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by jcburnham 1613 days ago
I'm glad you brought up Wise! I love Wise and use it frequently. However, there are some jurisdictions it simply doesn't work for. For example, there is currently no way for a US company to use Wise Business to pay a Brazilian contractor.

This is not because such payments are illegal, but rather because the Brazilian financial system has poor norms and poor rule-of-law: https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/16/wise-accuses-former-brazil....

1 comments

This absolutely does not stop you from doing what Wise does under the hood: have bank accounts in two countries and settle using comms rather than the banking system. A message comes in “Alice should now be given x amount from the local account” and a local bank transfer is executed.
Yes, you could do that if the payment volume was high and bidirectional. It doesn't work at all for a company that occasionally has to pay someone in Brazil, but has no revenue or presence in Brazil.