All of my contractors have previously agreed to pay all fees associated with their payment, so I always type into the USD box. TransferWise withdraws exactly that amount from my bank and in 2-3 seconds tells me the amount that will be deposited into their account.
If hypothetically a new contractor wanted 1M RUB up-front, meaning that I would be responsible for payment fees, I'd simply paste 1000000 into the RUB box, and the recipient will get that exact amount, while TransferWise will calculate and tell me the USD amount to be deducted in my bank. Also couldn't be simpler.
PayPal makes this a nightmare. In order to make a payment such that exactly $1000 USD is withdrawn from my bank, I have to basically apply Newton's algorithm (or successive guessing) to the Send Money page (with each load time being ~30 seconds), because the number you enter is post-fees but pre-exchange. They couldn't have chosen a more useless variable for me to input, since I'd only either want to enter an amount pre-everything in USD or post-everything in RUB. I don't want to enter some weird intermediate amount.
out of curiosity, do you have an estimate of how much are those fees?
Similarly, the TransferWise business account is a bit of a joke. Features that should have been there on day one were not there, and are still not there. Things like multiple signatories, the sort of thing you take for granted at a real bank.
Additionally "Borderless" is marketing hype. You can only actually deposit in a small number of the available currencies. You're better off with a real bank.
Or the half-hearted implementation of M-PESA. Using Transferwise you can only pay private individuals on M-PESA. Paying businesses on M-PESA is impossible because TransferWise are not correctly integrated.
Need I go on ?
Not saying avoid TransferWise. I'm just saying caveat emptor, look beyond the marketing hype.
A ton of scam / fraud calls into the US are done using overseas garbage voip providers who do nothing to try to reduce the impact their crap has on individuals.
Thank you for not bothering to read my post. You know, the bit where I said "long-established reputable, not fly-by-night".
You know, the bit where I am talking about a long-established company with offices in the US and Europe ? A company that is regulated in all juristictions, pays its taxes and obeys all laws ?
You know, the bit where I talk about a company that hates "crap" on their network as much as you hate receiving it.
You know, the company that actively takes steps to identify and deal with miscreants on its network ?
Well of course not, because you want to tarnish all VOIP providers with the same brush !
This was my first transfer on my first ever account with them, it's not like I had any prior history with them.
Woo.
I'd love to see some insider of these companies explain the obsessive habit of booting and then refusing to explain a single reason why.
I suspect one such report got filed for me or a nonprofit I volunteered with when I came across the Canada-US border a few years back to deposit several Canada Post USD money orders plus a single US$20 bill into the nonprofit's US bank account, representing the cash receipts at a conference the nonprofit had held in Canada. (The Canada Post money orders were the CAD cash receipts converted to USD in a way that was safe for transport. We received the US$20 bill physically. Most of the money received for the conference was done via credit cards or PayPal, but not all.)
My reason for suspecting this is how many people came over to the teller's desk to help with handling the deposit, and how long it took with mostly periods of silence. But that said, the deposit happened just fine with no objections raised and no follow-up inquiries reaching me or the nonprofit.
So I don't know whether it happened - but I do know the bank couldn't confirm it if it had. Probably likewise if the same laws required closing an account.
If it's the company's choice without legal obligation, maybe it's just to avoid giving fraudsters information on what works and what doesn't work. Definitely a shitty experience for honest people caught in the mess.
Just confirming what I've read: you suspect that a report was filed, but your non-profit's account has not been closed by the bank?
Many suspicious activity reports are filed defensively by banks to avoid the risk of getting regulators mad at them for not filing one if something shady did turn out to happen, not because of real individualized suspicions. Many aren't even looked at by investigators.
It is so brazenly unjust, it strikes me right at the firmament of my being. If this is AML and KYC and not the financial institutions, why aren't there advocacy groups standing up against this gross mistreatment?
> What is the bloody fucking point of rules that cause you to kick off customers if you can't even give some transparency on how those rules work. It's insane and even if it complies with some bullshit government regulations on money laundering, grotesquely shitty of major financial services companies. Users should at least be given the benefit of the doubt and told why they're being punished before being booted.
Your problem here is with United States KYC & AML requirements, not with payments processors.
Even if this comment is genuine, culture within a company is temporary, and once a company has built up a trusted brand, the amount of money that can be made by taking advantage of this trust grows substantially.
Especially for fast growing companies built out of venture capital, most will eventually sell out. It becomes especially difficult to avoid these pressures after IPO.
> I really hope that PR firms don't pick this up.
That ship sailed years ago, alas :(
In addition, their interview included a debugging / code refactoring segment which felt more "real" than most other interviews that I've done, and hopefully provided a better signal to them.
They make everything so painlessly easy. It could take a couple of days to get cash from the UK to NZ where it can be under an hour with TransferWise. I can’t sing their praises loud enough, especially after having the deal with UK banks
Can’t thanks them enough for their business: traveling with my primitive European bank was a nightmare.
i.e. how do they actually enact the exchange of the funds? Do they have a contract with one of the big investment banks? Do they work directly via Forex markets? Can they leverage their scale now to minimise actual exchange costs – for example internally matching up (say) a one customer transferring USD to EUR, and another transferring EUR to USD, so that TW’s costs are minimised?
TransferWise charges end-user 900 USD + spread for the same operation, which is rather comical when you see their ads "banks are scamming you"
That is not a consumer-friendly site. Is it even practical for the typical case TransferWise targets: sending a few payments a year, or a few a month?
The pricing page for foreign exchange has the cheapest category as under $1 billion -- is transferring $200 something they'd do? I don't know what a "basis point" is, or "trade value".
That said, its currency conversion is the real deal. If you have an account with them (I do), you can convert as little or as much as you like and withdraw it to your own account elsewhere.
I wouldn't recommend opening an account there just for currency conversion but their brokerage offering is fantastic so I'd consider currency conversion a nice benefit that comes with that.
If you want a more direct comparison, Revolut does conversion for free if your amount is under 6k/month.
But yes, they can exchange even a dollar or two. I've exchanged five figures a few times there between CAD and USD, as an American living in Canada and actively using a US credit card.
So far I've found them to be much more affordable than TransferWise, but equally, they are a very complicated broker to use, and it may not be worth the hassle just for FX. They have other benefits that make them worth the tradeoff for me, like good margin interest rates and the ability to provide tax forms complying with both the US and Canadian tax systems each year.
From the homepage, Pricing → Commissions → Forex leads to the 1,000,000,000 cutoff.
To clarify the terms in that table: one basis point is 1/100 of 1%, as they themselves clarify in a footnote rather than assuming all readers know it. And trade value is, well, the amount you trade. :) The footnote for that term clarifies that they convert and charge this commission in whatever currency you have configured as the base currency for your account. (For example, I've chosen USD for my base currency since most of my transactions are US stocks on US exchanges, even though I'm in Canada and therefore the legal entity I'm officially dealing with is IB's Canadian arm.)
So, to convert anywhere up to US$100,000 (or its foreign currency equivalent) to any other currency, they charge their minimum fee of US$2 - mathematically, 2 / (1/100 of 0.20) = 100,000. Above that and up to US$1 billion, you take the amount you're trading, multiply by 1/100 of 0.20, and that's the fee.
$2 is a ridiculously low fee to convert five USD figures or less of currency, given that they also directly pass through the very tight exchange rates collectively quoted by their suppliers without building any profit for them into the rate itself.
They don't charge spread. That's the entire point of Transferwise.
> On InteractiveBrokers for example, you pay +/- 2.33 USD in total to convert 100'000 USD to EUR
My understanding is that Interactive Brokers allows access to the forex market , indeed with a low fee, however Transferwise will use mid-market rate which is unattainable via the forex market.
It's trivially visible on Transferwise what are you paying, where can I see the same for Interactive Brokers ?
As long as they have a decent float in a bank account in each country, they can just do frequent (daily? hourly?) forex transactions to balance their reserves between countries.
At their scale, if the total amount sent by customers is X, then they probably transact 0.2X in the Forex market.
The frequency of the forex transactions will of course affect costs and exposure. Too frequent would increase transaction costs. Too infrequent and you risk exchange rates moving against you. Too infrequent and you need to hold more money in popular destination countries.
I’d say that they are probably transacting 0.9X or something in that range.
Reason being that, I suspect, a lot of their transfer flow is from richer countries to poorer countries, as payments for services.
Of course that money flows back at some point, but as payments for goods shipped, which typically doesn’t happen through transfer wise.
I wonder what % of their total transaction costs are from FX spread and fees. Maybe, even at 0.9X, total transaction costs are dominated by local bank transfer fees.
From what I've read, apparently that was their idea since inception, do their own reconciliation as far as they can.
I just hope they don't get bought out :(
I'm sure it works for most large countries, but the reality is that they sell the idea that they can transfer anywhere, list almost every country to give the illusion of ubiquity, but haven't actually tested transfers to all those countries.
Support was responsive.
Wonderful ethics!
Nice try, TransferWise CEO.
I know someone who had their money frozen because they made the mistake of mentioning that the money being sent was for kava. You simply can't trust TransferWise to put their customers first.
Kava is illegal/regulated in Europe and the UK and therefore the money and account would obviously be frozen pending an investigation.
On top of that it is legal in a lot of pacific islands.
Go read the Acceptable Usage Policy... nowhere in it will you find anything about every customer being subject to UK law. In fact they go out of their way to make you think the opposite is true... by showing you different AUP's depending on which country you're in.
UK law on kava (and many other drugs) is stupid, but that's not TransferWise's fault.
Assuming that there are two parties interested in doing a hawala exchange in two countries where this is legal, they still cannot (openly) use a bank that does business in US/EU because if the bank knowingly executes that transaction they could be facing serious fines.
The grandparent comment is about how the CEO of TransferWise is obsessed with customer satisfaction. If X is banned on TransferWise, then TransferWise should say so in their AUP.
To simply lock accounts out of the blue is ridiculous.
Keeping a close eye on compliance/risk is going to help keep their transaction costs down, which keeps the cost of their service down for everyone else.
It is literally the first item in the AUP that you're not allowed to use the service for anything unlawful. Of course they monitor that. They did everything right. And I'm sure your "friend" got their money back reasonably promptly after TW completed their review.
Criticism is fine, but taking a company to task for refusing to break the law for you is just silly. They didn't make the rules, and they'd be risking their own existence by breaking them.
Again, kava isn't unlawful. It's a food product. The UK law says it is illegal to import kava for consumption, and illegal to trade in it in the UK.
TransferWise is neither trading in kava, nor importing it into the UK.
All they're doing is moving money from one person to another, neither of whom is in the UK or importing kava into the UK.
Their economy of scale enables them to offer increasingly lower fees, but I can speak first hand to the pain felt by everyone at the company when costs have to increase.
Anyway, I trust them far more than any bank and cannot recommend them more highly both as a customer and workplace.