It’s like when I updated my Stripe account to be used with my new shiny Ko-Fi account I opened, like Ko-Fi suggest I could do… and then Stripe immediately closed my account for linking it to Ko-Fi because they suddenly considered it crowdfunding. No recourse, just “fuck off to the void forever”.
A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
231–240 of 275 posts
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#232Can someone propose a similar alternative? All these services seem to suffer greatly from the same kind of “poor support”.
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#233Earlier 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.
Doubt that true. Pretty sure that if you assign the case to a powerful lawyers, you’ll
Get your funds back. Now for the account, I can’t tell … but do you want to?
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though not any telco bill, it has to be a landline. Otherwise you could spin up a mobile contract and it would be easy. If you're a single person company/consultant they'll accept a personal bank statement (having just gone through this runaround myself).
That's even more absurd. What if I don't have a landline, or somebody else in my household is paying for it?
It seems to be for offices where you'd have a lease agreement. But even my accountant's letter was refused as not proof enough. I believe you can have HMRC send something, but they're not exactly quick and Wise wanted something more urgently. The strange thing is they didn't ask until months after the account was set up and had already approved proof of incorporation for the registered address.
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about the rest of the EU but France just has national ID cards with your address printed on the back! No need for anything fancy there. In both Australia and Japan there are tax numbers used for corporate identity verification (remember: here we're talking about a Wise account used for a business)
> France just has national ID cards with your address printed on the back! No need for anything fancy there. Is a scan/photo of a government ID that much more reliable, though? Physical IDs are designed to be validated in person because they're hard to replicate. That's not the case for a scan/photo of an ID.
So a couple of things:
- I don’t know for France but for Japan one of the ID cards (My Number cards) have RFID chips in them. This means that KYC procedures can involve both scanning the card with your phone, and then doing some video “turn your head” verification stuff
- even absent that, video-based KYC flows (which I see a lot of) just leave less margin of error for fraudsters. And for people being honest, a national ID card is yet another way for someone to have proof, despite their other circumstances
There’s always going to be people in edge cases of course, I just feel like leaning on ID cards that many jurisdictions have is straightforward
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Financial institutions are far from passive bystanders in the legal process that creates those laws, much less the regulatory process that applies them in practice. Binance is frankly probably the lesser evil at this point.
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#237Earlier 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.
Low fee international transfers are not ubiquitous unless you're talking about SEPA.
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not even corner cases. I worked for a fintech that launched a dda-ish product that had 16 digit account numbers, issued sequentially, with no check digits. At launch there didn't seem to be a CS process for dealing with pretty obvious "customer mistyped account number and sent their money to some else's account." problem.
Feature parity with blockchains.
Not even, in cases where the company couldn't recover funds from misdirected payments they ate the loss. Though obviously I think that's a good thing.
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like Twitter, there was no good reason to change a name with years of trust and reputation. "X" sounds juvenile and stupid, and so does "Wise". I don't understand how it's legal for companies to name themselves as common words like "Alphabet". It's not only confusing, it's arrogant as hell.
Same with Apple
Apple wasn't a name change, though: that was its name from the beginning. Slightly different situation. (Yes, they changed their name from Apple Computer Company to Apple Inc. once they started making smartphones, but that's not the same because the part of their name that everyone called them, Apple, was kept unchanged). Their logo was always an apple with a bite out of it, their first computer was the Apple I (first one of theirs I ever used was the Apple II)... they really leaned into the name, and made it part of their identity. Which isn't the case with Alphabet or Wise.
Re: A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
For brick and mortar retail that isn't fast fashion or supermarkets, dropping troublesome customers is generally extremely sensible. Profit on most goods is low - single digit % typically - and a single return can eliminate the profit margins on a dozen sales. Sometimes cost can be reclaimed from goods providers - i.e. genuinely defective or manufacturer refurbishment programs - and sometimes they can resell the item…
All true, I have no doubt, but this experience has weighted your judgement here IMO. That isn't the force at play in modern customer service policies.