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)
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.