101–110 of 275 posts
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.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 interes…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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 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?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.