Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

shaun.nz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 275 posts

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#61

Post by jhancock »

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.

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#62

Post by mjcl »

htrp wrote: post #25

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.

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.

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#64

Post by wmf »

ntSean wrote: post #50

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 servic…

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.

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#65

Post by WJW »

wmf wrote: post #34
htrp wrote: post #25

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.

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.

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#66

Post by jemmyw »

jhancock wrote: post #61

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

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#67

Post by monooso »

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.

Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

#69

Post by quantumwoke »

jemmyw wrote: post #60
quantumwoke wrote: post #38

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.

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.
Post reply on HN