Comment by csomar
2 years ago
First, Wise is not your bank. It's a dodgy money-transmitter business.
Second, never keep a balance in Wise. Just use it for transfers. It's good for US/EU since transfers are close to instant. If they are instant in South Africa, you should be able to make a transfer using SEPA, then to a South African bank. Rinse and repeat so you don't get $40k stuck.
One thing I noticed about these fintech companies is that they won't ban you if you don't keep a balance. I had lots of troubles with freezing funds with other fintechs (ie: PayPal, Skrill, etc..) but that stopped once I stopped having a balance with them. That is interesting, because my flow with them now is "$xxx received, $xxx sent". Which should, theoretically, trigger a money laundering alert.
I am biased to say, at this point, that they are maliciously freezing money but I do not have any proof of that at the moment.
"since transfers are close to instant" for US, no?
ACH pull/push takes days to get credit either way, wire is faster but still no where close to instant? I know SEPA "can" be instant, but AFAIK wise doesn't do (near)instant transfers to/from US.
I don't know but ACH times have been variable for me from almost instant (few minutes) to a few days. But for Wise, it's usually a 10 minutes window.
> Second, never keep a balance in Wise. Just use it for transfers. It's good for US/EU since transfers are close to instant.
These two statements seem to contradict each other. How can you have an instant transfer (out) if you don't keep a balance?
As in clear "employee 1" transfer and then move to "employee 2". So in case you get frozen, you only get 2-3k instead of 40k.