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

shaun.nz

161–170 of 275 posts

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

#161

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.

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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...

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

#164
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#165
post #123

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.

> 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?

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

#166
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

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.

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

#168
post #34
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.

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.

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

#169
post #98

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.

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bullsh…

what do you use now

Not the person you're asking but I had similar CS issues. I still use Wise sparingly but have also started using Revolut. Though, I wouldn't trust either with more money than I can afford to budget for ^life lessons^
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