Wise (Formerly TransferWise): The In-Depth Review After Using It Since 2019

Thanks to rapid advances in technology, international money transfers have become much easier. As a result, cross-border transactions are rising at an unprecedented rate.

This shift led to the launch of Wise, an international money transfer company that offers a cheaper and faster way to send money overseas compared to traditional banks.

Although there are many similar services on the market, Wise remains one of the most popular options. We’ve also been using it regularly since 2019.

Wise provides benefits that traditional banks often don’t. No matter where you are, you can send money quickly, securely, and at a lower cost to business partners, family, or friends worldwide.

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History

Wise was founded by Taavet Hinrikus, who also happens to be Skype’s first employee, and Kristo Käärmann, a financial consultant at the time. The two Estonian founders came up with the concept of Wise due to their firsthand experiences of the “pain of international money transfer” back when they used to transfer funds between the UK and their native country, Estonia.

They had to pay high bank charges for conversions from euros to pounds, and vice versa. Hinrikus, expressing his anguish, said later in an interview:

“I was losing 5% of the money each time I moved it. At the same time, my co-founder Kristo Käärmann (also from Estonia) was starting to get paid in the UK and was losing a lot of money transferring cash back home to pay for a mortgage there.“

Their agonies ultimately led the two entrepreneurs to devise a crowdsourced currency exchange service that offered a cheaper alternative to existing traditional institutions.

Eventually, in 2011, their ingenuity led them to create Wise. Since then, Wise has flourished and has been groomed as one of the leading fin-tech money transfer providers, and is now deemed by many as the “Robin Hood” of the money transfer industry.

Currently, Wise operates in more than 50 currencies, and with its innovative money transmission model, it even outsmarts the operations of big banks like JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America. Wise offers unique benefits like great transfer fees, exchange rates at mid-market prices, and safe and speedy delivery of funds.

How It Works

The rising popularity of Wise as an international money transfer platform can be attributed to its innovative business model. Its money transfer system, unlike banks, eliminates the need for middlemen, whether it’s within or outside national borders. This, in turn, significantly reduces the transfer fees incurred by customers.

Wise keeps local bank accounts in many countries and generally pays out transfers from its own local balances instead of sending each payment across borders through correspondent banks.

For example, suppose someone in the U.S. wants to transfer money to a business associate in India. Using Wise, the person in the U.S. will first transfer funds in Wise’s U.S. account.

The company’s system will then be notified that someone in India needs to make a transfer toward the opposite direction. The person in India would then deposit funds into Wise’s Indian account. This Indian currency will be used later to pay the Indian recipient from the transaction initiated in the U.S.

In this way, currencies aren’t actually transferred internationally, which substantially decreases transfer fees.

Pricing

Wise is known for its low and transparent fee structure. You can see the total fee before sending money.

• Transfer Fee: Because Wise has local accounts in most countries and regions, it doesn’t rely on intermediary banks. This helps reduce costs that would otherwise increase transfer fees.
• Exchange Rate: Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, with no markup added to the rate itself.
• Total Fee: After more than 1,000 transfers with Wise, our average fee per transaction has been around 0.3% to 1%. The exact fee depends on the sending and receiving currencies. Transfers involving major currencies like USD, CAD, GBP, and EUR are usually cheaper.

Here’s an example of an inexpensive transaction involving sending GPB 1,000 to EUR.

As you can see, the transfer above costs GBP 3.95, or 0.395% of the total amount. This is generally cheaper than banks, which typically charge around 3% to 5% per transaction.

Since Wise does not charge a fixed fee, it is also suitable for sending larger amounts of money.

Our thoughts: While Wise is not always the cheapest option for certain currencies, we’ve occasionally found other providers offering slightly better rates. However, the difference is usually minimal and not worth switching providers.

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Transfer Speed

Wise transfers money quickly, often much faster than traditional banks.

Based on our experience sending money from the U.S. and Hong Kong to service providers and writers worldwide since 2019, funds are usually received within a few days. If the recipient regularly uses Wise, transfers can sometimes arrive within 10 minutes.

Transfer times depend on the amount, payment method, currencies used, and the countries involved. In some cases, additional security checks can delay the process.

How to Use

Wise is easy to use, and with its smoothly operating app and website, offers its customers a good user experience (UX).

There are three steps involved:

• Register for an account: To send money with Wise, you first need to create an account. Registration is straightforward and only requires your email address and a password.
• Verify your account: Wise needs to verify your identity before you can use the service. In general, you’ll need to upload a photo of your ID, a selfie holding the ID, and proof of address, such as a credit card statement. The verification process usually takes less than two days.
• Send money: Once your account is verified, enter the amount you want to send and provide the recipient’s details, including their name and bank information. You can then choose your payment method, typically bank transfer, credit card, or debit card.

We usually use the bank transfer option, as it’s the cheapest.

Transparency

When it comes to serving information to customers on their money transmission, Wise doesn’t operate behind any smokescreen.

Here an example of a Wise transaction that mentions all the important transaction details to the customer — with regard to transfer time, total fees, and the actual amount that will reach the recipient:

As soon as a user makes a payment, Wise churns out an estimation on the transfer duration and instantly shares the information. An email is promptly sent to the customer once the transfer has been initiated. It states the precise time when the money got transferred, and when it would reach the recipient’s account.

The fee information is always upfront and the recipient receives exactly the same amount which is revealed during the initiation of the transfer.

The exact amount of the fees is revealed to you each time a payment is made. For a majority of currencies, Wise provides the transferer and the recipient with a guaranteed exchange rate, so you also know exactly how much your recipient will receive.

Although it must be reckoned that this feature is not unique solely to Wise, banks while guaranteeing exchange rates, charge a significantly higher transfer rate in order to offer that.

Safety and Security

When it comes to international money transfers, it is not uncommon for people to have fears and apprehensions. Wise does meet all the strict criteria to assure that the money it handles remains safe during its transition.

Wise has licenses with every leading regulatory authority of the land it operates in.

• As an Authorised Electronic Money Institution, the firm is regulated by the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) and HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) in the United Kingdom, which happens to be its headquarters city.
• In the US, it is registered with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Furthermore, it holds licenses as a money transmitter in all the individual American states it operates in.
• In Australia, it is regulated by AUSTRAC and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) as a money remitter, Wise Inc.

The security system of Wise is further bolstered by institutional-grade security for their services undertaken.

As a preventive measure, it asks customers for a 2-step login and verification procedures. It is further strengthened by the use of the latest Transport Layer Security that keeps customer data safely encrypted in transit and encrypt data at rest.

Abiding by one of the important conditions slated in the FCA (which authorizes its business activities) regulations, Wise — under its so-called segregated accounts system — keeps its clients’ funds completely separate from its own business accounts.

Thus, the customers’ money remains safe, even in the eventuality of the firm getting in a state of doldrums.

A cluster of elite investors like Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, IVP (Institutional Venture Partners), and Seedcamp associated with Wise further goes on to prove the immense trust it enjoys for its financial operations.

With its distinctiveness in its capabilities and safety features, it is hardly a surprise that its mobile app is rated the highest among the list of its competitors:

Customer Service

Since Wise’s growth strategy is centred around a channel of referral system, it ensures an extraordinary customer care service. Their team of support, available 24/7, stand out for their ability to quickly comprehend and personally resolve issues faced by their customers.

The customer staff of Wise is able and friendly. The executives always try to offer prompt solutions to resolve issues reported to them.

Benefits

Here are the benefits of Wise in brief.

For business people

• Wise is indeed a boon for businesses hiring location-independent, cross-border workers who can be paid their remuneration with much ease and inexpensively without the payment of high transfer and conversion fees.
• Those businesses that deal with bulky international transactions perhaps have the most to gain from the Multi-Currency Account. As against the traditional model, the money movement is significantly easier, swifter, and cheaper.

With Wise, the transfers are much faster and more transparent than the banks’.

• At first, you are informed about the turnaround time before you finalize your fund’s transfer.

• The processing time taken by Wise transfers is usually one to two business days and in some cases, it happens almost instantly. As Wise maintains bank accounts in a host of countries, it is able to execute transfers quickly. Banks, on the other hand, typically take five to seven business days, or even more, to process transfers.

• Firms and business people who make large and regular payments abroad can benefit a great deal by using Wise’s batch payments tool. With a single CSV file upload, it allows a customer to make up to 1,000 transfers.

Benefits for everyone else

Wise Multi-Currency Account is a boon for non-business people too. We live in a day and age when people across the world travel and settle abroad for work.

The increased mobility of people comes with their regular need to transfer or receive funds to and from their family and friends in their home country.

You can read more about this topic on our Wise Multi-Currency Account review.

Limitations

Let’s take a look at Wise’s limitations.

Transfer Amount

Wise does impose limits on the amount of money being transferred, depending on the currency being used. For a standard cross-border money transfer, the upper limit of a transfer is 1 million for many currencies such as USD, GBP, or EUR per transfer.

When transferring a large sum of money, Wise may ask for an additional document to verify the source of that money. They want to make sure that you are not using them for laundering money.

Available Countries

Wise is not available in every country. For example, you can send Thai baht with Wise, and you can send money from most major currencies, including USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, JPY, INR, and HKD.

When it comes to receiving money, you have more options. Wise supports over 70 currencies, including those mentioned above, as well as THB, CNY, KRW, and PHP.

Additional Features

In addition to sending money, Wise also offers you two additional features: the borderless account and a credit card.

Multi-Currency Account

The Multi-Currency Account is a virtual multi-currency account that enables the account holder to hold their money in over 40 currencies. Irrespective of the country you open your account from, you gain instant access to local bank accounts in U.S. dollars, British pounds, Euros, Australian dollars, and New Zealand dollars.

For example, suppose you are in America and you have the Borderless Account. Using this account, you can obtain bank information that will help you make transactions throughout the eurozone in a way that you would have done actually being present there.

You can execute several types of transactions through a range of functionalities offered by Wise, including account number, SWIFT/BIC, and IBAN codes and sort code/routing number, enabling swift and smooth transactions in the desired local currency.

Money transfers such as ACH transfer would otherwise not be possible unless you possess an account in the country to which the money is supposed to reach.

One of the best things about Wise Borderless account is that you can receive money in many countries locally without having to have a bank account there.

In addition, you can send those money locally without having to pay a currency conversion fee.

However, please note that the Borderless Account is merely a virtual account.

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It lacks certain features that the latter possesses. The services not covered by Wise include: cash transactions, payment of interest and cheques.

Additionally, their Borderless Account, unlike a bank account, is not covered by any insurance schemes run by the government.

You can read our in-depth review of the Wise Multi-Currency account for more information.

Wise Card

Wise Card that is offered free of charge to the customers can be used almost everywhere in the world. With the Card, you can make payments in local currencies without having to pay any additional currency conversion fees or transaction fees.

Another very beneficial feature of Wise Card is that unlike ATM cards, you don’t need to pay any monthly or yearly fee.

You can find out more about Wise Card from this article.

Mobile Application

Wise apps are available in both Android and Apple stores.

You can use the same Wise account to log in to their applications. The money transfer procedure is exactly the same as transferring through their website.

Wise Vs. Other Money Transfer Services

You won’t easily get both rates and speed benefits that Wise offers when using your bank, PayPal, Western Union, or any other exchange and currency transfer service. The exchange rate of Wise is REAL, which you can check on Google or any currency exchange app.

Vs. Bank Transfer

Criteria	Wise	Bank Transfer
Transfer Fees	Customers are given all the details on the fees payments they make.On average, the transfer fee works out only 1%. It is lesser — i.e., 0.5% for certain destinations, whereas it can rise up to 1.5% for others. The beneficiary doesn’t have to pay any fees. Fixed fees: $2 for transfers below $400. Fund transfer through a domestic wire or a debit card.	Bank charges both fixed transfer fee and currency exchange fee. It’s going to range from 3%-5% on average.
Currency Ex Fees	Wise offers mid-market currency conversion rates, which are much lower than any local bank’s rates.	Bank charges additional 1-3% on the currency exchange fees.
Speed	If you are transferring money from the UK or Europe your payment and transfer will be automatically approved by the system after the provision of the copies. The transfer will happen within a few minutes or within a day at the latest.However, from other regions, the on-boarding process takes longer due to the long compliance procedure.	Transfers may take 3-5 business days.
Safety	Wise is authorised by the British FCA. Wise payments require the prior submission of identification documents.	It’s very safe to transfer money through banks. All of them must be authorised by local government organisations in their respective countries.

Vs. PayPal

Criteria	Wise	PayPal
Transfer Fees	Customers are given all the details on the fees payments they make.On average, the transfer fee works out only 1%. It is lesser — i.e., 0.5% for certain destinations, whereas it can rise up to 1.5% for others. The beneficiary doesn’t have to pay any fees.Fixed fees: $2 for transfers below $400. Fund transfer through a domestic wire or a debit card.	Customers are not given all the details on the fees payments they make. The recipient is supposed to pay 3.4% of the funds received.
Currency Ex Fees	Wise offers mid-market currency conversion rates, which are much lower than any local bank’s rates.	The foreign exchange fees plus the recipient fees amount to 3.9%-4.9% of the amount transferred. The exchange rates are much higher than banks.
Speed	If you are transferring money from the UK or Europe your payment and transfer will be automatically approved by the system after the provision of the copies. The transfer will happen within a few minutes or within a day at the latest.However, from other regions, the on-boarding process takes longer due to the long compliance procedure.	Since the money transfer happens from one PayPal account to another, the transmission of money is instantaneous. However, for the money to reach their account, customers need to wait 2-3 business days.
Safety	Wise is authorised by the British FCA. Wise payments require the prior submission of identification documents.	Paypal is authorised by the American SEC, considered to be more stringent than FCA. PayPal payments initiation requires only relevant customer information and their bank account link.

Vs. XE

Criteria	Wise	XE Money Transfer
Transfer Fees	Customers are given all the details on the fees payments they make.On average, the transfer fee works out only 1%. It is lesser —i.e., 0.5 % for certain destinations, whereas it can rise up to 1.5% for others. The beneficiary doesn’t have to pay any fees.Fixed fees: $2 for transfers below $400. Fund transfer through a domestic wire or a debit card.	With XE, one does not need to pay any fee on their money transfer, irrespective of their physical location or amount being sent.
Currency Ex Fees	Wise offers mid-market currency conversion rates, which are much lower than any local bank’s rates.	XE’s charges exchange rates that are based on the current foreign exchange markets. They’re often lesser than the bank rates.
Speed	If you are transferring money from the UK or Europe your payment and transfer will be automatically approved by the system after the provision of the copies. The transfer will happen within a few minutes or within a day at the latest. However, from other regions, the on-boarding process takes longer due to the long compliance procedure.	Typically, depending on the currency one pays in and the country funds are transferred to, XE takes 2-4 days for the fund’s transfer.
Safety	Wise is authorised by the British FCA. Wise payments require the prior submission of identification documents.	XE Money Transfer, as part of Euronet Worldwide Group, has been in the business of exchanging currencies for more than 20 years. The group comprises a large, high-end, international financial services businesses.

Vs. Revolut

Criteria	Wise	Revolut
Transfer Fees	Customers are given all the details on the fees payments they make.On average, the transfer fee works out only 1%. It is lesser — i.e., 0.5 % for certain destinations, whereas it can rise up to 1.5% for others. The beneficiary doesn’t have to pay any fees. Fixed fees: $2 for transfers below $400. Fund transfer through a domestic wire or a debit card.	Revolut offers free money transfer, irrespective of the currencies involved. However, beyond the monthly limit of £5,000 per month, customers have to pay 0.5% fee on each transfer.
Currency Ex Fees	Wise offers mid-market currency conversion rates, which are much lower than any local bank’s rates.	On weekdays, interbank exchange rate without any markup charged irrespective of currencies used, except for the Thai Baht and the Ukrainian Hryvnia, which incur a 1% markup.
Speed	If you are transferring money from the UK or Europe your payment and transfer will be automatically approved by the system after the provision of the copies. The transfer will happen within a few minutes or within a day at the latest. However from other regions, the on-boarding process takes longer due to the long compliance procedure.	Local transfers using GBP usually takes up to 24 hours at most, while local EUR transfers need up to 3 business days.Incoming international funds could take up to five working days; outbound transfers, 1-3 working days.
Safety	Wise is authorised by the British FCA. Wise payments require the prior submission of identification documents.	Revolut is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). However, its services are not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme of the UK.

Now, on to You

Wise is fast becoming the most popular option for international money transfer. It’s easy to use, Fast, and safe. More importantly, the rates are one of the best out there.

Although they haven’t covered all currencies, the currencies they do cover are sufficient for a majority of expats out there. Not to worry as more currencies will be added very soon.

So, if you are looking for a practical, speedy, and cost-effective option to transfer your money internationally, Wise is your good choice.