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

shaun.nz

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

#201

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

peanut-walrus wrote: post #120

The KYC/AML dance is really annoying. The actual bad guys know exactly what they need to pass all the checks, while regular people, as in this case, often get caught in the wheels. Banks or fintechs rarely have the kind of investigative powers they would need to actually find the criminals using them, nor do they really want to spend their time playing police. So anything even remotely suspicious? You're now out of o…

Are you American? If so, you should lobby for the end of the Bank Secrecy Act which is upstream of all of this.

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

#202

Post by Terretta »

hyperbolablabla wrote: post #186
novok wrote: post #163

This was very obviously written with ChatGPT. The structure, emojis, emdashes and contrasting sentences. Surprised nobody is calling it out. IMO save us time and just give us the original short version you wrote to ChatGPT

"Their answer?" I absolutely loathe gpt's structure

Just yesterday, a coworker used "And the best part?" while verbally relating a story.

ChatGPT must have trained on something. Only things I can think of are the many teen angst TV series with spoken "inner monologue" voice over, and narratives from people who are their own main character.

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

#203

Post by graemep »

Kwpolska wrote: post #52
phil21 wrote: post #48

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.

In many places fintechs are just financial sector companies and operate by the same rules. You do need to check what regulation one is subject to (or not subject to) in your country though.

A lot of banks are now fintechs - no branches, everything in an app, with a website if you are lucky. The rest would like to be like them to cut costs.

Wise is straightforward in the UK, where it is regulated by the same regulator as banks but subject to different rules (the big difference being customer fund ringfencing rather than a deposit guarantee). It varies in other countries but is locally regulated in a good many.

Reputable financial businesses follow regulations in countries in which they do not operate (e.g. by not opening accounts in countries where they are not authorised).

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

#204

Post by graemep »

dboreham wrote: post #142
phil21 wrote: post #48

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…

With a traditional bank you can walk into a branch and explain the situation to a human. I've had to do this several times with my large US bank, one time when traveling but thankfully to a place where they had a branch. In the end things got fixed up but not without much time and hassle expended. I get the impression these institutions run ML software that was written by people who knew it would generate false posit…

The big British banks are closing all their branches so that is becoming a thing of the past for us.

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

#205

Post by graemep »

atmavatar wrote: post #90
FateOfNations wrote: post #78

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.

There was a time when the general consensus was that treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time. 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…

> net positive profit-wise over time.

There are definitely many customers you should drop, but business are not even that interested in retaining profitable customers. The problem is with the "over time".

Management are rewarded with bonuses and options that focus on the next few years so they are not really interested in how profitable a customer will be over the next ten years, only over the next one or two. Small businesses and family owned businesses are different, but for a big, widely held, professionally managed business the incentives are all short term.

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

#206

Post by graemep »

cjs_ac wrote: post #195
csomar wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did "math out" because these industries heavily lobbied and regulated that starting an alternative is close to impossible. Think about Wise: How many companies out there have the same service? The closest are Revolut and Airwallex. So in a world of 8 billion people and millions of businesses, there are only 3 companies that do the same thing that Wise do. In comparison, there are thousands of banks around the worl…

Wise's USP is a consequence of the way the US banking industry works (possibly as a result of US regulation). Free and instantaneous interbank transfers are ubiquitous in other banking systems, as are low-fee international transfers.

Wise is a British company with lots of customers around the world, the article is by someone in New Zealand.

It is cheaper than British banks for international transfers. Its business accounts are both easier to open and cheaper to run than those of the banks.

You are right that transfers from personal bank accounts in the UK are usually free and rapid (usually immediate, guaranteed to be within two hours), and similar or better in many other places, but Wise still has an offering beyond that.

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

#207

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

dboreham wrote: post #142
phil21 wrote: post #48

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…

With a traditional bank you can walk into a branch and explain the situation to a human. I've had to do this several times with my large US bank, one time when traveling but thankfully to a place where they had a branch. In the end things got fixed up but not without much time and hassle expended. I get the impression these institutions run ML software that was written by people who knew it would generate false posit…

The legislation requires you to send any suspicious transactions to the regulator and requires you not to tell the customer.

So, from an ML perspective you want to maximize recall, precision be damned.

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

#208

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

devnonymous wrote: post #169
hshdhdhehd wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not if it's AML stuff. In those cases neither the banks or regulators are your friends.

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

#209

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

lmm wrote: post #139
tehwebguy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Normal people who experience a bank treating them like shit will assume the bank has treated them like shit. However they are wrong.

Yep. His explanation of the details is somewhat interesting, but his insistence on ascribing all moral responsibility to customers, governments, or random bystanders because none of this could possibly be anyone in the banking industry's fault is infuriating.

I mean, he is correct though. The laws exist and financial institutions need to follow them, or else Binance happens.

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

#210

Post by lxgr »

Etheryte wrote: post #29
lxgr wrote: post #26

> a dropdown list of acceptable documents: a lease agreement, rates notice, tax document, utilities bill, or telecommunications bill. It’s baffling to me that these types of (usually unsigned in both the electronic and the ink way, not that the latter would prove anything in a scan) PDFs are still somehow the gold standard for “proofs” of address.

In many countries worldwide that's the reasonable best option. A scan of a physically signed piece of paper is no better, anyone could've signed it. So long as there is no global standard for digitally signed documents, that's what we're stuck with, no?

Does it necessarily need to be a global standard? Just starting with the ones that do have a digital signature infrastructure would be something. The EU has eIDAS, which already covers 27 countries, for example.
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