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Earlier quoted context omitted.
No amount of HN popularity should bring down a static article, really.
it's wordpress, so technically not static, although if it was it wouldn't have this resource problem.
As a Wise user, only for personal international transactions, I'm very curious to read this! I've had good experiences so far.
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.
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.
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.
As a Wise user, only for personal international transactions, I'm very curious to read this! I've had good experiences so far.
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.
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".
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
There was a video game written about this scenario... 38 years ago! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)
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?
So this is my word of warning:
Don’t put all your eggs in the Wise basket.
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.
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.
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.