I had a horrible experience with TransferWise. They silently canceled my account for suspected fraud after I'd sent my first transfer. No call, no emails, no questions. I didn't find out until days later when I went to check why my money hasn't been received yet - I was unable to login.
Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
171–180 of 256 posts
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#172I’m a former TransferWise employee and I cannot speak more highly of them. Yes, they aim to make money like every business, but I’ve never seen a company so focused on transparency to customers. The CEO intensely interrogates roadmaps from the customer perspective, and fairness to customers is non-negotiable. Their economy of scale enables them to offer increasingly lower fees, but I can speak first hand to the pain…
Ya but remitly has far better rates every single time.
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#173Just use remitly. The best rates I have found so far.
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#174I’m a former TransferWise employee and I cannot speak more highly of them. Yes, they aim to make money like every business, but I’ve never seen a company so focused on transparency to customers. The CEO intensely interrogates roadmaps from the customer perspective, and fairness to customers is non-negotiable. Their economy of scale enables them to offer increasingly lower fees, but I can speak first hand to the pain…
Are you able to offer any insight (top level, non-confidential, obvs) into how TransferWise works, behind-the-scenes? i.e. how do they actually enact the exchange of the funds? Do they have a contract with one of the big investment banks? Do they work directly via Forex markets? Can they leverage their scale now to minimise actual exchange costs – for example internally matching up (say) a one customer transferring U…
They don't need to 'match up' individual transactions.
As long as they have a decent float in a bank account in each country, they can just do frequent (daily? hourly?) forex transactions to balance their reserves between countries.
At their scale, if the total amount sent by customers is X, then they probably transact 0.2X in the Forex market.
The frequency of the forex transactions will of course affect costs and exposure. Too frequent would increase transaction costs. Too infrequent and you risk exchange rates moving against you. Too infrequent and you need to hold more money in popular destination countries.
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#175At least in Europe, SEPA payments are visible abroad the next day (at least according to my experience from transferring to Germany and London from Finland), so that's not too slow.
Where "next day" can mean 4 days later if you initiate the transfer on a Friday afternoon.
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All of my contractors have previously agreed to pay all fees associated with their payment out of curiosity, do you have an estimate of how much are those fees?
You're asking about TransferWise? Says on their website. https://transferwise.com/
woah, TransferWise transparency is no joke!
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
In reality, internalised or not, TransferWise makes lot of money in fees. On InteractiveBrokers for example, you pay +/- 2.33 USD in total to convert 100'000 USD to EUR (+ 1 USD extra for withdrawal if you already did one this month). TransferWise charges end-user 900 USD + spread for the same operation, which is rather comical when you see their ads "banks are scamming you"
> On InteractiveBrokers for example That is not a consumer-friendly site. Is it even practical for the typical case TransferWise targets: sending a few payments a year, or a few a month? The pricing page for foreign exchange has the cheapest category as under $1 billion -- is transferring $200 something they'd do? I don't know what a "basis point" is, or "trade value". https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?…
You're absolutely right. I just mean that TransferWise has a lot of leeway in terms of pricing policy and that the actual cost of exchange itself is marginal (as counter-intuitive it may seems)
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#178We at Toptal initially created TopTracker payments (we don't monetize on this product at all) to be the lowest form of payments for freelancers globally by partnering with Payoneer. Essentially, it's a fixed 2% transfer cost including FX, however TransferWise is often able to beat that. We, and I'm sure other companies, would love to partner with TransferWise, however they've yet to create API's that allows for a pro…
My traditional bank is less expensive than that
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#179I’m a former TransferWise employee and I cannot speak more highly of them. Yes, they aim to make money like every business, but I’ve never seen a company so focused on transparency to customers. The CEO intensely interrogates roadmaps from the customer perspective, and fairness to customers is non-negotiable. Their economy of scale enables them to offer increasingly lower fees, but I can speak first hand to the pain…
"fairness to customers is non-negotiable" .... yeah, unless you run a VoIP company. In which case you get told VoIP is against TransferWise AUP and you get told your business account is suspended permanently. And yes, we are talking about a reputable long-established VoIP company here, not some fly-by-night spam operation. Similarly, the TransferWise business account is a bit of a joke. Features that should have been…
Actually thrilled to hear Voip is considered high risk!!
A ton of scam / fraud calls into the US are done using overseas garbage voip providers who do nothing to try to reduce the impact their crap has on individuals.
Re: Saving money on international payments as a remote freelancer
#180There is a simpler solution. Charge more money for your freelance work. Higher fees compound. Cost savings diminish. Even better higher fees select for better clients. Working for clients where profits depend on your cost savings is a race to the bottom. And when clients pay more you can afford to outsource the work of setting up cost savings processes instead of doing the work yourself. There's nothing wrong with sa…
Yes, easy, just charge more! I wonder why doesn't everybody just do it? Because it's non-trivial, it involves risk and you might end up making less money! While cost saving has almost no risk. Here's a relevant piece of the article: > But what if it's a 6-month project and instead of billing them 1000 per month, you are billing them 10.000 per month? > Now you could have saved €150 per month for 6 months, meaning you…
Charging more is harder than shopping for ways to save money and less pleasurable than dreaming of new MacBooks. Yes there is risk. Mostly of rejection. And rejection is painful and saving money sounds like what a responsible adult does and charging more just because you can doesn’t come with universal social approval. Your clients know this if they are hard negotiating on fees they are using that knowledge to their advantage.
The premise of the scenario is the freelancer is absorbing the risks of currency exchange. The client is not compensating the freelancer for the currency risk. The only way the freelancer gets compensated is by charging more or placing the risk on the client by requiring payment in the freelancer’s local currency. Neither creates a dependency on a third party, their API’s, business model, or terms of service. All of those are a distraction from doing the things that are the basis of the business.