This was very obviously written with ChatGPT. The structure, emojis, emdashes and contrasting sentences. Surprised nobody is calling it out. IMO save us time and just give us the original short version you wrote to ChatGPT
At some point customer service died. Businesses of seem to no longer be interested in dealing with customers. Good customers come in all shapes and sizes, and often don't exactly fit a cookie cutter. It's frustrating to see businesses just cut and run the moment something becomes a problem that needs more than a series of pre-scripted responses to be resolved.
> OP can't even provide proof from the tax office of being at that address
Well, the article says otherwise. I think "The document was rejected because it was a tax invoice, not a bill." is a pretty lame rejection reason.
That being said, I didn't quite get the solution Wise suggested. Don't they already have a lease document for the new office? It looks like the author has omitted some crucial detail.
I couldn't log on, got the problem escalated, then they got me to create a logged session in their app, and from that they diagnosed the problem was due to larger text on a smaller screen causing their app to crash. I've rarely had technical faults diagnosed and fixed by any company.
Did you read the post? The business had just moved. Was it supposed to wait on the tax office for the next tax statement, which could arrive months later?
There was a time when the general consensus was that treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time.
It seems like that changed somewhere around the turn of the century, whereby businesses started to decide that it was better to cut down on customer service, and in some cases, go so far as to ban customers. The first cases of this I recall reading about had to do with Best Buy, and specifically their policy of banning people from their stores who made a lot of returns.
I'm not really sure how it ultimately maths out - i.e., whether it's long-term optimal to drop troublesome customers or merely short-term optimal, and this was primarily taken from the perspective of retail.
As such, I'm sure the math changes a little for subscription services. However, I also recall my prior employer's support activity followed a power law distribution across its clients, so it wouldn't surprise me if a policy to drop particularly noisy clients is a net savings there as well.
For brick and mortar retail that isn't fast fashion or supermarkets, dropping troublesome customers is generally extremely sensible.
Profit on most goods is low - single digit % typically - and a single return can eliminate the profit margins on a dozen sales. Sometimes cost can be reclaimed from goods providers - i.e. genuinely defective or manufacturer refurbishment programs - and sometimes they can resell the item as new. But if the item has been used, broken by the customer, etc. the loss is significant. It turns out that some people are more honest than others, and some people are directly trying to scam companies.
When one 'dodgy' customer can eliminate the value of 10 'real' sales with every return the maths say to ban people quickly.
A little anecdote - I have a distant relative who, circa 2005, would buy a vacuum cleaner use it, and then return it. He rotated stores (hardware stores, supermarkets, electronic stores) until he gradually got banned from them all. Once that happened he moved house. Not only had he almost certainly spent more in time and fuel than a reasonable vacuum would have cost him (which I will note he could afford); but the cost and waste he has incurred on both individual companies and society at large through that and similar schemes is staggering. I don't know if he's still at it - or alive - but the people he was surrounding himself with all saw such behaviour as reasonable.
> treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time.
may be true in the past, but a business cannot scale up good customer service - it's at best a linear scaling, where each new customer costs the same fixed amount due to needing high touch/people to manage that customer.
With the internet, businesses have found scaling to work better by ensuring your fixed costs stay fixed even if you scaled up customer count - this includes support/call centers etc. Without doing this, the business cannot scale up exponentially.
On one hand, this makes me incredibly sad. It means that all of us, as consumers, agreed we'd rather save a buck than get acceptable service.
On the other hand, as someone who did customer service in my younger years, 95% of calls were PEBKAC, so it's essentially a giant money drain for things of no real concern to you as a company.
I've often wondered how successful it would be to charge $3 or $5 per call, refunding the money in cases said call was needed.
In principle I agree with the concept of charging for support and refunding if the issue is not at the customer's end. I'd certainly be fine with that myself, even if it cost $50 or so to get a responsible human on the line when there's trouble with a service like banking, payments, or business-critical SaaS providers.
I think Microsoft tried that at one point, but they didn't stick with it for some reason. Maybe it leads to a lot of knock-down, drag-out arguments about whose fault something is.
That's what you get for the low cost of entry. When most customers are self-signup (and probably low margin) there's no individual responsible for them.
Good in that you never have to speak to a salesperson, bad in that there will be no-one to take care of you if things go sideways.
Back in early 2022, a little after the war started, TransferWise blocked transfer (i.e. donation) to the account run by the National Bank of Ukraine for support of the Ukrainian military.
Looks like it is probably against their acceptable use policy:
1.2.3 Other restricted activities
c. Weaponry, military and semi-military goods and services.
Weapons (including weapons of historic significance), military software, or any other goods or services intended for military use.
It feels like particularly in finance, that startups who disrupt traditional players do so without a full understanding of all the corner cases and none of the regulatory accountability which is why those traditional finance players were so expensive in the first place.
There are international mechanismis for verifying that countries enforce AML stuff like KYC, but no mechanisms for measuring either how effectice it is nor what it's negative effects are.
Kinda depends on how you define "accountability" of course, but rejecting paying customers is usually frowned upon in business. You want your KYC processes to be conservative enough not to get fined, but not so conservative that you lose out on potential revenue.
If you're too far off on either side, you either get fined by whatever regulator you fall under, or you get fined by the stock market because your competitors are more profitable.
Not even corner cases. I worked for a fintech that launched a dda-ish product that had 16 digit account numbers, issued sequentially, with no check digits. At launch there didn't seem to be a CS process for dealing with pretty obvious "customer mistyped account number and sent their money to some else's account." problem.
In the UK I have a single person Ltd. I use a virtual office as my registered address (a standard practice) and my home as my trading address. My UK banks and insurance all list my trading address (knowingly - that is the one they want) and my regular bills are personal, not under the company.
When wise ran a KYC, we had quite the confusing back and forth. The only documents I had which they nearly liked were from HMRC - but they didn't like that they were > 1year old.
In the end I rang HMRC and asked for any paper document they could send me with their logo, my company name, my trading address and my registered address on it... the lovely HMRC rep worked out which real document I could trigger. A complete waste of her time obviously.
You might be shocked just how bad some wordpress sites are. Ive responded to web developers calling 'ddos' on sites that crashed under the Google crawl (before ai crawls misbehaved and made this more of a thing).
Oh, I'm not surprised at all, but there's absolutely no reason at all that static webpages don't at least use a caching plugin, if they insist on using WordPress.
I'm sure some of the caching plugins don't play nice with other plugins or vice versa.
I once had to do terrible things to make a WordPress blog work under massive load. Actually not that terrible, I just did some manual caching; grabbed the html, saved it as index.html and made sure the webserver served that (if present) rather than WordPress for the front page, and approximately nobody clicked past the front page (I could have cached some of the article links too)
Thankfully, a little while later, I had a good reason to write a rage fueled just barely dynamic replacement of WordPress that met our exact needs with data stored as files. Not as fast as static files, but page generation in < 10 ms (IIRC) is good enough most days. Sadly, I think that blog moved to something slow again, but I no longer support it.
I got the same notification, US business owner here. In my case, I did not change my address (or anything else). But I suspect their system is regularly looking for work and can't handle DBAs well. To avoid this exact scenario, I was on their butts and uploaded every document I had. Eventually I was escalated and they did something, but I still can't enable their APR option due to some error somewhere. No one seems to know what. I'm very concerned one day I'll wake up to the same fate as the author.
It's a shame because I really love using the Wise website, app, payment system, and even the physical card (esp. in Japan).
Happy to work with anyone over there if they read this and want to dig in.
The right solution here is to take the telecom tax invoice, edit it in a PDF editor to say Telecom bill, and send it back.
The process is stupid enough that this will work 95% of the time. Is it fraud? No, not really, I'd argue. You're just conforming the document to an arbitrary standard, but all the relevant details are factual, not fraudulent.
I can confirm that this is the exact method recommended in forums where people and businesses that meet adversity from banks on a daily basis (most of the time for completely legitimate businesses, sometimes not) congregate to share advice.
The point is to feed the compliance critters exactly what they want so they can tick their boxes without sticking their necks out.
That was my first thought as I was reading. Of course, I imagine almost every serious business would be extremely uncomfortable doing something like that. On the other hand, if the alternative is getting your account closed anyway, there's not much to lose.
Story as old as time. Fintechs may be cheaper or have a cooler app, but if you ever stray off the happy path, you can kiss your account and/or money goodbye.
What’s the difference between that and traditional banking?
Been party to more than a couple situations with large banks who decided that you violated some hidden AML related policy and with zero recourse. You are lucky to even get your money out of those accounts without lengthy litigation.
Might happen more with fintech, but traditional banking does not remotely make you immune to this. Start doing anything interesting not “normal” and you’ll find out the hard way.
Banks usually have government oversight and legal obligations to customers. A fintech might have neither, it may also be doing business from some other country where it is not possible for you to make use of the government guarantees, or it may be hard to sue the fintech.
When it comes to AML/KYC you get effectively zero government guarantees. It’s almost the opposite.
I agree in the sense of FDIC insurance and being nominally operating under the banking regulatory system - but those typically offer exactly zero protection to a whole category of not-crimes.
A bank can decide you are suspicious and simply freeze your accounts indefinitely - and stonewall you at the customer service level. It’s not like they are required by any law to respond to you or anything like that.
There is likely more recourse if you have enough funds worth perusing legal action to its final conclusion - if you win then you can be more assured the bank will exist six years later when your judgement finally hits. Enjoy paying those legal bills though.
Having witnessed this happen and seen six figure losses due to absolutely zero crime being committed, I basically operate under the mental model that any money within a bank or financial institution is their money and not yours.
With a traditional bank you can walk into a branch and explain the situation to a human. I've had to do this several times with my large US bank, one time when traveling but thankfully to a place where they had a branch. In the end things got fixed up but not without much time and hassle expended.
I get the impression these institutions run ML software that was written by people who knew it would generate false positives but is now run by people who have been told that it is always correct. I say this having seen a bank manager call the group responsible on an internal phone line and them tell the manager that they suspect they (the branch manager) is a fraudster.
> a dropdown list of acceptable documents: a lease agreement, rates notice, tax document, utilities bill, or telecommunications bill.
It’s baffling to me that these types of (usually unsigned in both the electronic and the ink way, not that the latter would prove anything in a scan) PDFs are still somehow the gold standard for “proofs” of address.
Though not any telco bill, it has to be a landline. Otherwise you could spin up a mobile contract and it would be easy. If you're a single person company/consultant they'll accept a personal bank statement (having just gone through this runaround myself).
For more serious stuff in AU there is Justice of the Peace (basically a qualified volunteer but not necessarily a lawyer) who can certify the copy. This can then be scanned and has the JP stamp and signature. Sort of handy as it is a distributed network, so you dont need to queue at a post office and get someone to eye up your docs and fill in a form.
In many countries worldwide that's the reasonable best option. A scan of a physically signed piece of paper is no better, anyone could've signed it. So long as there is no global standard for digitally signed documents, that's what we're stuck with, no?
While you can always outright commit fraud, there are many jurisdictions where there are decently strong forms of proof that go beyond a letter.
Things like tax numbers with addresses associated to them, official address registers... hell, a lot of ID cards in many jurisdictions just have your address printed on it!
Now, again, fraud is possible, but "I registered my drivers license to a fake address" is a bit of a higher hurdle than "I edited my utility PDF to show the right address".
Though there's a bit of a blessing in things like PDFs being easily editable, in that many badly organized criminals will likely do it haphazardly, leading to messy metadata, or even more amateur hour stuff around just having the font be wrong or the like. More opportunities for a fraudster to trip up, so to speak.
In countries where you do have e.g. tax numbers associated with addresses no government agency is going to give it to a random private company. I've lived in many countries both in the EU and outside of it and I can think of only a few countries where you actually could do something better than a pdf — and they use digital signatures.
In Finland, people are supposed to have a single official address. When you move, the government informs banks and other businesses that have a legitimate reason to know your official address, unless you have opted out. There are a few exceptions, such as temporary addresses and international relocations, where you have to give the new address yourself.
> In countries where you do have e.g. tax numbers associated with addresses no government agency is going to give it to a random private company.
Why not? In my country the company registry is public, anyone can pay a small fee to get an official certificate of a company's address and company number.
We're talking about different things, what you're describing is the opposite problem. The vast majority of the customers are people, not companies, and no information will be released about them.
Yes, I've edited a pdf before before sending to get though bureaucracy. Not to lie of course, but to get around some BS requirement or hide sensitive information. Was libreoffice draw? or inkscape or something, then you can delete the metadata too from a cli in linux.
I've had similar from Wise and it's partly their fault but partly also not. If you do anything suspicious, they have to do this and they're not allowed to tell you why.
Today, in people who discover things that aren't banks don't act like banks
Tomorrow we'll have a double header featuring people who discover things that aren't hotels don't act like hotels and things that aren't taxis don't act like taxis.
If your business relies on the less-regulated "alternative" you're going to get burned eventually.
Unfortunately, this is still a good thing. As recently as a few months ago, I was in Las Vegas. The cabbie didn't know where to go, I had to direct them using Google maps from my phone, their credit card machine mysteriously wasn't working, and they didn't have change for cash because they "just got on shift". Seriously, all three in one ride?
Don't blame me that it was Uber/Lyft for the rest of my visif. I'll take an eventual possibility of getting burned somehow over a repeat of negative taxi experiences.
Also very curious, as a former Wise user who stopped using them after they demanded impossible KYC requirements (proof of address with address components that simply don't exist for my address, luckily with no money in the account, but didn't budge even when I reached out to support) and then seem to have silently dropped this months later (still not using them - not going to risk that they come back with more bullshit when they have money to hold hostage).
Edit: Someone posted a copy of the article below, and it seems to be a similar issue with no satisfactory resolution.
As a personal Wise customer, I have a small issue with a name mismatch. It happens every time, I need to submit extra documentation every time, and when I raise the issue with support I get the same response every time - they got the documents and the transfer can go ahead, so there's no problem. They are incapable of the simple act of looking the history and realizing there is an issue. Wise excels at low fees, not at customer support.
I do dozens of transactions every month sending payments to various freelancers. Been doing this for five years and can count the numbers of times I hand problems making payments on one hand - all we're minor and resolved in just a few days.
I've made about a dozen payments with them, and have had only one real problem - not long after I made the account but after I'd used them successfully for a few payments, I was paying for a purchase in 2 payments (one for each item).
After making the first payment, Wise decided that they had to see my passport before I could make any other payments, so I had to call my wife at home in another city, have her scan in my passport so I could upload it for verification and then still had to wait overnight until they unlocked my account. I asked customer service if they could allow my second payment while they verified my ID, but they said they said I had to wait but "it won't be long".
Has anyone ever just called them 'Wise'? Every single mention is 'Wise (formerly TransferWise)' like it's part of their legal entity name. Their CEO probably introduces himself as 'CEO of Wise (formerly TransferWise)'.
When you change your name and then have to constantly say (formerly OldName), it's a sign of a bad name-change decision. When you change your name to a common word, that does nothing to say what you actually do, it's a sign of a bad name-change decision. When you do both at once...
It's like Twitter, there was no good reason to change a name with years of trust and reputation. "X" sounds juvenile and stupid, and so does "Wise". I don't understand how it's legal for companies to name themselves as common words like "Alphabet". It's not only confusing, it's arrogant as hell.
I didn't sign up with them until they rebranded to "Wise", so that's what I call them. If this article just called them "TransferWise", I doubt I would have known it was the same as the Wise I use.
I had a very similar experience with Wise recently. I finally managed to find a document they deemed acceptable (at the fifth attempt) the day before the deadline. At no point did I receive a clear explanation as to why a document was rejected.
After the second rejection I hastily transferred all of my business funds to other accounts, and have no intention of returning.
Any suggestions for alternatives? I set up an account and tested a transfer to an out-of-country account, just in case I need to leave the US.. It worked painlessly. But recently, I think they closed my account pending more documents.
Also, any suggestions on reasonably secure bank accounts one can hold without citizenship / residency? Swiss?
I would suggest Revolut, but my experience with them has been similar to Wise. I have a locked Revolut account with funds in it that I can't access because I moved address.
Do you think you'll eventually get your money back ? I got my funds locked up in a neobank once and it tooks weeks to get it back and there was almost no support available
xe.com is competitive with wise rates and answers the phone. My KYC/AML journey was brief and they came through within their stated timeframe.
However all of the online companies sell the happy path and your experience will be diminished the farther you deviate from it. The right answer may be for a business to maintain a second-source in this as in all critical supplier relationships.
The KYC/AML dance is really annoying. The actual bad guys know exactly what they need to pass all the checks, while regular people, as in this case, often get caught in the wheels. Banks or fintechs rarely have the kind of investigative powers they would need to actually find the criminals using them, nor do they really want to spend their time playing police. So anything even remotely suspicious? You're now out of our risk appetite, bye.
For the actual criminals - if you're already doing crime, what's a little document forgery on top of that?
It's about time we accepted this fact and allowed money transfers, payments and banking to be neutral infrastructure.
I've had good experiences with Wise but jesus this is a nightmare, it looks like their customer service is crooked. It's a shame that such a great company can be so inflexible and let this type of situations fly.
I don't think their customer service is crooked, but their customer service is tailored to making sure they meet the exact letter of the laws and regulations they operate under and if it means they lose customers, that's better than a large fine (or whatever the penalty is)
Most fintech customer service is cooked. If someone is doing X cheaper, it's likely because they are cutting costs somewhere and customer service is easy place to do it.
Since it is looooong (even by my aging standards), an excerpt:
> Many regular people who get the [bank's] offboarding letter are confused and upset. Most people who get this letter are insufficiently expert in the financial system to understand what is going on. Many of them are (perhaps sensibly) enraged that the bank seems reluctant to offer answers. If they successfully pry answers out of the bank, the answers sound like nonsense or change constantly.
> Here, advocates often say that banks lack fundamental humanity, regard for their customers, or simple competence. I’d tell them that is neither here nor there, but the challenges described in Seeing like a Bank drive far more of this than malice, apathy, or incompetence as such. It is a systems issue.
[...]
> Very soon after making the decision to close your account the bank does not know specifically why it chose to close your account.
> This strikes many people as Kafkaesque. (Me, too!) It is the long-standing practice of banking in the U.S. and allied countries. It is downstream of laws passed by duly elected representatives. It was not capriciously developed as a political tool in the last few years. (We’ll get to those.)
Yep. His explanation of the details is somewhat interesting, but his insistence on ascribing all moral responsibility to customers, governments, or random bystanders because none of this could possibly be anyone in the banking industry's fault is infuriating.
We were burned by Wise as well when they suddenly moved our business account to another partner bank in the US and that of course changed our account number. The account was registered in dozens of procurement systems of our enterprise customers and it took us several months and a lot of pain to resume receiving payments from those customers who kept sending them to the now wrong account. I can never imagine a "traditional" bank doing that.
After that, we transferred the bulk of our funds back to a "traditional" bank and now never use Wise as the main business account. We now use it mostly for operational expenses.
Wise still has something to learn about banking business.
New Zealand banks are horrible. If they made it easy to hold USD and/or forex/fees on international card charges were reasonable, Wise wouldn't be needed in most cases.
NZ banks also have no depositor protection. No equivalent of the US FDIC. Note below from 'jemmyw depositor protection added the past couple months.
I feel as though the whole story isn't here, as there's one key detail that seems suspect from Wise's email: "Additionally, the reason behind our decision is because your activities exceed our risk tolerance."
It seems as though Wise had noticed payment patterns that seemed outside of what Wise is comfortable facilitating. I hope the author can get their funds, but this behaviour is consistent with all banking services.
I've personally found wise to be more than helpful and I've changed addresses across continents, to far more red flag jurisdictions than my native Australia
So while I feel for the person they seem very unwilling to meet a provider in the middle, is it not fair to question why this business pays no electricity or either owns/rent the property?
This is very basic stuff for a business to have. Nothing more than a phone bill at that address is bit iffy.
From a pure risk perspective buying a $2 sim card and putting whatever address you want in online then sending someone the PDF saying that's where we are is not hard to do, so maybe not worth having your business if you can't provide anything else to satisfy their worries?
There's plenty of banks that have to service you by law, go to them, and pay the far higher costs.
The article details the story of a business that tried to change their address in NZ. Thier documents (while correct to NZ) didn’t match the criteria of Wise and then Wise effectively closed the account. The support and appeal process was basically nonexistent and even by the end article it is unclear that the business owner were even able to retrieve the funds in the Wise accounts. Also the author’s personal account with Wise was also closed.
I hope this is a very brief overview of the article, which I would encourage people to read. In speaks to the huge imbalance in power and accountability in dealing with some companies
Bah. I posted it but I didn't keep it open on my phone. The tldr:
They moved offices, informed wise of a change of address. Wise asked for proof of address. They sent a phone bill. Wise rejected it because the terminology of bills in New Zealand is different to the US (i.e. here bills are usually labelled Tax invoice rather than Bill). Wise support agent also made a barmey suggestion on how to get around it that they didn't follow. Another Wise agent called them back agreeing that the document should be accepted and resubmitted on their behalf. Later the document was rejected again and then their account was closed without any further communication from Wise. Later the author's personal wise account was closed just for being associated with the company.
Ah, I had a similar situation with them. They also closed my personal account immediately after closing the business account. I was really surprised it works that way.
For years, one of my businesses has been a regular user of Wise (formerly TransferWise). Wise is a financial service that lets you send and receive money across currencies, often at a better rate and lower fee than traditional banks. Sounds great, right?
Until it isn’t.
This is our story – a sobering, frustrating, and frankly appalling experience that ended with our business and personal accounts being shut down, without any meaningful reason, support, or recourse.
And all we did? We updated our address.
A Routine Change Turned Nightmare
Like many businesses, we recently moved into a new office. Alongside the usual updates to suppliers and records, we updated our physical address with Wise. Not long after, we received an email requesting us to verify the new address.
Fair enough – we had no problem with that.
Wise provided a dropdown list of acceptable documents: a lease agreement, rates notice, tax document, utilities bill, or telecommunications bill. Due to our company structure, most of those documents are in the name of our parent company or show our PO Box (which NZ Post requires, since they won’t deliver to our street address). But we had a telecommunications bill that ticked every box:
Correct entity name
Correct physical street address
Even detailed our fibre connection at the new premises
So we uploaded it – and assumed that would be the end of it.
We were so wrong.
The Call That Made No Sense
Days later, we received an email: our document was rejected.
No clear reason. So, I called Wise and explained the situation to the customer service representative.
Her response left me stunned.
“The document was rejected because it was a tax invoice, not a bill.”
Wait… what?
I paused, trying to process this. I politely explained that in New Zealand, a “tax invoice” is a legal form of a bill – even down to the name “tax invoice” being a legal requirement by IRD, and that’s how telecommunications companies issue invoices here. But she refused to accept it.
“It needs to say Telecommunications Bill at the top,” she insisted.
“A tax invoice isn’t acceptable.”
This is simply not true, and completely out of touch with New Zealand’s business documentation standards. The rep wouldn’t budge.
The “Solution” That Was Beyond Belief
Still trying to find a solution, I asked: what do you recommend I do then?
Her answer?
“You should find a local shared workspace, lease a desk under your company name, change your registered office to that address, and use that lease document to verify your address with us.”
Yes, you read that right.
Wise’s advice was to artificially lease a desk we didn’t need, change our registered address, and use that document – just to verify an address we actually operate from.
I asked to speak to a manager. That request was refused. She told me, flatly:
“I am providing you with the correct information.”
A bit more back and forth… then the call was disconnected.
A Glimmer of Hope – Then The Hammer Falls
Later that day, I received a call back from Wise – not from a manager (because apparently, Wise doesn’t have managers), but from a more “senior” representative.
This rep was more empathetic and agreed the document should have been acceptable. She escalated the issue, resubmitted the document herself, and said she’d personally follow up if it was rejected again.
Progress, I thought.
Until the next morning.
“We’ve Restricted Your Account”
I woke to an email with a stunning subject line:
“We’ve restricted your account”
Just like that, our entire business account was locked. No warning. No reason. No discussion.
We could no longer send or receive money, use our Wise cards, or even contact support. The email stated:
“Due to our current risk policies, your account will be closed in a few months. You will not be able to use support channels.”
Even worse? My personal Wise account was locked too. The same personal account which did have its address fully verified, by a rates invoice for my personal address.
Not too long ago, I transferred the equivalent of $12 USD from a Fintech chequing account and immediately had my Wise account flagged for sanctions. I had to spend 2 hours drafting and collecting documentation that I was indeed, not a sanctioned entity.
I can't prove it, but from interacting with 'support' teams who are clearly middle-people working with a clunky AI and accepting its output as absolute, that would be my first guess.
Jesus Christ, what a nightmare. I've used Wise quite a bit and was blocked as well, though I'm not entirely sure what I did to get released. I was stuck in a place where I had to login to do something but it wouldn't let me log in. I told a friend of mine who managed to find me a page where I could finally get customer support without being logged in.
In my case, it was totally my fault because I foolishly used Wise on my work email. Why would I even do that? It did start this half-Kafkaesque nightmare but I managed to eventually get the account back. I'd compounded the problems by also trying to make a new account so I could get customer support and promptly ended up being banned for trying a duplicate account. Fantastic.
But at least you know there is some flow that can get you out of this temporarily restricted state - which seems far less severe than the flow they got stuck in. Being unable to actually get their money out seems crazy. I would have rented the damned WeWork and been done with it to be honest.
So this is my word of warning:
Don’t put all your eggs in the Wise basket.
You've taken the wrong message away from this.
The lesson you should have learned here is: Don't put all your eggs in any one basket.
If you are relying on a single provider for some critical business function, then your business is at risk. Period. I don't care how long you've been working with them and how nice their current sales support rep is. Things change. People leave. Companies get bought by other companies and restructured. If you're relying on any single one for anything mission-critical, that's an existential risk.
I agree that your wise story is ludicrous and terrible and hilarious. I particularly love how your bill was rejected because it was labelled as a "Tax Invoice" (we have the same requirement here in AU).
But TBH this is pretty typical of online services these days, and you should have expected this to happen. Google will happily lock you out of your account for no real reason and give opaque reasons why they won't unlock it. I've seen cases of this happening to google employees. Paypal are notorious for freezing funds during product launches.
IMO there should be regulations requiring businesses to have a way for customers to speak to an actual human with decision-making powers. If I was you, I'd be taking legal action against wise and complaining to the government department responsible for regulating these things.
I would file a "dangerous professional" complaint with the appropriate regulator. (Don't say Wise is completely unregulated. NZ is a civilized country.)
Wise will need to have a corporate presence here to operate here, so depending on the amount (whether it be USD or EUR or NZD), this business can take them to the Disputes Tribunal or if >$30K (NZD), the district court.
>A bit more back and forth… then the call was disconnected.
who disconnected it? were you yelling at support? this seems relevant and you just put "yadda yadda... the call was disconnected" (not to defend Wise, just curious what happened there)
>This isn’t just poor service — it’s unacceptable.
meaningless LLM-addendums don't improve your blogpost
I have a personal Wise account as do several family members. I've had a few odd things happen with their debit cards, and actually (eventually received some reasonably sane customer support via email). Otherwise no problems. That said, when I was opening the account another family member with a history in fintech said "you know that's not a bank, right?". Accordingly I've never kept a large balance there.
Nowhere in this blog does it mention what the business actually does, which is always a red flag. I've seen plenty of stripe bashing posts on HN that end up with the business being in newsletter scams or adult content.
If you've ever dealt with financial institutions in a meaningful way, you'd know that the self-service variety, or the HSBC variety, will create hurdles and enforce policies arbitrarily with no recourse, care or concern for your well-being.
ISPs that host illegal content can indeed be outside the risk tolerance of a financial services company. The blog post is very careful to say "one of our companies" and censor the name of it on screenshots so I'll be interested to see what it is.
You can look up the blog author yourself if you're interested. It looks like the typical small NZ "does several things because the local market is so small" kind of business. Local laws here are a bit more strict on hosting content so that seems unlikely, and would the minions at Wise even look into that side of things?
Yep, small is correct, the blogger's companies are all focused on South Canterbury and headquartered in Timaru (for non-Kiwis, 55K people live in South Canterbury, and 29K of them live in Timaru. Massive shit-ton of cows though).
Oh no… god forbid - adult content lol. Yes regardless of the content if the business is legal and they only changed an address that’s not a reason to have this level of shit support and no way to escalate and contact a human…
I don't agree with those policies but it's a possible reason for a financial services business to break a relationship if they discover incidentally that this guys business is breaking the law. Changes the blog post completely and the business info should have been included.
As a heuristic, using TransferWise is traditionally associated with Russian money laundering scams.
I'm not really sure what the author expected. If you're in KYC and ask to speak to a manager when your document gets rejected, you're going to have a bad time. The person processing your documents can't give you leeway even if they wanted to, they have legal requirements and a process they must follow.
So what do you do when the process has a problem? The document that your country issues that is valid and meets the KYC legal requirement but has a title that the internal process rejects? You need to speak to someone who can say "this meets the legal requirement but our process is bunk"
That makes sense if you're trying to use a costco membership card to board an international flight, but nitpicking over telecommunications "bill" vs "invoice" seems exactly the type of ambiguity that's worth escalating over?
This was very obviously written with ChatGPT. The structure, emojis, emdashes and contrasting sentences. Surprised nobody is calling it out. IMO save us time and just give us the original short version you wrote to ChatGPT
At some point customer service died. Businesses of seem to no longer be interested in dealing with customers. Good customers come in all shapes and sizes, and often don't exactly fit a cookie cutter. It's frustrating to see businesses just cut and run the moment something becomes a problem that needs more than a series of pre-scripted responses to be resolved.
Wise customer service is amazingly good though.
I'd much prefer to use a company that spends 100% of the time on 80% of customers than one that spends 80% of it's time on 20% of the customers
OP can't even provide proof from the tax office of being at that address, it's an angry rant rather than the whole picture.
Would you go into business with him with nothing but a phone bill as proof?
> OP can't even provide proof from the tax office of being at that address
Well, the article says otherwise. I think "The document was rejected because it was a tax invoice, not a bill." is a pretty lame rejection reason.
That being said, I didn't quite get the solution Wise suggested. Don't they already have a lease document for the new office? It looks like the author has omitted some crucial detail.
I've had good interactions with Wise twice.
I couldn't log on, got the problem escalated, then they got me to create a logged session in their app, and from that they diagnosed the problem was due to larger text on a smaller screen causing their app to crash. I've rarely had technical faults diagnosed and fixed by any company.
Cough economist and financial times
Did you read the post? The business had just moved. Was it supposed to wait on the tax office for the next tax statement, which could arrive months later?
> Was it supposed to wait on the tax office for the next tax statement, which could arrive months later?
In Australia you can get a Company Extract from ASIC for $10. Apparently it's free in NZ [1].
I believe they haven't actually updated their registered company address for some reason, and that triggered Wise's systems.
[1] https://companies-register.companiesoffice.govt.nz/help-cent...
There was a time when the general consensus was that treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time.
It seems like that changed somewhere around the turn of the century, whereby businesses started to decide that it was better to cut down on customer service, and in some cases, go so far as to ban customers. The first cases of this I recall reading about had to do with Best Buy, and specifically their policy of banning people from their stores who made a lot of returns.
I'm not really sure how it ultimately maths out - i.e., whether it's long-term optimal to drop troublesome customers or merely short-term optimal, and this was primarily taken from the perspective of retail.
As such, I'm sure the math changes a little for subscription services. However, I also recall my prior employer's support activity followed a power law distribution across its clients, so it wouldn't surprise me if a policy to drop particularly noisy clients is a net savings there as well.
For brick and mortar retail that isn't fast fashion or supermarkets, dropping troublesome customers is generally extremely sensible.
Profit on most goods is low - single digit % typically - and a single return can eliminate the profit margins on a dozen sales. Sometimes cost can be reclaimed from goods providers - i.e. genuinely defective or manufacturer refurbishment programs - and sometimes they can resell the item as new. But if the item has been used, broken by the customer, etc. the loss is significant. It turns out that some people are more honest than others, and some people are directly trying to scam companies.
When one 'dodgy' customer can eliminate the value of 10 'real' sales with every return the maths say to ban people quickly.
A little anecdote - I have a distant relative who, circa 2005, would buy a vacuum cleaner use it, and then return it. He rotated stores (hardware stores, supermarkets, electronic stores) until he gradually got banned from them all. Once that happened he moved house. Not only had he almost certainly spent more in time and fuel than a reasonable vacuum would have cost him (which I will note he could afford); but the cost and waste he has incurred on both individual companies and society at large through that and similar schemes is staggering. I don't know if he's still at it - or alive - but the people he was surrounding himself with all saw such behaviour as reasonable.
> treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time.
may be true in the past, but a business cannot scale up good customer service - it's at best a linear scaling, where each new customer costs the same fixed amount due to needing high touch/people to manage that customer.
With the internet, businesses have found scaling to work better by ensuring your fixed costs stay fixed even if you scaled up customer count - this includes support/call centers etc. Without doing this, the business cannot scale up exponentially.
On one hand, this makes me incredibly sad. It means that all of us, as consumers, agreed we'd rather save a buck than get acceptable service.
On the other hand, as someone who did customer service in my younger years, 95% of calls were PEBKAC, so it's essentially a giant money drain for things of no real concern to you as a company.
I've often wondered how successful it would be to charge $3 or $5 per call, refunding the money in cases said call was needed.
The worst customer service is usually for things where you don't have a choice, like when your mortgage gets sold to a new servicer.
The problem is dealing with those other 5% of calls. If you are in a 5% situation, you're seemingly SOL these days.
In principle I agree with the concept of charging for support and refunding if the issue is not at the customer's end. I'd certainly be fine with that myself, even if it cost $50 or so to get a responsible human on the line when there's trouble with a service like banking, payments, or business-critical SaaS providers.
I think Microsoft tried that at one point, but they didn't stick with it for some reason. Maybe it leads to a lot of knock-down, drag-out arguments about whose fault something is.
> At some point customer service died.
At some point enforcement died. It used to be that locking someone out of their money would wind up with people in jail.
Now, it's not just a cost of doing business but also viewed as a positive by state actors.
...when exactly would you have gone to jail for this?
That's what you get for the low cost of entry. When most customers are self-signup (and probably low margin) there's no individual responsible for them.
Good in that you never have to speak to a salesperson, bad in that there will be no-one to take care of you if things go sideways.
Yes. I think that is a reasonable point. When cost of retention exceeds the cost of acquisition.
Back in early 2022, a little after the war started, TransferWise blocked transfer (i.e. donation) to the account run by the National Bank of Ukraine for support of the Ukrainian military.
I have and never will forgive them for this.
Looks like it is probably against their acceptable use policy:
1.2.3 Other restricted activities c. Weaponry, military and semi-military goods and services. Weapons (including weapons of historic significance), military software, or any other goods or services intended for military use.
It feels like particularly in finance, that startups who disrupt traditional players do so without a full understanding of all the corner cases and none of the regulatory accountability which is why those traditional finance players were so expensive in the first place.
Is there any accountability for overly conservative KYC? My understanding from the whole debanking thing is no, at least in the US.
There are international mechanismis for verifying that countries enforce AML stuff like KYC, but no mechanisms for measuring either how effectice it is nor what it's negative effects are.
Kinda depends on how you define "accountability" of course, but rejecting paying customers is usually frowned upon in business. You want your KYC processes to be conservative enough not to get fined, but not so conservative that you lose out on potential revenue.
If you're too far off on either side, you either get fined by whatever regulator you fall under, or you get fined by the stock market because your competitors are more profitable.
Closing 1% of accounts instead of .1% of accounts for kyc reasons won't affect your revenue enough to matter to the stock market.
Not even corner cases. I worked for a fintech that launched a dda-ish product that had 16 digit account numbers, issued sequentially, with no check digits. At launch there didn't seem to be a CS process for dealing with pretty obvious "customer mistyped account number and sent their money to some else's account." problem.
Feature parity with blockchains.
Chesterson's bureaucracy
In the UK I have a single person Ltd. I use a virtual office as my registered address (a standard practice) and my home as my trading address. My UK banks and insurance all list my trading address (knowingly - that is the one they want) and my regular bills are personal, not under the company.
When wise ran a KYC, we had quite the confusing back and forth. The only documents I had which they nearly liked were from HMRC - but they didn't like that they were > 1year old.
In the end I rang HMRC and asked for any paper document they could send me with their logo, my company name, my trading address and my registered address on it... the lovely HMRC rep worked out which real document I could trigger. A complete waste of her time obviously.
They might have to follow up with a “why we are never using <hosting> again”
A 9 point HN post shouldn't bring down the server.
No amount of HN popularity should bring down a static article, really.
> Additionally, a 507 Insufficient Storage error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
They've probably forgotten to rotate web server logs.
It's back up, luckily.
Will a default config of caddy be able to handle this load?
You might be shocked just how bad some wordpress sites are. Ive responded to web developers calling 'ddos' on sites that crashed under the Google crawl (before ai crawls misbehaved and made this more of a thing).
Oh, I'm not surprised at all, but there's absolutely no reason at all that static webpages don't at least use a caching plugin, if they insist on using WordPress.
I'm sure some of the caching plugins don't play nice with other plugins or vice versa.
I once had to do terrible things to make a WordPress blog work under massive load. Actually not that terrible, I just did some manual caching; grabbed the html, saved it as index.html and made sure the webserver served that (if present) rather than WordPress for the front page, and approximately nobody clicked past the front page (I could have cached some of the article links too)
Thankfully, a little while later, I had a good reason to write a rage fueled just barely dynamic replacement of WordPress that met our exact needs with data stored as files. Not as fast as static files, but page generation in < 10 ms (IIRC) is good enough most days. Sadly, I think that blog moved to something slow again, but I no longer support it.
it's wordpress, so technically not static, although if it was it wouldn't have this resource problem.
Don't cache plugins exist for WordPress? Or, barring that, wouldn't CloudFlare help?
They do, but they aren't very good. PHP is very fast, but unfortunately Wordpress is carefully designed to make it very slow.
This
Follow up article: why were never using Wordpress again. A hacker news cautionary tale.
Also. Well done wise.com. Only having customers who use Wordpress means no vitality on people posting hate for you.
Oh, a wise guy, ehe?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yscaDkzHqek
I got the same notification, US business owner here. In my case, I did not change my address (or anything else). But I suspect their system is regularly looking for work and can't handle DBAs well. To avoid this exact scenario, I was on their butts and uploaded every document I had. Eventually I was escalated and they did something, but I still can't enable their APR option due to some error somewhere. No one seems to know what. I'm very concerned one day I'll wake up to the same fate as the author.
It's a shame because I really love using the Wise website, app, payment system, and even the physical card (esp. in Japan).
Happy to work with anyone over there if they read this and want to dig in.
The right solution here is to take the telecom tax invoice, edit it in a PDF editor to say Telecom bill, and send it back.
The process is stupid enough that this will work 95% of the time. Is it fraud? No, not really, I'd argue. You're just conforming the document to an arbitrary standard, but all the relevant details are factual, not fraudulent.
I can confirm that this is the exact method recommended in forums where people and businesses that meet adversity from banks on a daily basis (most of the time for completely legitimate businesses, sometimes not) congregate to share advice.
The point is to feed the compliance critters exactly what they want so they can tick their boxes without sticking their necks out.
That was my first thought as I was reading. Of course, I imagine almost every serious business would be extremely uncomfortable doing something like that. On the other hand, if the alternative is getting your account closed anyway, there's not much to lose.
It is misrepresentation unless you tell them you doctored it.
Story as old as time. Fintechs may be cheaper or have a cooler app, but if you ever stray off the happy path, you can kiss your account and/or money goodbye.
What’s the difference between that and traditional banking?
Been party to more than a couple situations with large banks who decided that you violated some hidden AML related policy and with zero recourse. You are lucky to even get your money out of those accounts without lengthy litigation.
Might happen more with fintech, but traditional banking does not remotely make you immune to this. Start doing anything interesting not “normal” and you’ll find out the hard way.
Banks usually have government oversight and legal obligations to customers. A fintech might have neither, it may also be doing business from some other country where it is not possible for you to make use of the government guarantees, or it may be hard to sue the fintech.
When it comes to AML/KYC you get effectively zero government guarantees. It’s almost the opposite.
I agree in the sense of FDIC insurance and being nominally operating under the banking regulatory system - but those typically offer exactly zero protection to a whole category of not-crimes.
A bank can decide you are suspicious and simply freeze your accounts indefinitely - and stonewall you at the customer service level. It’s not like they are required by any law to respond to you or anything like that.
There is likely more recourse if you have enough funds worth perusing legal action to its final conclusion - if you win then you can be more assured the bank will exist six years later when your judgement finally hits. Enjoy paying those legal bills though.
Having witnessed this happen and seen six figure losses due to absolutely zero crime being committed, I basically operate under the mental model that any money within a bank or financial institution is their money and not yours.
With a traditional bank you can walk into a branch and explain the situation to a human. I've had to do this several times with my large US bank, one time when traveling but thankfully to a place where they had a branch. In the end things got fixed up but not without much time and hassle expended.
I get the impression these institutions run ML software that was written by people who knew it would generate false positives but is now run by people who have been told that it is always correct. I say this having seen a bank manager call the group responsible on an internal phone line and them tell the manager that they suspect they (the branch manager) is a fraudster.
> a dropdown list of acceptable documents: a lease agreement, rates notice, tax document, utilities bill, or telecommunications bill.
It’s baffling to me that these types of (usually unsigned in both the electronic and the ink way, not that the latter would prove anything in a scan) PDFs are still somehow the gold standard for “proofs” of address.
Though not any telco bill, it has to be a landline. Otherwise you could spin up a mobile contract and it would be easy. If you're a single person company/consultant they'll accept a personal bank statement (having just gone through this runaround myself).
For more serious stuff in AU there is Justice of the Peace (basically a qualified volunteer but not necessarily a lawyer) who can certify the copy. This can then be scanned and has the JP stamp and signature. Sort of handy as it is a distributed network, so you dont need to queue at a post office and get someone to eye up your docs and fill in a form.
In the US (for financial things) that's called a medallion guarantee and you can walk into a bank and get them to authenticate it.
For other things there are notaries public.
In many countries worldwide that's the reasonable best option. A scan of a physically signed piece of paper is no better, anyone could've signed it. So long as there is no global standard for digitally signed documents, that's what we're stuck with, no?
While you can always outright commit fraud, there are many jurisdictions where there are decently strong forms of proof that go beyond a letter.
Things like tax numbers with addresses associated to them, official address registers... hell, a lot of ID cards in many jurisdictions just have your address printed on it!
Now, again, fraud is possible, but "I registered my drivers license to a fake address" is a bit of a higher hurdle than "I edited my utility PDF to show the right address".
Though there's a bit of a blessing in things like PDFs being easily editable, in that many badly organized criminals will likely do it haphazardly, leading to messy metadata, or even more amateur hour stuff around just having the font be wrong or the like. More opportunities for a fraudster to trip up, so to speak.
In countries where you do have e.g. tax numbers associated with addresses no government agency is going to give it to a random private company. I've lived in many countries both in the EU and outside of it and I can think of only a few countries where you actually could do something better than a pdf — and they use digital signatures.
A bank is not a random private company.
In Finland, people are supposed to have a single official address. When you move, the government informs banks and other businesses that have a legitimate reason to know your official address, unless you have opted out. There are a few exceptions, such as temporary addresses and international relocations, where you have to give the new address yourself.
> In countries where you do have e.g. tax numbers associated with addresses no government agency is going to give it to a random private company.
Why not? In my country the company registry is public, anyone can pay a small fee to get an official certificate of a company's address and company number.
We're talking about different things, what you're describing is the opposite problem. The vast majority of the customers are people, not companies, and no information will be released about them.
Yes, I've edited a pdf before before sending to get though bureaucracy. Not to lie of course, but to get around some BS requirement or hide sensitive information. Was libreoffice draw? or inkscape or something, then you can delete the metadata too from a cli in linux.
I've had similar from Wise and it's partly their fault but partly also not. If you do anything suspicious, they have to do this and they're not allowed to tell you why.
See https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
There was a video game written about this scenario... 38 years ago!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)
This is my fantasy to create computer games to simulate life absurdities.
My blood pressure just went up.
Today, in people who discover things that aren't banks don't act like banks
Tomorrow we'll have a double header featuring people who discover things that aren't hotels don't act like hotels and things that aren't taxis don't act like taxis.
If your business relies on the less-regulated "alternative" you're going to get burned eventually.
Banks famously never have issues like this.
In most (all ?) countries banks are regulated and customers have recourse to some sort of banking ombudsman for this sort of thing.
> Today, in people who discover things that aren't banks don't act like banks
On the contrary, this is a case where Wise is acting exactly like a bank.
> things that aren't taxis don't act like taxis.
Unfortunately, this is still a good thing. As recently as a few months ago, I was in Las Vegas. The cabbie didn't know where to go, I had to direct them using Google maps from my phone, their credit card machine mysteriously wasn't working, and they didn't have change for cash because they "just got on shift". Seriously, all three in one ride?
Don't blame me that it was Uber/Lyft for the rest of my visif. I'll take an eventual possibility of getting burned somehow over a repeat of negative taxi experiences.
? "Wise, formerly known as TransferWise, is an English financial technology company focused on global money transfers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_%28company%29
As a Wise user, only for personal international transactions, I'm very curious to read this! I've had good experiences so far.
Also very curious, as a former Wise user who stopped using them after they demanded impossible KYC requirements (proof of address with address components that simply don't exist for my address, luckily with no money in the account, but didn't budge even when I reached out to support) and then seem to have silently dropped this months later (still not using them - not going to risk that they come back with more bullshit when they have money to hold hostage).
Edit: Someone posted a copy of the article below, and it seems to be a similar issue with no satisfactory resolution.
what do you use now
As a personal Wise customer, I have a small issue with a name mismatch. It happens every time, I need to submit extra documentation every time, and when I raise the issue with support I get the same response every time - they got the documents and the transfer can go ahead, so there's no problem. They are incapable of the simple act of looking the history and realizing there is an issue. Wise excels at low fees, not at customer support.
Likewise, been with them for a few years and am changing countries very often (including NZ like the author). It's making me quite nervous TBH!
I do dozens of transactions every month sending payments to various freelancers. Been doing this for five years and can count the numbers of times I hand problems making payments on one hand - all we're minor and resolved in just a few days.
I've made about a dozen payments with them, and have had only one real problem - not long after I made the account but after I'd used them successfully for a few payments, I was paying for a purchase in 2 payments (one for each item).
After making the first payment, Wise decided that they had to see my passport before I could make any other payments, so I had to call my wife at home in another city, have her scan in my passport so I could upload it for verification and then still had to wait overnight until they unlocked my account. I asked customer service if they could allow my second payment while they verified my ID, but they said they said I had to wait but "it won't be long".
Same here! I need to know!
Has anyone ever just called them 'Wise'? Every single mention is 'Wise (formerly TransferWise)' like it's part of their legal entity name. Their CEO probably introduces himself as 'CEO of Wise (formerly TransferWise)'.
When you change your name and then have to constantly say (formerly OldName), it's a sign of a bad name-change decision. When you change your name to a common word, that does nothing to say what you actually do, it's a sign of a bad name-change decision. When you do both at once...
It's like Twitter, there was no good reason to change a name with years of trust and reputation. "X" sounds juvenile and stupid, and so does "Wise". I don't understand how it's legal for companies to name themselves as common words like "Alphabet". It's not only confusing, it's arrogant as hell.
Same with Apple
I didn't sign up with them until they rebranded to "Wise", so that's what I call them. If this article just called them "TransferWise", I doubt I would have known it was the same as the Wise I use.
I call them Wise now, have for at least a year. I first joined years before they renamed. Wise is a lot quicker to say.
I've only known it as just Wise
My only issue with a personal Wise account is that it was unobvious to me that they charge 1.75% on ATM withdrawals (over NZD350).
I'm not sure if using Wise actually saves money otherwise - but it mostly works fine.
The one technical issue I've hit in the US was a bowser asking for my ZIP code which it couldn't verify so I couldn't use that gas station.
I had a very similar experience with Wise recently. I finally managed to find a document they deemed acceptable (at the fifth attempt) the day before the deadline. At no point did I receive a clear explanation as to why a document was rejected.
After the second rejection I hastily transferred all of my business funds to other accounts, and have no intention of returning.
Any suggestions for alternatives? I set up an account and tested a transfer to an out-of-country account, just in case I need to leave the US.. It worked painlessly. But recently, I think they closed my account pending more documents.
Also, any suggestions on reasonably secure bank accounts one can hold without citizenship / residency? Swiss?
I would suggest Revolut, but my experience with them has been similar to Wise. I have a locked Revolut account with funds in it that I can't access because I moved address.
Do you think you'll eventually get your money back ? I got my funds locked up in a neobank once and it tooks weeks to get it back and there was almost no support available
I think so, but I have to jump through a few hoops first and that's been painful.
xe.com is competitive with wise rates and answers the phone. My KYC/AML journey was brief and they came through within their stated timeframe.
However all of the online companies sell the happy path and your experience will be diminished the farther you deviate from it. The right answer may be for a business to maintain a second-source in this as in all critical supplier relationships.
The KYC/AML dance is really annoying. The actual bad guys know exactly what they need to pass all the checks, while regular people, as in this case, often get caught in the wheels. Banks or fintechs rarely have the kind of investigative powers they would need to actually find the criminals using them, nor do they really want to spend their time playing police. So anything even remotely suspicious? You're now out of our risk appetite, bye.
For the actual criminals - if you're already doing crime, what's a little document forgery on top of that?
It's about time we accepted this fact and allowed money transfers, payments and banking to be neutral infrastructure.
I've had good experiences with Wise but jesus this is a nightmare, it looks like their customer service is crooked. It's a shame that such a great company can be so inflexible and let this type of situations fly.
I don't think their customer service is crooked, but their customer service is tailored to making sure they meet the exact letter of the laws and regulations they operate under and if it means they lose customers, that's better than a large fine (or whatever the penalty is)
Most fintech customer service is cooked. If someone is doing X cheaper, it's likely because they are cutting costs somewhere and customer service is easy place to do it.
For more on why banks might drop customers in a seemingly-capricious way: "Debanking (And Debunking)" - https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
Prior HN discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371476
Since it is looooong (even by my aging standards), an excerpt:
> Many regular people who get the [bank's] offboarding letter are confused and upset. Most people who get this letter are insufficiently expert in the financial system to understand what is going on. Many of them are (perhaps sensibly) enraged that the bank seems reluctant to offer answers. If they successfully pry answers out of the bank, the answers sound like nonsense or change constantly.
> Here, advocates often say that banks lack fundamental humanity, regard for their customers, or simple competence. I’d tell them that is neither here nor there, but the challenges described in Seeing like a Bank drive far more of this than malice, apathy, or incompetence as such. It is a systems issue.
[...]
> Very soon after making the decision to close your account the bank does not know specifically why it chose to close your account.
> This strikes many people as Kafkaesque. (Me, too!) It is the long-standing practice of banking in the U.S. and allied countries. It is downstream of laws passed by duly elected representatives. It was not capriciously developed as a political tool in the last few years. (We’ll get to those.)
> Normal people who experience a bank treating them like shit will assume the bank has treated them like shit. However they are wrong.
When it's not actually a quote, you might want to present it a little differently. Especially when nobody can tell that its fake at a glance.
The guy isn't arguing that the outcome is sane or deserved, but rather than most victims mis-identify the motives and causes.
Yep. His explanation of the details is somewhat interesting, but his insistence on ascribing all moral responsibility to customers, governments, or random bystanders because none of this could possibly be anyone in the banking industry's fault is infuriating.
We were burned by Wise as well when they suddenly moved our business account to another partner bank in the US and that of course changed our account number. The account was registered in dozens of procurement systems of our enterprise customers and it took us several months and a lot of pain to resume receiving payments from those customers who kept sending them to the now wrong account. I can never imagine a "traditional" bank doing that.
After that, we transferred the bulk of our funds back to a "traditional" bank and now never use Wise as the main business account. We now use it mostly for operational expenses.
Wise still has something to learn about banking business.
New Zealand banks are horrible. If they made it easy to hold USD and/or forex/fees on international card charges were reasonable, Wise wouldn't be needed in most cases.
NZ banks also have no depositor protection. No equivalent of the US FDIC. Note below from 'jemmyw depositor protection added the past couple months.
We do now have depositor protection: https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/dcs
thanks for the good news. It does exclude foreign currency accounts.
This was the best thing about Google cache. It's sad they killed it. I really wanted to read this.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251030232647/https://shaun.nz/...
I feel as though the whole story isn't here, as there's one key detail that seems suspect from Wise's email: "Additionally, the reason behind our decision is because your activities exceed our risk tolerance."
It seems as though Wise had noticed payment patterns that seemed outside of what Wise is comfortable facilitating. I hope the author can get their funds, but this behaviour is consistent with all banking services.
If you do something wrong they say "your activities exceed our risk tolerance".
If they make a mistake they say... "your activities exceed our risk tolerance". It's legal boilerplate that covers all possible situations.
Probable just boilerplate. Both parts of the statement can be read so many ways as to be effectively meaningless.
I've personally found wise to be more than helpful and I've changed addresses across continents, to far more red flag jurisdictions than my native Australia
So while I feel for the person they seem very unwilling to meet a provider in the middle, is it not fair to question why this business pays no electricity or either owns/rent the property?
This is very basic stuff for a business to have. Nothing more than a phone bill at that address is bit iffy.
From a pure risk perspective buying a $2 sim card and putting whatever address you want in online then sending someone the PDF saying that's where we are is not hard to do, so maybe not worth having your business if you can't provide anything else to satisfy their worries?
There's plenty of banks that have to service you by law, go to them, and pay the far higher costs.
If anyone opened this and still has it open, please paste the contents here so we can read it.
The article details the story of a business that tried to change their address in NZ. Thier documents (while correct to NZ) didn’t match the criteria of Wise and then Wise effectively closed the account. The support and appeal process was basically nonexistent and even by the end article it is unclear that the business owner were even able to retrieve the funds in the Wise accounts. Also the author’s personal account with Wise was also closed.
I hope this is a very brief overview of the article, which I would encourage people to read. In speaks to the huge imbalance in power and accountability in dealing with some companies
Bah. I posted it but I didn't keep it open on my phone. The tldr:
They moved offices, informed wise of a change of address. Wise asked for proof of address. They sent a phone bill. Wise rejected it because the terminology of bills in New Zealand is different to the US (i.e. here bills are usually labelled Tax invoice rather than Bill). Wise support agent also made a barmey suggestion on how to get around it that they didn't follow. Another Wise agent called them back agreeing that the document should be accepted and resubmitted on their behalf. Later the document was rejected again and then their account was closed without any further communication from Wise. Later the author's personal wise account was closed just for being associated with the company.
Ah, I had a similar situation with them. They also closed my personal account immediately after closing the business account. I was really surprised it works that way.
That tracks with my personal account experience.
For years, one of my businesses has been a regular user of Wise (formerly TransferWise). Wise is a financial service that lets you send and receive money across currencies, often at a better rate and lower fee than traditional banks. Sounds great, right?
Until it isn’t.
This is our story – a sobering, frustrating, and frankly appalling experience that ended with our business and personal accounts being shut down, without any meaningful reason, support, or recourse.
And all we did? We updated our address.
A Routine Change Turned Nightmare Like many businesses, we recently moved into a new office. Alongside the usual updates to suppliers and records, we updated our physical address with Wise. Not long after, we received an email requesting us to verify the new address.
Fair enough – we had no problem with that.
Wise provided a dropdown list of acceptable documents: a lease agreement, rates notice, tax document, utilities bill, or telecommunications bill. Due to our company structure, most of those documents are in the name of our parent company or show our PO Box (which NZ Post requires, since they won’t deliver to our street address). But we had a telecommunications bill that ticked every box:
Correct entity name Correct physical street address Even detailed our fibre connection at the new premises So we uploaded it – and assumed that would be the end of it.
We were so wrong.
The Call That Made No Sense Days later, we received an email: our document was rejected.
No clear reason. So, I called Wise and explained the situation to the customer service representative.
Her response left me stunned.
“The document was rejected because it was a tax invoice, not a bill.”
Wait… what?
I paused, trying to process this. I politely explained that in New Zealand, a “tax invoice” is a legal form of a bill – even down to the name “tax invoice” being a legal requirement by IRD, and that’s how telecommunications companies issue invoices here. But she refused to accept it.
“It needs to say Telecommunications Bill at the top,” she insisted.
“A tax invoice isn’t acceptable.”
This is simply not true, and completely out of touch with New Zealand’s business documentation standards. The rep wouldn’t budge.
The “Solution” That Was Beyond Belief Still trying to find a solution, I asked: what do you recommend I do then?
Her answer?
“You should find a local shared workspace, lease a desk under your company name, change your registered office to that address, and use that lease document to verify your address with us.”
Yes, you read that right.
Wise’s advice was to artificially lease a desk we didn’t need, change our registered address, and use that document – just to verify an address we actually operate from.
I asked to speak to a manager. That request was refused. She told me, flatly:
“I am providing you with the correct information.”
A bit more back and forth… then the call was disconnected.
A Glimmer of Hope – Then The Hammer Falls Later that day, I received a call back from Wise – not from a manager (because apparently, Wise doesn’t have managers), but from a more “senior” representative.
This rep was more empathetic and agreed the document should have been acceptable. She escalated the issue, resubmitted the document herself, and said she’d personally follow up if it was rejected again.
Progress, I thought.
Until the next morning.
“We’ve Restricted Your Account” I woke to an email with a stunning subject line:
“We’ve restricted your account”
Just like that, our entire business account was locked. No warning. No reason. No discussion.
We could no longer send or receive money, use our Wise cards, or even contact support. The email stated:
“Due to our current risk policies, your account will be closed in a few months. You will not be able to use support channels.”
Even worse? My personal Wise account was locked too. The same personal account which did have its address fully verified, by a rates invoice for my personal address.
Both had funds inside.
Unfortunately copy-pasting the article misses out on the emojis. Gotta go to the site for the full AI slop experience.
Not too long ago, I transferred the equivalent of $12 USD from a Fintech chequing account and immediately had my Wise account flagged for sanctions. I had to spend 2 hours drafting and collecting documentation that I was indeed, not a sanctioned entity.
I don't know but I just quickly read the google doc cached version at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YS8FLnSz2eP-nXp7FJR7Gsef...
And does this seem like AI automation gone mad?
No, this seems like the kind of madness a human bureaucracy is fully capable of without the use of advanced computing.
Some of the support emails read like ChatGPT tbh.
Keren banget jo777 mantap
it sounds like youre a victim of SAR (suspicious activity report)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_activity_report
in most western countries it is illegal to disclose the nature of the SAR. they will simply end your account with no recourse.
I can't prove it, but from interacting with 'support' teams who are clearly middle-people working with a clunky AI and accepting its output as absolute, that would be my first guess.
Jesus Christ, what a nightmare. I've used Wise quite a bit and was blocked as well, though I'm not entirely sure what I did to get released. I was stuck in a place where I had to login to do something but it wouldn't let me log in. I told a friend of mine who managed to find me a page where I could finally get customer support without being logged in.
In my case, it was totally my fault because I foolishly used Wise on my work email. Why would I even do that? It did start this half-Kafkaesque nightmare but I managed to eventually get the account back. I'd compounded the problems by also trying to make a new account so I could get customer support and promptly ended up being banned for trying a duplicate account. Fantastic.
But at least you know there is some flow that can get you out of this temporarily restricted state - which seems far less severe than the flow they got stuck in. Being unable to actually get their money out seems crazy. I would have rented the damned WeWork and been done with it to be honest.
I have an archived copy here if you want to see https://archive.roshangeorge.dev/archive/1761866967.0412/ind... (hopefully the Cloudflare cache isn't misconfigured)
EDIT: The Wayback Machine has a copy as well, so you don't need mine https://web.archive.org/web/20251030232647/https://shaun.nz/...
https://web.archive.org/web/20251030232647/https://shaun.nz/...
The lesson you should have learned here is: Don't put all your eggs in any one basket.
If you are relying on a single provider for some critical business function, then your business is at risk. Period. I don't care how long you've been working with them and how nice their current sales support rep is. Things change. People leave. Companies get bought by other companies and restructured. If you're relying on any single one for anything mission-critical, that's an existential risk.
I agree that your wise story is ludicrous and terrible and hilarious. I particularly love how your bill was rejected because it was labelled as a "Tax Invoice" (we have the same requirement here in AU).
But TBH this is pretty typical of online services these days, and you should have expected this to happen. Google will happily lock you out of your account for no real reason and give opaque reasons why they won't unlock it. I've seen cases of this happening to google employees. Paypal are notorious for freezing funds during product launches.
IMO there should be regulations requiring businesses to have a way for customers to speak to an actual human with decision-making powers. If I was you, I'd be taking legal action against wise and complaining to the government department responsible for regulating these things.
I had problems with Wise too. Here in Canada there at least is some federal regulation for money service providers.
How can the business gets its money back ?
I would file a "dangerous professional" complaint with the appropriate regulator. (Don't say Wise is completely unregulated. NZ is a civilized country.)
Maybe that would only work if they held New Zealand dollars ? But not if they held USD or EUR or another currency outside of NZ jurisdiction
Wise will need to have a corporate presence here to operate here, so depending on the amount (whether it be USD or EUR or NZD), this business can take them to the Disputes Tribunal or if >$30K (NZD), the district court.
Are we being trolled. Is this deeply cynical humor. If so I love it
Your error was arguing about the tax invoice being a bill. Corporations don't like when you argue. Don't matter if you are right or wrong.
Is this site hosted on AWS??
HN hug of death just FYI
Not on archive.today or wayback either. (nor indexed by google, afaict)
https://web.archive.org/web/20251030232647/https://shaun.nz/...
This would have been a good page to archive before hugging it to death.
>A bit more back and forth… then the call was disconnected.
who disconnected it? were you yelling at support? this seems relevant and you just put "yadda yadda... the call was disconnected" (not to defend Wise, just curious what happened there)
>This isn’t just poor service — it’s unacceptable.
meaningless LLM-addendums don't improve your blogpost
I have a personal Wise account as do several family members. I've had a few odd things happen with their debit cards, and actually (eventually received some reasonably sane customer support via email). Otherwise no problems. That said, when I was opening the account another family member with a history in fintech said "you know that's not a bank, right?". Accordingly I've never kept a large balance there.
Nowhere in this blog does it mention what the business actually does, which is always a red flag. I've seen plenty of stripe bashing posts on HN that end up with the business being in newsletter scams or adult content.
Based on the DNS records, and the Companies Office website, the blogger owns several companies.
https://www.vetta.online/
https://aorangieftpos.nz/
https://www.reliance.net.nz/
Business networking, local ISP, card payment solutions, basically. Given the blog posts about cPanel and Outlook, it tracks.
I note that the blogger lives in a small town in the South Island, so likely is focused on the local market.
Possibly. Would be better if the company name wasn't obscured from the post.
If you've ever dealt with financial institutions in a meaningful way, you'd know that the self-service variety, or the HSBC variety, will create hurdles and enforce policies arbitrarily with no recourse, care or concern for your well-being.
Looking around it seems its a small ISP / IT consultancy. It doesn't look to be anything shady at all.
ISPs that host illegal content can indeed be outside the risk tolerance of a financial services company. The blog post is very careful to say "one of our companies" and censor the name of it on screenshots so I'll be interested to see what it is.
You can look up the blog author yourself if you're interested. It looks like the typical small NZ "does several things because the local market is so small" kind of business. Local laws here are a bit more strict on hosting content so that seems unlikely, and would the minions at Wise even look into that side of things?
Yep, small is correct, the blogger's companies are all focused on South Canterbury and headquartered in Timaru (for non-Kiwis, 55K people live in South Canterbury, and 29K of them live in Timaru. Massive shit-ton of cows though).
Oh no… god forbid - adult content lol. Yes regardless of the content if the business is legal and they only changed an address that’s not a reason to have this level of shit support and no way to escalate and contact a human…
I don't agree with those policies but it's a possible reason for a financial services business to break a relationship if they discover incidentally that this guys business is breaking the law. Changes the blog post completely and the business info should have been included.
As a heuristic, using TransferWise is traditionally associated with Russian money laundering scams.
I believe the business is an ISP.
One of. Also runs card payment systems and business networking consulting. The blogger is focused on his small local market.
I'm not really sure what the author expected. If you're in KYC and ask to speak to a manager when your document gets rejected, you're going to have a bad time. The person processing your documents can't give you leeway even if they wanted to, they have legal requirements and a process they must follow.
So what do you do when the process has a problem? The document that your country issues that is valid and meets the KYC legal requirement but has a title that the internal process rejects? You need to speak to someone who can say "this meets the legal requirement but our process is bunk"
That makes sense if you're trying to use a costco membership card to board an international flight, but nitpicking over telecommunications "bill" vs "invoice" seems exactly the type of ambiguity that's worth escalating over?