[emdowling]

I’m a former TransferWise employee and I cannot speak more highly of them. Yes, they aim to make money like every business, but I’ve never seen a company so focused on transparency to customers. The CEO intensely interrogates roadmaps from the customer perspective, and fairness to customers is non-negotiable.

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.

[vortico]

Can confirm. I need to send payments from the US to ~30 international contractors per quarter. I generate a spreadsheet of their names and payment amounts. I click on their name in TransferWise's "saved recipients" page. I copy/paste the amount from the spreadsheet into the USD box, submit the payment, and then copy/paste the payment summary page into an email to the contractor verifying that I paid them. Couldn't be simpler than that.

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 In order to make a payment such that exactly $1000 USD is withdrawn from my bank, I have to basically apply Newton's algorithm (or successive guessing) to the Send Money page (with each load time being ~30 seconds), because the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.

[vsipuli]

With so many international contractors (possibly spread out over different countries and jurisdictions), how do you keep track of your possible tax consequences in both your own and their jurisdictions? How do you ensure you don't become liable to treat them as employees in your and their jurisdictions? Asking out of curiosity, because interested in hiring remote contractors across the globe but fearing possible tax complexity.

[vortico]

Because our contractors provide us a 1-6 month, non-full-time, packaged, isolated service by an agreed deadline for a lump sum, they're very far from the definition of an employee in all countries, so it's not a problem with us. However, if your company starts directing tasks, or otherwise starts creeping toward the fine line, then what happens is out of my expertise, sorry. My useless advice is to stay far from the line, but of course some businesses might not be able to easily do this.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

I will chime in here as well. They seem to manage their relationship with banks rather well. When I was working in the wire unit, everything was usually ready to go in a way requested by the bank and despite working on another continent, any issues tended to be resolved the same day. I never dealt with them as a customer though.

[gchamonlive]

> All of my contractors have previously agreed to pay all fees associated with their payment

out of curiosity, do you have an estimate of how much are those fees?

[vortico]

You're asking about TransferWise? Says on their website. https://transferwise.com/

[gchamonlive]

woah, TransferWise transparency is no joke!

[traceroute66]

"fairness to customers is non-negotiable" .... yeah, unless you run a VoIP company. In which case you get told VoIP is against TransferWise AUP and you get told your business account is suspended permanently. And yes, we are talking about a reputable long-established VoIP company here, not some fly-by-night spam operation.

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.

[thoraway1010]

Actually thrilled to hear Voip is considered high risk!!

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.

[traceroute66]

@thoraway1010

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 !

[StavrosK]

I have similarly been bitten by them. I tried to test the service by transferring $40ish or something small like that that from one of my accounts to another, and they told me they're not doing it and are shutting my account permanently, but they can't tell me why.

This was my first transfer on my first ever account with them, it's not like I had any prior history with them.

Woo.

[shadowprofile77]

This. It is so absolutely, positively, disgustingly maddening to see companies like Stripe, Paypal, now apparently transferwise as well, based on this and other comments I've read, simply freeze accounts for seemingly trivial "violations" of some obscure TOC and then not only permanently ban you for what was in 99% of cases an honest mistake, but also simply refuse to state why they do so. 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.

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.

[jkaplowitz]

I don't know the specifics of any of the companies you've listed, but I do know that financial institutions can't generally tell customers when they're doing something like filing a Suspicious Activity Report.

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.

[ValentineC]

> 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.

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?

[jkaplowitz]

Right. No consequences of any sort happened which were visible to me, which I'm glad about since everything in that transaction was legitimate and legal and traceable. (The non-profit has proper financial records and could confirm details to investigators if asked.)

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.

[emptysongglass]

I wish you hadn't led with a "this" but man you put words to my heart.

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?

[exolymph]

Dude, if you sign up for a payment processor without reading the TOC, you are an idiot. Just straight up. It's a huge dependency of your business and you need to understand the rules. (Silent changes are much more problematic, and I think companies can be legitimately blamed for that.)

> 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.

[dmos62]

This is probably the best advertisement I have read. It's spot on about my concerns, heartfelt, empathetic and sincere. I really hope that PR firms don't pick this up. Would hate to seriously ponder if it's genuine or not. Oh damn, I'm already doing it. There's something to be said about cynicism and sincerity in today's world.

[Taek]

I am sure that dropping comments like this in threads on popular news aggregates has crossed the minds of many PR firms.

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.

[DaveSapien]

Indeed, not to be too pessimistic but I have seen radical changes in company attitudes that came with only age, success, and/or failure. Same people, evolving circumstances.

[bryanrasmussen]

As a general rule I look at the profile, emdowling has been a member since 2013, has a number of comments on different subjects, not a high reputation but no submissions, it seems most likely genuine to me.

[exolymph]

The comment you're responding to seems genuine. However...

> I really hope that PR firms don't pick this up.

That ship sailed years ago, alas :(

[gbrodman]

I interviewed with them about two years ago right now and while I didn't accept their offer, I came away with nothing but the highest level of respect for them, their work, and their culture. Even in the interviews / offer stage, they made sure that I knew that everyone's primary priority would be the customer and building a great product. The concept of "building metrics to support your ideas" is a bit of a daunting one if you have to do it for every project, but it showed a level of respect for the user and transparency that I appreciated.

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.

[ElCapitanMarkla]

I’ve been working remotely between NZ and the UK for the last 7 years. I was dealing with HSBC and then Barclays Wealth in the UK but recently started using the TransferWise Borderless account after Barclays wanted £40 a month account fees...

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

[bromuro]

I am using TransferWise since a year now to support my digital nomad business. Couldn’t be happier — The app is beautiful, it always worked, transfers are quick, and it is even cheap. Support is great too.

Can’t thanks them enough for their business: traveling with my primitive European bank was a nightmare.

[mft_]

Are you able to offer any insight (top level, non-confidential, obvs) into how TransferWise works, behind-the-scenes?

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?

[rvnx]

In reality, internalised or not, TransferWise makes lot of money in fees. On InteractiveBrokers for example, you pay +/- 2.33 USD in total to convert 100'000 USD to EUR (+ 1 USD extra for withdrawal if you already did one this month).

TransferWise charges end-user 900 USD + spread for the same operation, which is rather comical when you see their ads "banks are scamming you"

[Symbiote]

> On InteractiveBrokers for example

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".

https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=4969

[Youden]

Interactive Brokers is by no means a replacement for TransferWise. It doesn't even permit you to send money to an account that isn't in your name.

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.

[jkaplowitz]

I'm not sure where in the provided link you found that, but I am not doubting you found something FX-related in there with $1 billion as a relevant number, since they serve lots of different professional populations.

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.

[graton]

Well this page says something about trading less than $1 billion per month:

https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=1590&p=fx

[jkaplowitz]

Yeah, that's indeed the link that the other poster meant to share. See my reply to their comment parallel to yours for more detailed thoughts and numbers.

[Symbiote]

Sorry, I think I pasted the wrong link.

From the homepage, Pricing → Commissions → Forex leads to the 1,000,000,000 cutoff.

https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=1590&p=fx

[jkaplowitz]

Thanks. I guess you're right that people like me who don't trade billions per month pay their most expensive forex rates. But it's not a cutoff, just a price tier, and still far cheaper than TransferWise or any other option I know of for exchanging non-institutional quantities of currency.

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.

[rvnx]

You're absolutely right. I just mean that TransferWise has a lot of leeway in terms of pricing policy and that the actual cost of exchange itself is marginal (as counter-intuitive it may seems)

[chx]

> TransferWise charges end-user 900 USD + spread

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 ?

[graton]

As someone who is interested in transferring money I will admit that I find InteractiveBrokers website confusing. I don't understand how it works. Let's say I want to buy Russian Rubles with US Dollars. How does that work? How do I get the Russian Rubles out? With TransferWise it is very obvious. I'd love to save more money but I'm not sure how to do it with InteractiveBrokers, but I would like to know.

[rahimnathwani]

They don't need to 'match up' individual transactions.

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.

[konschubert]

I hope I’m wrong because I want them to be successful but I’m less optimistic about the optimization potential.

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.

[rahimnathwani]

You are right. 0.2X is reasonable for a transfer company with a more general audience.

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.

[raverbashing]

> 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?

From what I've read, apparently that was their idea since inception, do their own reconciliation as far as they can.

[sho]

Congrats to you - I love them. There's not too many companies that I feel so happy doing business with, serving such an obvious and vital need, and doing such a fine job of it. It's just a great product, really well done.

I just hope they don't get bought out :(

[koheripbal]

I don't know... the only time I tried to use Transferwise was to make a transfer to Haiti. Their website claims they support it, they allowed for the transfer to be initiated - but in the end it failed for some unknown opaque reason.

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.

[jeromegv]

If they say they support it, it’s because they do support it. Problems are common in international bank transfer, that’s why their support team could have helped you. Your anecdata doesn’t prove that they don’t support this country, if it’s on their website it’s because they do.

[koheripbal]

The reply from support was that they don't support Haiti - despite the marketing on their website that they do.

Support was responsive.

[jkaplowitz]

Sometimes they support countries in some ways but not others. For example, as of when I last checked, they support sending Canadian dollars south to Mexico to be converted into Mexican pesos for delivery there, but not the reverse transaction.

[coder1001]

I haven't seen many companies do what they do! They lower their fees without the customer asking! Most customers will not go comparing them to others, yet, when they can they reduce the fees and tell you how much more you are saving!

Wonderful ethics!

[deepGem]

Can confirm that Transferwise is the best option out there for cross border commerce. Also stay away from Payoneer if you can. They eat 1-3% of the gross money transferred as commission, depending on the target currency. Also Payoneer's exchange rates aren't the best in the market. This is ridiculous when compared to TW.

[goatherders]

Love Transferwise. Until a month or so ago I was using Xoom (paypal) and it was both more expensive and slower.

[andrewnicolalde]

That's great to hear. I regularly use Transferwise and have always been happy with the service they provide.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

Ya but remitly has far better rates every single time.

[markdown]

> fairness to customers is non-negotiable.

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.

[eckesicle]

So what you're saying is that their compliance and risk teams are on top of their game?

Kava is illegal/regulated in Europe and the UK and therefore the money and account would obviously be frozen pending an investigation.

[dzhiurgis]

Kava also means coffee in one of the European languages (Lithuanian).

On top of that it is legal in a lot of pacific islands.

[markdown]

Neither the sender or receiver had ever stepped foot in Europe or the UK and had anything to do with those jurisdictions.

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.

[Symbiote]

You have something to do with the jurisdiction of the UK when you use a service based in the UK. Illegal drugs are clearly forbidden in the acceptable use policy, and the terms of use states English law is used.

UK law on kava (and many other drugs) is stupid, but that's not TransferWise's fault.

[mschuster91]

US/EU banking / antiterrorism regulations apply to any entity worldwide which wants to do business in the respective markets.

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.

[markdown]

Sure, but this is merely UK food safety regulation we're talking about. It is illegal in the UK to trade in kava for consumption (based on a German court decision that's since been thrown out). Kava is legal almost everywhere else in the world.

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.

[JshWright]

You probably don't realize it, but you're making the case for using them even stronger.

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.

[sho]

So what exactly do you want? The law might be stupid, I agree it's stupid, but it's the bloody law. You wanted TW to break the law just to help our your friend? Then guess what happens? No more TW.

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.

[markdown]

> It is literally the first item in the AUP that you're not allowed to use the service for anything unlawful.

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.