Wise has recently made a big batch of account verifications which overwhelmed their verifications staff and support both and left a company we do in Austria unable to do payroll. That was fun. Of course we moved that company elsewhere (in this case xe) and my brother moved his personal to Starling in the UK.
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.)
3 weeks sounds great. I got 3 days for the same. Also spent most of this month scrambling to set up alternatives to make payroll.
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.
Yeah it took them 16 days to unblock the Austrian company. As I said, that was fun. We had insane luck because my brother and I are operating an entire international network of small companies (mostly because you can't employ people otherwise and staffing agencies are too expensive) so we could pull money from another company to Austria temporarily but gosh.
My experience of wise as a personal customer was that my face completely and utterly failed the ai "selfie" verification. I had a series of emails with their support staff in which they: asked me to email a pdf of my passport and a photograph of me; demanded I used the link again; asked me to open dev tools to get debugging info about why I couldn't complete the verification (it produces a message saying "do not open Dev Tools for security reasons"...); told me that I needed to complete a selfie link from a different device; and then told me verification was complete (I never completed it). At points their support staff directly contradicted themselves and I never "spoke" to the same human twice.
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.
Interestingly I've not had to do any of that but I expect given the age of my account it was grandfathered in and isn't subject to the same rules that newer accounts have, I did notice they unverified my LLC though re obtaining cards but I guess that may just be different regulations they need to follow now, or requirements from partner banks as they've changed 3 or 4 times since I opened my account (very early on, one of the first).
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.
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).
Hey chx, in case you either have email notifications for replies to your comments or check the threads page to see them - FYI I just quoted the Revolut part of your comment to a Revolut person in a new Wise thread, and wondered if you had anything further to add to save those of us who haven't spent the time to learn about Revolut's financial situation? No worries if not :)
In Wise I can have a personal and business account with a single login, how does this work with Bunq? What documentation are they asking for business accounts?
I had the worst experience with Wise and their support this past week. So bad it almost sent me to Twitter to rant. It used to be an amazing service but something has changed and I’m swearing off it too.
Their support seems to be overwhelmed, despite transacting 5 figures a month through Wise Business support is non-existent. They missed multiple self-imposed deadlines to verify my account (they decided it had to be re-verified) despite the large monthly volume.
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.
Odd, I've always found their support good. But this last week I couldn't order a card and they said they had to escalate it as we're not sure why it was happening. Anyway, I guess they found out, might have been unintended
My new wise card doesn't work with contactless. Every time it says over limit, even if the amount is only a pound and well under the the limit in the app.
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.
It's infuriatingly dumb as my backup high street banks (in multiple countries) have failed to implement this, I noticed when I got a new eco card, it's not even always 150 eur or 5 times, sometimes it is less of both.
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
They're a US-regulated money transfer service, so they can't keep your money without being in serious trouble. How do you cash out and close the account?
Wise never seems to take reliability seriously. I've also had issues with account numbers changing at short notice in the past. While a useful tool for transferring money, it is not a replacement for a bank and should not be used as one.
No inside knowledge but the “changed” account numbers sounds a lot like their banking partner (evolve) withdrew service with a few weeks notice, which would explain “temporarily” withdrawing cards too — as they’re linked to Evolve.
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.
They mention that this is a side effect of the USD account number change they made recently. Which was also really stupid. I used to use Wise a smh direct deposit for my salary since I’m in the middle of moving countries, but this whole situation has made me swear off of Wise as a store of money.
Which, to be honest, I should’ve always known, but still.
Depending on the amounts you're talking about, and the mechanism:
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.
IBKR can also be finicky when it comes to what they allow on their platform. They seem to want people to do stock brokerage, and not use their service for other things despite offering a whole lot of convenient features that suggest they want you to use them.
I used them a lot for automated transfers, paying bills and keeping cash and they weren't happy about it.
Yup this is true. They don't want to be doing just that, and they'll get pissy if you're doing only that.
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.
Agreed, if it's not your primary purpose for having the account then it should be fine. I did a bunch of FX through them not long after opening mine, and they sent me a polite email telling me that I shouldn't do that, which was fair enough. Much better than the "freeze account first, warn later" attitude that many other financial companies seem to have.
Now that I've been investing with them for a while, they don't seem to mind.
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.)