following laws.

Yes, but that's a matter to be settled in a court. Banks and other financial institutions have no business deciding what's just; they just follow the regulations given to them by governments and the courts.

Russia invaded Ukraine, inflicting untold horror, and Russia is a threat to Europe.

In the circumstances of early 2022, I would have expected a way to be found, in the knowledge that such an action - telescope held to blind eye - would be condoned.

> Russia invaded Ukraine, inflicting untold horror, and Russia is a threat to Europe.

Realistically it is way more nuanced than that. Its a juvenile worldview to think in black and white.

Not willing to start any discussion on the matter, but you may want to know about massacres ukraine did in it's eastern side. After all, the russian invasion wasnt that unprovoked at all (albeit as any force causing many to suffer, it's hard to justify it).

The bottomline is - reality is way more nuanced than just black and white.

No, it's really very simple. What kind of person wants to become a CEO of Russia, Ukraine, or Transferwise?

Or Wirecard lol

> Not willing to start any discussion on the matter, but you may want to know about massacres ukraine did in it's eastern side.

This is a Russian narrative.

> After all, the russian invasion wasnt that unprovoked at all

This also is a Russian narrative.

It seems to me you have been from some source been absorbing Russian material.

Putin is a dictator. A few years after he came to power in 2000, Russia was once again living in fear; you did not speak out. If you did, fines, prison, penal colonies with death and violence, or now and then being thrown out of windows.

It looks from material being produced by Putin, the State and the military Russia by about 2010 was looking to take Ukraine.

Putin had his man running Ukraine - into corruption and thuggery - until Euromaiden. He fled to Russia. Literally immediately after that, plan B - the small war began. Finally, 2022, the big war.

There is nothing here where we go "it was not that unprovoked".

Ukraine wanted, and wanted, freedom. To be itself, and not to live in a hell-hole dictatorship. Putin wants to possess Ukraine, because that's how he and it seems a good part of Russian State culture sees the world; in terms of power, conquest and territory.

> This is a Russian narrative.

What is the "russian narrative"? Whats is this made up definition?

> Putin is a dictator.

Based on what?

> Russia was once again living in fear; you did not speak out

I don't think Russia is living in fear, neither I should be speaking out as I am not in any way related to it.

> It looks from material being produced by Putin, the State and the military Russia by about 2010 was looking to take Ukraine

Doubt this is true.

> Putin had his man running Ukraine - into corruption and thuggery

Yea, all presidents/PMs were "his men". If this is not propaganda what you are desperately trying to do (and you do it quite poorly I must admit), then I don't know what propaganda is.

> Ukraine wanted, and wanted, freedom

Thats why ukraine sold everything it had, including it's rare minerals for years to west :) We certainly have different definitions of freedom.

> Putin wants to possess Ukraine,

There is no proof for that. What "posess" means?

That's your opinion. Businesses make their own decisions. You'd be aware if you knew anything about history.

> Justice is more than just following laws

Justice also isn't what you feel justice is.

The whole point of laws is to have a set of definitions and do judgements upon.

> buys western banks to do it's money laundering through

Western banks do enough money laundering even without changing owners to beneficiaries from Russia.

It was possible to make transfers to the military support account for about two weeks after war started; then it was blocked.

Transfers to other accounts were still possible.

Amount of theft from “military” accounts in Ukraine is staggering, if anyone would ever be interested to figure out. Everyone know that except people blindfolded by the world “military” and deluded to think money there would be used on anything else but beneficiaries whims.

Supporting evidence, please. So far you've made claims only - "everyone knows".

Kyiv Independent, who are pretty good at this and are on the spot, do not report large scale or significant military corruption. They have found and report on pretty corruption (individuals selling personal weapons). I note EU and US are very interested in keeping track of where the money is going.

Sapienti sat. Just because your favourite media piece does not report something it doesn't mean things don't exist.

> I note EU and US are very interested in keeping track of where the money is going.

That's funny :)

> Ukraine is well known money laundering machine.

Can you provide any sources for this?

Ukraine had very strict banking rules for at least a decade. It had much more sense to launder through Cyprus for example or other EU countries like Latvia (when it was still possible) or Hungary if you’re politically connected.

> Can you provide any sources for this?

Thats common knowledge for everyone even tangentially related to finance industry and likely for anyone who ever did international business with cross border payments . Not sure what kind of "sources" you expect to see here.

> Ukraine had very strict banking rules for at least a decade

Perhaps for it's own populace, but not for it's rulers and those who they work with.

Do you mean some Russians used Ukraine as a money laundering middleman, specifically through corruption of politicians and elites in the system there? Because it sounds like it. Before the "conflict" (invasion) happened.

I'll leave your imagination to judge who used ukraine as money laundering machine. To have some supplementary data for that, we can look where the money entering ukraine come from for say last 5 years. You can easily find how much was coming from russia and compare it with flow from say EU. You should be capable of drawing your own conclusions after.

You can imagine all sorts of things, including the ones which are not true.

The fact is that there are no proofs that any money donated by EU, US or other donors for Ukraine was misused.

I’ll leave your imagination to judge why the most powerful propaganda machine in the world tries to claim otherwise to stop such aid.

Okay, so basically you’ve read some “anonymous sources” and decided they are true.

Because for me, as a person who did international business from Ukraine it makes absolutely zero sense to launder through Ukraine as it is:

1) no part of any union, so you will be unable to spend or move money outside.

2) it has extreme bank regulation, and you cannot just send money outside without cause. Receiving and sending money for fake “services” will not work (compared to a lot of other places I know)

3) it has a lot of independent anti-corruption institutions. You can be sure that any government official fears the consequences of doing something illegal.

4) it is in a state of war and any suspicious money operation will trigger investigation from SBU as well, since Russia tries to pay for its agents.

If there is corruption and money laundering happening, it is well outside of any path available for regular people.

It’s advisable not to judge within your limited worldview. Not everyone “reads” mainstream media, some people have real world experience.

Your arguments regarding why Ukraine can’t be used for money laundering are laughable and just show you are now aware how certain things in financial world work. That’s totally fine - but it gets distorted when some extended judgements are made based on very limited worldview.

So enrich my and other peoples world view - this is what this forum is about. Instead of saying "I'll leave it to your imagination", please provide any substance of your claims - anything we can talk about.

Since you didn't I have to guess, what you are talking about.

It not possible to "enrich" view of someone who prefers to live in a bubble of own delusions. Neither I am gonna try that.

What about other users that might be interested in the topic, apart from OP?

Sapienti Sat.

They might have to follow up with a “why we are never using <hosting> again”

A 9 point HN post shouldn't bring down the server.

No amount of HN popularity should bring down a static article, really.

This

it's wordpress, so technically not static, although if it was it wouldn't have this resource problem.

Don't cache plugins exist for WordPress? Or, barring that, wouldn't CloudFlare help?

They do, but they aren't very good. PHP is very fast, but unfortunately Wordpress is carefully designed to make it very slow.

> Additionally, a 507 Insufficient Storage error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

They've probably forgotten to rotate web server logs.

It's back up, luckily.

You might be shocked just how bad some wordpress sites are. Ive responded to web developers calling 'ddos' on sites that crashed under the Google crawl (before ai crawls misbehaved and made this more of a thing).

Oh, I'm not surprised at all, but there's absolutely no reason at all that static webpages don't at least use a caching plugin, if they insist on using WordPress.

I'm sure some of the caching plugins don't play nice with other plugins or vice versa.

I once had to do terrible things to make a WordPress blog work under massive load. Actually not that terrible, I just did some manual caching; grabbed the html, saved it as index.html and made sure the webserver served that (if present) rather than WordPress for the front page, and approximately nobody clicked past the front page (I could have cached some of the article links too)

Thankfully, a little while later, I had a good reason to write a rage fueled just barely dynamic replacement of WordPress that met our exact needs with data stored as files. Not as fast as static files, but page generation in < 10 ms (IIRC) is good enough most days. Sadly, I think that blog moved to something slow again, but I no longer support it.

Will a default config of caddy be able to handle this load?

Serving static files? It wouldn't even register.

Oh, a wise guy, ehe?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yscaDkzHqek

Follow up article: why were never using Wordpress again. A hacker news cautionary tale.

Also. Well done wise.com. Only having customers who use Wordpress means no vitality on people posting hate for you.

The right solution here is to take the telecom tax invoice, edit it in a PDF editor to say Telecom bill, and send it back.

The process is stupid enough that this will work 95% of the time. Is it fraud? No, not really, I'd argue. You're just conforming the document to an arbitrary standard, but all the relevant details are factual, not fraudulent.

That was my first thought as I was reading. Of course, I imagine almost every serious business would be extremely uncomfortable doing something like that. On the other hand, if the alternative is getting your account closed anyway, there's not much to lose.

It is misrepresentation unless you tell them you doctored it.

I can confirm that this is the exact method recommended in forums where people and businesses that meet adversity from banks on a daily basis (most of the time for completely legitimate businesses, sometimes not) congregate to share advice.

The point is to feed the compliance critters exactly what they want so they can tick their boxes without sticking their necks out.

In my country, there is no single document that shows my name and address that is acceptable as a document for address verification in many western fintech applications.

If you're renting, bills will arrive in the name of the owner, even though I personally pay them each month.

We don't really do lease agreements either, except for very rare circumstances.

If you own a property, you could go to the public registry, then translate that, notarize and _maybe_ it will work. But I don't own any property.

We don't even get a PDF for the bills, it's just a HTML table with a few lines of CSS.

So I simply change the owner's name to mine in that table, save as PDF and send that. Never failed.

And at that point, why even have this process at all?

I read this yesterday and thought "only a matter of time for us". We use Wise twice a month and have for a couple of years.

Today I was surprised to find out that matter of time was 12 hours, as I logged in and see:

"We've temporarily blocked your Wise account. We're missing important information from you."

When I click the link, it says: "That address doesn't look right" and shows my business address. That is right.

There's no way to contact nor do anything other than change the address. I of course don't want to change the address, because it's my business address. Lol.

I got the same notification, US business owner here. In my case, I did not change my address (or anything else). But I suspect their system is regularly looking for work and can't handle DBAs well. To avoid this exact scenario, I was on their butts and uploaded every document I had. Eventually I was escalated and they did something, but I still can't enable their APR option due to some error somewhere. No one seems to know what. I'm very concerned one day I'll wake up to the same fate as the author.

It's a shame because I really love using the Wise website, app, payment system, and even the physical card (esp. in Japan).

Happy to work with anyone over there if they read this and want to dig in.

The KYC/AML dance is really annoying. The actual bad guys know exactly what they need to pass all the checks, while regular people, as in this case, often get caught in the wheels. Banks or fintechs rarely have the kind of investigative powers they would need to actually find the criminals using them, nor do they really want to spend their time playing police. So anything even remotely suspicious? You're now out of our risk appetite, bye.

For the actual criminals - if you're already doing crime, what's a little document forgery on top of that?

It's about time we accepted this fact and allowed money transfers, payments and banking to be neutral infrastructure.

Are you American? If so, you should lobby for the end of the Bank Secrecy Act which is upstream of all of this.

Only slightly related, but it gave me a laugh--

Wise needed beneficial ownership documentation for my business account. Presumably this was part of the whole KYC/AML/etc dance.

There's no standard form I could find for this, document to get out of the government service portal, or anything else. I finally just fired up a word processor and put together a single page document:

    To whom in may concern,
    
    Below is an accounting of all individuals who, directly or indirectly,
    through any contract, arrangement, understanding or otherwise own equity
    interests in 12341234 CANADA LTD.
    
    NAME             DOB              Ownership
    nucleardog       1970-01-01       100%
    
    I hereby certify that the above information is correct as of Dec 31, 2037.
    
    Nucleardog
    President
    12341234 CANADA LTD

No notes. They accepted it immediately and the account opening moved forward. Like... wat? Why was I stressed about this?

(I have since written myself many things things like this, e.g., salary verification letters. Always gives me a chuckle and feels like a weird superpower I've gained by paying the $250 or whatever to incorporate.)

If I were someone that set up forged accounts and stuff professionally this would've been absolutely _nothing_ to bypass. As someone legit doing this _once_ for _a_ business, it definitely took a lot more research and thought that it really should have.

Wow, haha. Reminds me of the recent South Park where they hold up the phone and the AI says "I can confirm we have the authority to pass."

    So this is my word of warning:
    Don’t put all your eggs in the Wise basket.

You've taken the wrong message away from this.

The lesson you should have learned here is: Don't put all your eggs in any one basket.

If you are relying on a single provider for some critical business function, then your business is at risk. Period. I don't care how long you've been working with them and how nice their current sales support rep is. Things change. People leave. Companies get bought by other companies and restructured. If you're relying on any single one for anything mission-critical, that's an existential risk.

I agree that your wise story is ludicrous and terrible and hilarious. I particularly love how your bill was rejected because it was labelled as a "Tax Invoice" (we have the same requirement here in AU).

But TBH this is pretty typical of online services these days, and you should have expected this to happen. Google will happily lock you out of your account for no real reason and give opaque reasons why they won't unlock it. I've seen cases of this happening to google employees. Paypal are notorious for freezing funds during product launches.

IMO there should be regulations requiring businesses to have a way for customers to speak to an actual human with decision-making powers. If I was you, I'd be taking legal action against wise and complaining to the government department responsible for regulating these things.

I had a very similar experience with Wise recently. I finally managed to find a document they deemed acceptable (at the fifth attempt) the day before the deadline. At no point did I receive a clear explanation as to why a document was rejected.

After the second rejection I hastily transferred all of my business funds to other accounts, and have no intention of returning.

Any suggestions for alternatives? I set up an account and tested a transfer to an out-of-country account, just in case I need to leave the US.. It worked painlessly. But recently, I think they closed my account pending more documents.

Also, any suggestions on reasonably secure bank accounts one can hold without citizenship / residency? Swiss?

I would suggest Revolut, but my experience with them has been similar to Wise. I have a locked Revolut account with funds in it that I can't access because I moved address.

Do you think you'll eventually get your money back ? I got my funds locked up in a neobank once and it tooks weeks to get it back and there was almost no support available

I think so, but I have to jump through a few hoops first and that's been painful.

xe.com is competitive with wise rates and answers the phone. My KYC/AML journey was brief and they came through within their stated timeframe.

However all of the online companies sell the happy path and your experience will be diminished the farther you deviate from it. The right answer may be for a business to maintain a second-source in this as in all critical supplier relationships.

The only real solution (that many people here in HN hate?) is crypto. USDT/USDC on Eth or Solana and rails to the old systems are much better now. If you are really paranoid (USDT/USDC have a blacklist functionality), then hold Bitcoin and open a derivative short essentially creating a synthetic USD.

Bitcoin doesn't have a blacklist functionality and you can use lightning for full anonymity.

> then hold Bitcoin and open a derivative short essentially creating a synthetic USD

Huh that's a pretty interesting idea. I guess the downside is you need enough margin to cover the short.

Theoretically, you are fully covered but full margin will require all your holdings to be on the exchange. So maybe do something like 20-25% margin and constantly follow the market to re-balance. It is not a carefree approach.

The main reason I was using Wise is because they made it easy to set up a US bank account. Changing the payment procedure with my current client is untenable, so for now I just ensure that my money is held by Wise for as little time as possible.

For personal foreign currency transactions, usually whilst travelling, I've used Revolut for years without issue.

? "Wise, formerly known as TransferWise, is an English financial technology company focused on global money transfers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_%28company%29

> a dropdown list of acceptable documents: a lease agreement, rates notice, tax document, utilities bill, or telecommunications bill.

It’s baffling to me that these types of (usually unsigned in both the electronic and the ink way, not that the latter would prove anything in a scan) PDFs are still somehow the gold standard for “proofs” of address.

In many countries worldwide that's the reasonable best option. A scan of a physically signed piece of paper is no better, anyone could've signed it. So long as there is no global standard for digitally signed documents, that's what we're stuck with, no?

While you can always outright commit fraud, there are many jurisdictions where there are decently strong forms of proof that go beyond a letter.

Things like tax numbers with addresses associated to them, official address registers... hell, a lot of ID cards in many jurisdictions just have your address printed on it!

Now, again, fraud is possible, but "I registered my drivers license to a fake address" is a bit of a higher hurdle than "I edited my utility PDF to show the right address".

Though there's a bit of a blessing in things like PDFs being easily editable, in that many badly organized criminals will likely do it haphazardly, leading to messy metadata, or even more amateur hour stuff around just having the font be wrong or the like. More opportunities for a fraudster to trip up, so to speak.

In countries where you do have e.g. tax numbers associated with addresses no government agency is going to give it to a random private company. I've lived in many countries both in the EU and outside of it and I can think of only a few countries where you actually could do something better than a pdf — and they use digital signatures.

> In countries where you do have e.g. tax numbers associated with addresses no government agency is going to give it to a random private company.

Why not? In my country the company registry is public, anyone can pay a small fee to get an official certificate of a company's address and company number.

We're talking about different things, what you're describing is the opposite problem. The vast majority of the customers are people, not companies, and no information will be released about them.

The post we're discussing is about a company, so I think that's the relevant case. (And for what it's worth the registry I'm talking about also applies to sole proprietors, at least those who've registered for the associated tax treatment).

A bank is not a random private company.

In Finland, people are supposed to have a single official address. When you move, the government informs banks and other businesses that have a legitimate reason to know your official address, unless you have opted out. There are a few exceptions, such as temporary addresses and international relocations, where you have to give the new address yourself.

I don't know about the rest of the EU but France just has national ID cards with your address printed on the back! No need for anything fancy there.

In both Australia and Japan there are tax numbers used for corporate identity verification (remember: here we're talking about a Wise account used for a business)

> France just has national ID cards with your address printed on the back! No need for anything fancy there.

Is a scan/photo of a government ID that much more reliable, though?

Physical IDs are designed to be validated in person because they're hard to replicate. That's not the case for a scan/photo of an ID.

So a couple of things:

- I don’t know for France but for Japan one of the ID cards (My Number cards) have RFID chips in them. This means that KYC procedures can involve both scanning the card with your phone, and then doing some video “turn your head” verification stuff

- even absent that, video-based KYC flows (which I see a lot of) just leave less margin of error for fraudsters. And for people being honest, a national ID card is yet another way for someone to have proof, despite their other circumstances

There’s always going to be people in edge cases of course, I just feel like leaning on ID cards that many jurisdictions have is straightforward

One big problem I see with that is that, while almost all passports and EU ID cards now support ICAO cryptographic document validation standards, there's usually no publicly accessible revocation list for these.

Combine that with the absence of any built-in user verification (some national schemes have a PIN code, but the track record of that isn't great), and it becomes clear why these documents don't fully solve the problem of strong identity verification.

>Is a scan/photo of a government ID that much more reliable, though?

There is a DataMatrix barcode containing the same data plus a digital signature from the government. The Wikipedia page for this specific barcode happens to show the back of the French national ID card as its example:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/2D-Doc

Does it necessarily need to be a global standard? Just starting with the ones that do have a digital signature infrastructure would be something. The EU has eIDAS, which already covers 27 countries, for example.

For more serious stuff in AU there is Justice of the Peace (basically a qualified volunteer but not necessarily a lawyer) who can certify the copy. This can then be scanned and has the JP stamp and signature. Sort of handy as it is a distributed network, so you dont need to queue at a post office and get someone to eye up your docs and fill in a form.

In the US (for financial things) that's called a medallion guarantee and you can walk into a bank and get them to authenticate it.

For other things there are notaries public.

Walk into a bank is no longer possible in Finland, regardless of the purpose.

Most branch offices have been closed. The bigger part of the remaining ones are appointment only and getting an appointment can take weeks.

Very few offer cash and similar day to day services without appointment, but only very short hours. People who cannot use cards or the internet will queue in the street.

So like the modern challengers, traditional banks just offer no customer service deserving the name.

Well obviously Finnish people wouldn't design a system where you talk to another human.

> [...] who can certify the copy. This can then be scanned [...]

Seems like you're back to square one: Having to trust a scan of an authentic document.

Yes, I've edited a pdf before before sending to get though bureaucracy. Not to lie of course, but to get around some BS requirement or hide sensitive information. Was libreoffice draw? or inkscape or something, then you can delete the metadata too from a cli in linux.

Though not any telco bill, it has to be a landline. Otherwise you could spin up a mobile contract and it would be easy. If you're a single person company/consultant they'll accept a personal bank statement (having just gone through this runaround myself).

That's even more absurd. What if I don't have a landline, or somebody else in my household is paying for it?

It seems to be for offices where you'd have a lease agreement. But even my accountant's letter was refused as not proof enough. I believe you can have HMRC send something, but they're not exactly quick and Wise wanted something more urgently. The strange thing is they didn't ask until months after the account was set up and had already approved proof of incorporation for the registered address.

The OP doesn't know this but the first rep. just gave him the blueprint on how to "preserve" and "stamp-approve" his account regardless of whether he has a legitimate business or not. He just needed to get "that" paper and move on. It is a process of document collection not a real verification for business purposes.

> It is a process of document collection not a real verification for business purposes.

I wish we could as a society move on from rituals paying tribute to what used to be an authentication method, towards one that actually constitutes one today.

Story as old as time. Fintechs may be cheaper or have a cooler app, but if you ever stray off the happy path, you can kiss your account and/or money goodbye.

What’s the difference between that and traditional banking?

Been party to more than a couple situations with large banks who decided that you violated some hidden AML related policy and with zero recourse. You are lucky to even get your money out of those accounts without lengthy litigation.

Might happen more with fintech, but traditional banking does not remotely make you immune to this. Start doing anything interesting not “normal” and you’ll find out the hard way.

Banks usually have government oversight and legal obligations to customers. A fintech might have neither, it may also be doing business from some other country where it is not possible for you to make use of the government guarantees, or it may be hard to sue the fintech.

When it comes to AML/KYC you get effectively zero government guarantees. It’s almost the opposite.

I agree in the sense of FDIC insurance and being nominally operating under the banking regulatory system - but those typically offer exactly zero protection to a whole category of not-crimes.

A bank can decide you are suspicious and simply freeze your accounts indefinitely - and stonewall you at the customer service level. It’s not like they are required by any law to respond to you or anything like that.

There is likely more recourse if you have enough funds worth perusing legal action to its final conclusion - if you win then you can be more assured the bank will exist six years later when your judgement finally hits. Enjoy paying those legal bills though.

Having witnessed this happen and seen six figure losses due to absolutely zero crime being committed, I basically operate under the mental model that any money within a bank or financial institution is their money and not yours.

In many places fintechs are just financial sector companies and operate by the same rules. You do need to check what regulation one is subject to (or not subject to) in your country though.

A lot of banks are now fintechs - no branches, everything in an app, with a website if you are lucky. The rest would like to be like them to cut costs.

Wise is straightforward in the UK, where it is regulated by the same regulator as banks but subject to different rules (the big difference being customer fund ringfencing rather than a deposit guarantee). It varies in other countries but is locally regulated in a good many.

Reputable financial businesses follow regulations in countries in which they do not operate (e.g. by not opening accounts in countries where they are not authorised).

Doubt that true. Pretty sure that if you assign the case to a powerful lawyers, you’ll Get your funds back. Now for the account, I can’t tell … but do you want to?

With a traditional bank you can walk into a branch and explain the situation to a human. I've had to do this several times with my large US bank, one time when traveling but thankfully to a place where they had a branch. In the end things got fixed up but not without much time and hassle expended.

I get the impression these institutions run ML software that was written by people who knew it would generate false positives but is now run by people who have been told that it is always correct. I say this having seen a bank manager call the group responsible on an internal phone line and them tell the manager that they suspect they (the branch manager) is a fraudster.

The big British banks are closing all their branches so that is becoming a thing of the past for us.

The legislation requires you to send any suspicious transactions to the regulator and requires you not to tell the customer.

So, from an ML perspective you want to maximize recall, precision be damned.

Has anyone ever just called them 'Wise'? Every single mention is 'Wise (formerly TransferWise)' like it's part of their legal entity name. Their CEO probably introduces himself as 'CEO of Wise (formerly TransferWise)'.

I've only known it as just Wise

I call them Wise now, have for at least a year. I first joined years before they renamed. Wise is a lot quicker to say.

When you change your name and then have to constantly say (formerly OldName), it's a sign of a bad name-change decision. When you change your name to a common word, that does nothing to say what you actually do, it's a sign of a bad name-change decision. When you do both at once...

It's like Twitter, there was no good reason to change a name with years of trust and reputation. "X" sounds juvenile and stupid, and so does "Wise". I don't understand how it's legal for companies to name themselves as common words like "Alphabet". It's not only confusing, it's arrogant as hell.

Same with Apple

Apple wasn't a name change, though: that was its name from the beginning. Slightly different situation. (Yes, they changed their name from Apple Computer Company to Apple Inc. once they started making smartphones, but that's not the same because the part of their name that everyone called them, Apple, was kept unchanged). Their logo was always an apple with a bite out of it, their first computer was the Apple I (first one of theirs I ever used was the Apple II)... they really leaned into the name, and made it part of their identity. Which isn't the case with Alphabet or Wise.

>I don't understand how it's legal for companies to name themselves as common words like "Alphabet". It's not only confusing, it's arrogant as hell

When I said Apple I was referring to this part

I didn't sign up with them until they rebranded to "Wise", so that's what I call them. If this article just called them "TransferWise", I doubt I would have known it was the same as the Wise I use.

I've been traveling around the world for many years and stayed in probably thousands of hotels. Eventually I figured if hotel has words like "supreme", "extraordinary", "exceptional" and sorts, do expect absolutely shitty quality for eh, "supreme" costs.

Wonder if the same logic can be applicable to Wise.

As a Wise user, only for personal international transactions, I'm very curious to read this! I've had good experiences so far.

Same here! I need to know!

Also very curious, as a former Wise user who stopped using them after they demanded impossible KYC requirements (proof of address with address components that simply don't exist for my address, luckily with no money in the account, but didn't budge even when I reached out to support) and then seem to have silently dropped this months later (still not using them - not going to risk that they come back with more bullshit when they have money to hold hostage).

Edit: Someone posted a copy of the article below, and it seems to be a similar issue with no satisfactory resolution.

what do you use now

Not the person you're asking but I had similar CS issues. I still use Wise sparingly but have also started using Revolut. Though, I wouldn't trust either with more money than I can afford to budget for ^life lessons^

Revolut. Despite an uneasy feeling with them since they're a fintech and those can be problematic, I've had nothing but excellent experiences with them. Including customer support in the few cases where I reached out.

I do dozens of transactions every month sending payments to various freelancers. Been doing this for five years and can count the numbers of times I hand problems making payments on one hand - all we're minor and resolved in just a few days.

I've made about a dozen payments with them, and have had only one real problem - not long after I made the account but after I'd used them successfully for a few payments, I was paying for a purchase in 2 payments (one for each item).

After making the first payment, Wise decided that they had to see my passport before I could make any other payments, so I had to call my wife at home in another city, have her scan in my passport so I could upload it for verification and then still had to wait overnight until they unlocked my account. I asked customer service if they could allow my second payment while they verified my ID, but they said they said I had to wait but "it won't be long".

Likewise, been with them for a few years and am changing countries very often (including NZ like the author). It's making me quite nervous TBH!

As a personal Wise customer, I have a small issue with a name mismatch. It happens every time, I need to submit extra documentation every time, and when I raise the issue with support I get the same response every time - they got the documents and the transfer can go ahead, so there's no problem. They are incapable of the simple act of looking the history and realizing there is an issue. Wise excels at low fees, not at customer support.

There was a video game written about this scenario... 38 years ago!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)

My blood pressure just went up.

This is my fantasy to create computer games to simulate life absurdities.

Papers, Please!

For more on why banks might drop customers in a seemingly-capricious way: "Debanking (And Debunking)" - https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

Prior HN discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371476

Since it is looooong (even by my aging standards), an excerpt:

> Many regular people who get the [bank's] offboarding letter are confused and upset. Most people who get this letter are insufficiently expert in the financial system to understand what is going on. Many of them are (perhaps sensibly) enraged that the bank seems reluctant to offer answers. If they successfully pry answers out of the bank, the answers sound like nonsense or change constantly.

> Here, advocates often say that banks lack fundamental humanity, regard for their customers, or simple competence. I’d tell them that is neither here nor there, but the challenges described in Seeing like a Bank drive far more of this than malice, apathy, or incompetence as such. It is a systems issue.

[...]

> Very soon after making the decision to close your account the bank does not know specifically why it chose to close your account.

> This strikes many people as Kafkaesque. (Me, too!) It is the long-standing practice of banking in the U.S. and allied countries. It is downstream of laws passed by duly elected representatives. It was not capriciously developed as a political tool in the last few years. (We’ll get to those.)

> Normal people who experience a bank treating them like shit will assume the bank has treated them like shit. However they are wrong.

When it's not actually a quote, you might want to present it a little differently. Especially when nobody can tell that its fake at a glance.

The guy isn't arguing that the outcome is sane or deserved, but rather than most victims mis-identify the motives and causes.

Yep. His explanation of the details is somewhat interesting, but his insistence on ascribing all moral responsibility to customers, governments, or random bystanders because none of this could possibly be anyone in the banking industry's fault is infuriating.

I mean, he is correct though. The laws exist and financial institutions need to follow them, or else Binance happens.

Financial institutions are far from passive bystanders in the legal process that creates those laws, much less the regulatory process that applies them in practice. Binance is frankly probably the lesser evil at this point.

> Financial institutions are far from passive bystanders in the legal process that creates those laws, much less the regulatory process that applies them in practice. Binance is frankly probably the lesser evil at this point.

Ok, help me understand here. Like, the laws are passed by governments. The financial institutions complain but comply to some extent. How does this benefit said financial institutions? Or am I missing something here?

> Like, the laws are passed by governments.

Sure, but do you think the government writes them themselves? Without any input from the industry?

> How does this benefit said financial institutions?

One of the best ways to get ahead in finance is to get a regulation passed that's easy for you to comply with but hard for your competitors. That's what drives a lot of the laws.

> One of the best ways to get ahead in finance is to get a regulation passed that's easy for you to comply with but hard for your competitors. That's what drives a lot of the laws.

This I totally agree with, however, the AML/KYC laws are not those kind of laws. They are super expensive for basically every financial institution, for dubious returns. And yet, governments love them. The US basically forced the Swiss to introduce these laws post GFC, which doesn't sound like it was driven by the Swiss financial institutions.

And literally the first paragaph of the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act) notes that loads of people sued when the act was introduced, suggesting that it wasn't driven by industry pressure.

Like, it's interesting that these laws are the template for all the ChatControl/break encryption type stuff. Governments already have all the financial information and they see no reason why they shouldn't have everything else.

Today, in people who discover things that aren't banks don't act like banks

Tomorrow we'll have a double header featuring people who discover things that aren't hotels don't act like hotels and things that aren't taxis don't act like taxis.

If your business relies on the less-regulated "alternative" you're going to get burned eventually.

Banks famously never have issues like this.

In most (all ?) countries banks are regulated and customers have recourse to some sort of banking ombudsman for this sort of thing.

Not if it's AML stuff. In those cases neither the banks or regulators are your friends.

> things that aren't taxis don't act like taxis.

Unfortunately, this is still a good thing. As recently as a few months ago, I was in Las Vegas. The cabbie didn't know where to go, I had to direct them using Google maps from my phone, their credit card machine mysteriously wasn't working, and they didn't have change for cash because they "just got on shift". Seriously, all three in one ride?

Don't blame me that it was Uber/Lyft for the rest of my visif. I'll take an eventual possibility of getting burned somehow over a repeat of negative taxi experiences.

> Today, in people who discover things that aren't banks don't act like banks

On the contrary, this is a case where Wise is acting exactly like a bank.

I've had good experiences with Wise but jesus this is a nightmare, it looks like their customer service is crooked. It's a shame that such a great company can be so inflexible and let this type of situations fly.

I don't think their customer service is crooked, but their customer service is tailored to making sure they meet the exact letter of the laws and regulations they operate under and if it means they lose customers, that's better than a large fine (or whatever the penalty is)

Most fintech customer service is cooked. If someone is doing X cheaper, it's likely because they are cutting costs somewhere and customer service is easy place to do it.

This was the best thing about Google cache. It's sad they killed it. I really wanted to read this.

https://web.archive.org/web/20251030232647/https://shaun.nz/...

I've had similar from Wise and it's partly their fault but partly also not. If you do anything suspicious, they have to do this and they're not allowed to tell you why.

See https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

New Zealand banks are horrible. If they made it easy to hold USD and/or forex/fees on international card charges were reasonable, Wise wouldn't be needed in most cases.

NZ banks also have no depositor protection. No equivalent of the US FDIC. Note below from 'jemmyw depositor protection added the past couple months.

We do now have depositor protection: https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/dcs

thanks for the good news. It does exclude foreign currency accounts.

> If they made it easy to hold USD and/or forex/fees on international card charges were reasonable, Wise wouldn't be needed in most cases.

Yeah, if the banks could provide a service similar to Wise I'd happily use a bank.

My bank wanted ~$800/mo in foreign exchange fees for what I'm doing. Wise charges me ~$100/mo. That's, what, 700% more fees? I'm saving $8.5k/yr.

Even if Wise imploded tomorrow and I lost the cash I have in there I'm pretty sure after this long I'm still ahead versus having used my bank all along.

And there are a lot of value-adds on top.

I can get a Visa card that lets me pay directly in the foreign currency instead of paying the exchange fee twice. This was a whole separate expensive/specialty product from my bank.

I can send electronic transfers (through Canada's Interac e-Transfer service) that exceed what a local bank will provide even to my business account and completely avoid the need for additional services/hacks/fees/etc. This is, apparently, "impossible and not supported by Interac" according to multiple banks I've talked to, the business rep, etc.

Long story short... I agree. Wise only exists because banks are kinda terrible at this. If the banks sucked less, few people would bother with the friction of the additional account.

We were burned by Wise as well when they suddenly moved our business account to another partner bank in the US and that of course changed our account number. The account was registered in dozens of procurement systems of our enterprise customers and it took us several months and a lot of pain to resume receiving payments from those customers who kept sending them to the now wrong account. I can never imagine a "traditional" bank doing that.

After that, we transferred the bulk of our funds back to a "traditional" bank and now never use Wise as the main business account. We now use it mostly for operational expenses.

Wise still has something to learn about banking business.

I've opened a business account there back in 2018 and used it for a couple of years up to the moment when they asked me to "update details" or so in the middle of a routine transfer. I've sent them what they wanted and they made the transfer with a day of delay, but the experience was too humiliating and alerting.

Revolut might be a bit better but again, you don't owe your money, they may ask for random stuff (a selfie, a scan of your passport, a PoA) randomly at any time, they may arbitrarily block you from accessing your money when your passport expired and you haven't received a new one yet, or when you landed in a new country and their heuristic thinks it's not you, so you cant't even buy some food or get a taxi. Even if you pay their Ultra subscription (which I do) it's hard to speak with someone who may make decisions and I've experienced some comical situations like "we can't figure out which one of your cards was used for this attempted transaction, we can't find it in our database, we will reissue all your cards"

If anyone opened this and still has it open, please paste the contents here so we can read it.

Bah. I posted it but I didn't keep it open on my phone. The tldr:

They moved offices, informed wise of a change of address. Wise asked for proof of address. They sent a phone bill. Wise rejected it because the terminology of bills in New Zealand is different to the US (i.e. here bills are usually labelled Tax invoice rather than Bill). Wise support agent also made a barmey suggestion on how to get around it that they didn't follow. Another Wise agent called them back agreeing that the document should be accepted and resubmitted on their behalf. Later the document was rejected again and then their account was closed without any further communication from Wise. Later the author's personal wise account was closed just for being associated with the company.

That tracks with my personal account experience.

Ah, I had a similar situation with them. They also closed my personal account immediately after closing the business account. I was really surprised it works that way.

The article details the story of a business that tried to change their address in NZ. Thier documents (while correct to NZ) didn’t match the criteria of Wise and then Wise effectively closed the account. The support and appeal process was basically nonexistent and even by the end article it is unclear that the business owner were even able to retrieve the funds in the Wise accounts. Also the author’s personal account with Wise was also closed.

I hope this is a very brief overview of the article, which I would encourage people to read. In speaks to the huge imbalance in power and accountability in dealing with some companies

For years, one of my businesses has been a regular user of Wise (formerly TransferWise). Wise is a financial service that lets you send and receive money across currencies, often at a better rate and lower fee than traditional banks. Sounds great, right?

Until it isn’t.

This is our story – a sobering, frustrating, and frankly appalling experience that ended with our business and personal accounts being shut down, without any meaningful reason, support, or recourse.

And all we did? We updated our address.

A Routine Change Turned Nightmare Like many businesses, we recently moved into a new office. Alongside the usual updates to suppliers and records, we updated our physical address with Wise. Not long after, we received an email requesting us to verify the new address.

Fair enough – we had no problem with that.

Wise provided a dropdown list of acceptable documents: a lease agreement, rates notice, tax document, utilities bill, or telecommunications bill. Due to our company structure, most of those documents are in the name of our parent company or show our PO Box (which NZ Post requires, since they won’t deliver to our street address). But we had a telecommunications bill that ticked every box:

Correct entity name Correct physical street address Even detailed our fibre connection at the new premises So we uploaded it – and assumed that would be the end of it.

We were so wrong.

The Call That Made No Sense Days later, we received an email: our document was rejected.

No clear reason. So, I called Wise and explained the situation to the customer service representative.

Her response left me stunned.

“The document was rejected because it was a tax invoice, not a bill.”

Wait… what?

I paused, trying to process this. I politely explained that in New Zealand, a “tax invoice” is a legal form of a bill – even down to the name “tax invoice” being a legal requirement by IRD, and that’s how telecommunications companies issue invoices here. But she refused to accept it.

“It needs to say Telecommunications Bill at the top,” she insisted.

“A tax invoice isn’t acceptable.”

This is simply not true, and completely out of touch with New Zealand’s business documentation standards. The rep wouldn’t budge.

The “Solution” That Was Beyond Belief Still trying to find a solution, I asked: what do you recommend I do then?

Her answer?

“You should find a local shared workspace, lease a desk under your company name, change your registered office to that address, and use that lease document to verify your address with us.”

Yes, you read that right.

Wise’s advice was to artificially lease a desk we didn’t need, change our registered address, and use that document – just to verify an address we actually operate from.

I asked to speak to a manager. That request was refused. She told me, flatly:

“I am providing you with the correct information.”

A bit more back and forth… then the call was disconnected.

A Glimmer of Hope – Then The Hammer Falls Later that day, I received a call back from Wise – not from a manager (because apparently, Wise doesn’t have managers), but from a more “senior” representative.

This rep was more empathetic and agreed the document should have been acceptable. She escalated the issue, resubmitted the document herself, and said she’d personally follow up if it was rejected again.

Progress, I thought.

Until the next morning.

“We’ve Restricted Your Account” I woke to an email with a stunning subject line:

“We’ve restricted your account”

Just like that, our entire business account was locked. No warning. No reason. No discussion.

We could no longer send or receive money, use our Wise cards, or even contact support. The email stated:

“Due to our current risk policies, your account will be closed in a few months. You will not be able to use support channels.”

Even worse? My personal Wise account was locked too. The same personal account which did have its address fully verified, by a rates invoice for my personal address.

Both had funds inside.

Unfortunately copy-pasting the article misses out on the emojis. Gotta go to the site for the full AI slop experience.

I feel as though the whole story isn't here, as there's one key detail that seems suspect from Wise's email: "Additionally, the reason behind our decision is because your activities exceed our risk tolerance."

It seems as though Wise had noticed payment patterns that seemed outside of what Wise is comfortable facilitating. I hope the author can get their funds, but this behaviour is consistent with all banking services.

If you do something wrong they say "your activities exceed our risk tolerance".

If they make a mistake they say... "your activities exceed our risk tolerance". It's legal boilerplate that covers all possible situations.

Probable just boilerplate. Both parts of the statement can be read so many ways as to be effectively meaningless.

I don't know but I just quickly read the google doc cached version at

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YS8FLnSz2eP-nXp7FJR7Gsef...

And does this seem like AI automation gone mad?

No, this seems like the kind of madness a human bureaucracy is fully capable of without the use of advanced computing.

Some of the support emails read like ChatGPT tbh.

Not too long ago, I transferred the equivalent of $12 USD from a Fintech chequing account and immediately had my Wise account flagged for sanctions. I had to spend 2 hours drafting and collecting documentation that I was indeed, not a sanctioned entity.

I can't prove it, but from interacting with 'support' teams who are clearly middle-people working with a clunky AI and accepting its output as absolute, that would be my first guess.

Jesus Christ, what a nightmare. I've used Wise quite a bit and was blocked as well, though I'm not entirely sure what I did to get released. I was stuck in a place where I had to login to do something but it wouldn't let me log in. I told a friend of mine who managed to find me a page where I could finally get customer support without being logged in.

In my case, it was totally my fault because I foolishly used Wise on my work email. Why would I even do that? It did start this half-Kafkaesque nightmare but I managed to eventually get the account back. I'd compounded the problems by also trying to make a new account so I could get customer support and promptly ended up being banned for trying a duplicate account. Fantastic.

But at least you know there is some flow that can get you out of this temporarily restricted state - which seems far less severe than the flow they got stuck in. Being unable to actually get their money out seems crazy. I would have rented the damned WeWork and been done with it to be honest.

I have an archived copy here if you want to see https://archive.roshangeorge.dev/archive/1761866967.0412/ind... (hopefully the Cloudflare cache isn't misconfigured)

EDIT: The Wayback Machine has a copy as well, so you don't need mine https://web.archive.org/web/20251030232647/https://shaun.nz/...

I had Wise ask for my tax documents when I was in South America! I couldn’t access any documentation so I just ignored that account and used another one. That is the second time I have refused to use Wise. The first, they closed my account because I sent some money to my son and referenced a trust a/c. Ai carumba! Why do they make it so difficult when they only exist for overseas functions?

My only issue with a personal Wise account is that it was unobvious to me that they charge 1.75% on ATM withdrawals (over NZD350).

I'm not sure if using Wise actually saves money otherwise - but it mostly works fine.

The one technical issue I've hit in the US was a bowser asking for my ZIP code which it couldn't verify so I couldn't use that gas station.

it sounds like youre a victim of SAR (suspicious activity report)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_activity_report

in most western countries it is illegal to disclose the nature of the SAR. they will simply end your account with no recourse.

https://web.archive.org/web/20251030232647/https://shaun.nz/...

I've personally found wise to be more than helpful and I've changed addresses across continents, to far more red flag jurisdictions than my native Australia

So while I feel for the person they seem very unwilling to meet a provider in the middle, is it not fair to question why this business pays no electricity or either owns/rent the property?

This is very basic stuff for a business to have. Nothing more than a phone bill at that address is bit iffy.

From a pure risk perspective buying a $2 sim card and putting whatever address you want in online then sending someone the PDF saying that's where we are is not hard to do, so maybe not worth having your business if you can't provide anything else to satisfy their worries?

There's plenty of banks that have to service you by law, go to them, and pay the far higher costs.

> is it not fair to question why this business pays no electricity or either owns/rent the property?

It's fair to question, and it is addressed in the article. They're a subsidiary, and the utilities and rent are in the parent company's name. Other relevant documents are in this company's name, but have a PO Box address because their street address does not have a mail service.

> There's plenty of banks that have to service you by law, go to them, and pay the far higher costs.

I think the "we don't want to service you" angle can be addressed by using alternative bank. However, "we've restricted all your abilities to contact us" is an unreasonable step, and prevents actually refunding the former customer the money they're owed. So that latter action is still an unreasonable step on Wise's part.

Your error was arguing about the tax invoice being a bill. Corporations don't like when you argue. Don't matter if you are right or wrong.

Can someone propose a similar alternative? All these services seem to suffer greatly from the same kind of “poor support”.

I had problems with Wise too. Here in Canada there at least is some federal regulation for money service providers.

Wise is not a bank, and is not licensed as a bank. They should not be treated as a bank.

How can the business gets its money back ?

I would file a "dangerous professional" complaint with the appropriate regulator. (Don't say Wise is completely unregulated. NZ is a civilized country.)

Maybe that would only work if they held New Zealand dollars ? But not if they held USD or EUR or another currency outside of NZ jurisdiction

Wise will need to have a corporate presence here to operate here, so depending on the amount (whether it be USD or EUR or NZD), this business can take them to the Disputes Tribunal or if >$30K (NZD), the district court.

This would have been a good page to archive before hugging it to death.

Are we being trolled. Is this deeply cynical humor. If so I love it

HN hug of death just FYI

Not on archive.today or wayback either. (nor indexed by google, afaict)

https://web.archive.org/web/20251030232647/https://shaun.nz/...

Man, that background animation is really distracting.

I couldn’t read with it and filtered it out with uBlock Origin:

  shaun.nz##.blogig-background-animation

Is this site hosted on AWS??

I have a personal Wise account as do several family members. I've had a few odd things happen with their debit cards, and actually (eventually received some reasonably sane customer support via email). Otherwise no problems. That said, when I was opening the account another family member with a history in fintech said "you know that's not a bank, right?". Accordingly I've never kept a large balance there.

It’s like when I updated my Stripe account to be used with my new shiny Ko-Fi account I opened, like Ko-Fi suggest I could do… and then Stripe immediately closed my account for linking it to Ko-Fi because they suddenly considered it crowdfunding. No recourse, just “fuck off to the void forever”.

>A bit more back and forth… then the call was disconnected.

who disconnected it? were you yelling at support? this seems relevant and you just put "yadda yadda... the call was disconnected" (not to defend Wise, just curious what happened there)

>This isn’t just poor service — it’s unacceptable.

meaningless LLM-addendums don't improve your blogpost

It's relatively common IME if you have a hard question or unusual request. Presumably it's going to affect the support person's metrics so they 'accidentally' drop you. Or, if there are targets then it might even be policy.

I've been on calls where it was 30 minute waiting to get answered, you ask for what you need, they put you on hold (or 'transfer' you), then the call drops. They don't ring back.

Telecoms companies in UK seem to have the worst communications, terrible line quality on support calls. I just assume people then don't complain because it's so hard to. The ombudsman is next to useless - you have to be without service for something like 6 weeks before they'll get out of bed.

You've never had the experience of having a somewhat challenging / unusual request result in an agent abruptly dropping the call?

They can figure out pretty quickly that A) it's going to be hard to help you, and B) you're going to suck a lot of their time, and C) their poor luck of getting your call is going to make them look worse to their management.

I had a sequence of this happening three times with a utility. Unfortunately, it's the fourth agent who actually helped me that got yelled at, at no fault of her own. But I was pretty pissed at that point.

Nowhere in this blog does it mention what the business actually does, which is always a red flag. I've seen plenty of stripe bashing posts on HN that end up with the business being in newsletter scams or adult content.

Oh no… god forbid - adult content lol. Yes regardless of the content if the business is legal and they only changed an address that’s not a reason to have this level of shit support and no way to escalate and contact a human…

I don't agree with those policies but it's a possible reason for a financial services business to break a relationship if they discover incidentally that this guys business is breaking the law. Changes the blog post completely and the business info should have been included.

As a heuristic, using TransferWise is traditionally associated with Russian money laundering scams.

I believe the business is an ISP.

One of. Also runs card payment systems and business networking consulting. The blogger is focused on his small local market.

Looking around it seems its a small ISP / IT consultancy. It doesn't look to be anything shady at all.

ISPs that host illegal content can indeed be outside the risk tolerance of a financial services company. The blog post is very careful to say "one of our companies" and censor the name of it on screenshots so I'll be interested to see what it is.

You can look up the blog author yourself if you're interested. It looks like the typical small NZ "does several things because the local market is so small" kind of business. Local laws here are a bit more strict on hosting content so that seems unlikely, and would the minions at Wise even look into that side of things?

Yep, small is correct, the blogger's companies are all focused on South Canterbury and headquartered in Timaru (for non-Kiwis, 55K people live in South Canterbury, and 29K of them live in Timaru. Massive shit-ton of cows though).

If you've ever dealt with financial institutions in a meaningful way, you'd know that the self-service variety, or the HSBC variety, will create hurdles and enforce policies arbitrarily with no recourse, care or concern for your well-being.

Based on the DNS records, and the Companies Office website, the blogger owns several companies.

https://www.vetta.online/

https://aorangieftpos.nz/

https://www.reliance.net.nz/

Business networking, local ISP, card payment solutions, basically. Given the blog posts about cPanel and Outlook, it tracks.

I note that the blogger lives in a small town in the South Island, so likely is focused on the local market.

Possibly. Would be better if the company name wasn't obscured from the post.

What do you mean possibly?

I checked the DNS records, then the Companies Office register of all companies the blogger is a director and/or shareholder of.

And it's his personal blog considering it's on the domain name of <first-name>.<country-code>.

Not sure why you're so certain that it must be a dubious company.

I'm not really sure what the author expected. If you're in KYC and ask to speak to a manager when your document gets rejected, you're going to have a bad time. The person processing your documents can't give you leeway even if they wanted to, they have legal requirements and a process they must follow.

That makes sense if you're trying to use a costco membership card to board an international flight, but nitpicking over telecommunications "bill" vs "invoice" seems exactly the type of ambiguity that's worth escalating over?

So what do you do when the process has a problem? The document that your country issues that is valid and meets the KYC legal requirement but has a title that the internal process rejects? You need to speak to someone who can say "this meets the legal requirement but our process is bunk"

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