Money Matters: Send Your Funds Safely Using Wise Transfer System

Is Wise Safe? Long gone are the days when we had to wait and wait and wait for mon­ey we trans­fer some­where else to arrive at the appoint­ed des­ti­na­tion across the globe. Whether trans­fer­ring mon­ey to fam­i­ly mem­bers in anoth­er coun­try or wiring funds to a cor­po­rate branch on the oth­er side of the world, there was a time when it seemed to take for­ev­er for those funds to land. First, there was paper­work to han­dle at the local bank. Then the mon­ey was received and autho­rized at a bank at the oth­er end. And if some­thing went wrong, a glitch in that paper­work? Good heavens! It could take a long time to sort out the sna­fus. In the mean­time, the recip­i­ent wait­ed, some­times for an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly long time, which made doing busi­ness incon­ve­nient at best or impos­si­ble at worst. Thank­ful­ly, those dark days of slow mon­ey trans­fers are long behind us. In this arti­cle, we take a look at a huge­ly pop­u­lar mon­ey trans­fer com­pa­ny now called Wise, orig­i­nal­ly called Trans­fer Wise. Wise moves more than 100 bil­lion (USD) annu­al­ly from place to place in dozens of coun­tries around the world. If clients trust this high-tech firm with that much mon­ey, it must be doing some­thing right! Here, we offer a bit of back­ground on Wise and sug­gest rea­sons that you, too, should con­sid­er using it to send mon­ey to oth­er places. Whether you’re just send­ing some funds to a strapped fam­i­ly mem­ber back home or you need to put reg­u­lar month­ly trans­ac­tions in place when open­ing a new branch of your com­pa­ny, Wise is the mon­ey-mov­ing com­pa­ny you can count on.

First, a Little Background…

Wise was found­ed in 2011, mean­ing it’s been in the funds-trans­fer­ring busi­ness for well over a decade. The com­pa­ny is based in Lon­don, in the U.K. The com­pa­ny’s mis­sion back then, and it remains com­mit­ted to it today, is to reduce or elim­i­nate the hid­den fees banks tra­di­tion­al­ly charge cus­tomers trans­fer­ring mon­ey. The com­pa­ny’s co-founder, Kris­to Kaar­mann, wrote on the fir­m’s blog in Feb­ru­ary 2022, “Send­ing, spend­ing and receiv­ing mon­ey inter­na­tion­al­ly is too expen­sive, slow and incon­ve­nient. We’re fix­ing that for peo­ple and businesses.” And indeed, Wise is ful­fill­ing that goal and branch­ing out. It has made the entire process of shift­ing resources from A to B – which, in a nut­shell, is what mon­ey trans­fers do – eas­i­er and faster for clients, though not always less expen­sive than its com­peti­tors. Nonethe­less, the slight­ly high­er fees have not proven to be a bar­ri­er for many peo­ple and busi­ness­es. The fast trans­fers are the goal, and Wise can’t be beat­en on that score.

- How Does Wise Work, and Why Should You Consider Using It? 

1- What Wise Doesn’t Do?

One of the best fea­tures Wise offers cus­tomers is some­thing it does­n’t do: it does­n’t jack up exchange rates as a way of increas­ing its own prof­it mar­gins. That, unfor­tu­nate­ly, is fre­quent­ly a com­mon prac­tice at tra­di­tion­al banks. And so, while the fees for trans­fers may be some­what high­er at Wise than at some of its com­peti­tors, Wise nev­er inflates exchange rates to max­i­mize its own finan­cial health. You’ll know exact­ly what you have to pay for each and every transaction.

2- Wise Services Are Fast

Accord­ing to com­pa­ny lit­er­a­ture, Wise trans­fers arrive at their des­ti­na­tions with­in sec­onds, a few hours, or at most five days, max­i­mum. It depends, in part, on the type of cur­ren­cy you’re send­ing and the coun­try to which you’re send­ing it. A recent arti­cle about Wise in forbes.com exam­ined how quick­ly Wise trans­fers of Amer­i­can funds got to spe­cif­ic sam­ple des­ti­na­tions from the U.S. The mag­a­zine dis­cov­ered the fol­low­ing: funds to India took any­where from a few sec­onds to one day to arrive. Funds being sent to Greece took one or two days to arrive. Mon­ey head­ed to Mex­i­co took only two hours to arrive at its des­ti­na­tion. And funds sent to Thai­land took just eight hours to arrive. Those fig­ures are impressive.

3- The Wise Website Is Quite Easy To Navigate

Nat­u­ral­ly, there are a lot of fig­ures and cur­ren­cy stats on the site, which can seem a lit­tle over­whelm­ing if you’re not a whiz with num­bers. How­ev­er, over­all it’s a breeze to use, and set­ting up an account takes very lit­tle time. Wise has promised nev­er to sell its cus­tomers’ data – an impor­tant promise by a com­pa­ny that col­lects every­thing from your home address to some finan­cial infor­ma­tion. The site uses a two-step iden­ti­fi­ca­tion process to help ensure your per­son­al infor­ma­tion is safe.

4- Wise Has Plenty Of Payment Options

Once you’ve set up a Wise account to han­dle mon­ey trans­fers, there are sev­er­al pay­ment options to choose from. If you’re send­ing funds from Amer­i­ca, you can use a bank account wire trans­fer, cred­it card, deb­it card, Google Pay or Apple Pay. You can also use the inter­na­tion­al finan­cial sys­tem known as SWIFT, which stands for the Soci­ety for World­wide Inter­bank Finan­cial Telecommunications. Lim­its on how much mon­ey you can trans­fer via Wise depend on sev­er­al fac­tors. Are you send­ing mon­ey to a branch of your com­pa­ny in anoth­er coun­try using the SWIFT net­work? If so, you can trans­fer well over a mil­lion dol­lars per transaction. If you’re send­ing mon­ey to anoth­er bank just across town with a deb­it trans­ac­tion, you can send up to $15,000 (USD) each day. How much you can trans­fer depends on the des­ti­na­tion, the type of cur­ren­cy you’re send­ing, and the pay­ment method you’re using.

- Customer Support Needs Improving

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, accord­ing to Forbes advi­sor, help is not always imme­di­ate­ly avail­able on the Wise helpline, and that’s a nui­sance when you’re hav­ing a prob­lem that’s time sen­si­tive and needs to be addressed right away. Still, Wise does­n’t use auto­mat­ed voice mails (don’t those dri­ves you crazy?) and instead has sup­port work­ers who can speak with cus­tomers in more than a dozen dif­fer­ent lan­guages. If the access issue is sort­ed out soon, Wise cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion rates will no doubt skyrocket.

Are There Any Drawbacks To Using Wise?

One draw­back in par­tic­u­lar that we found men­tioned dur­ing our research is that you can’t send cash to some­one’s home or busi­ness ( Mon­ey can only be trans­ferred to bank accounts or mobile wal­lets ). And while that may be a short­com­ing to some cus­tomers, we hon­est­ly don’t see how it presents too big an inconvenience. More than 13 mil­lion peo­ple use Wise to trans­fer mon­ey reg­u­lar­ly all over the globe. The com­pa­ny con­tin­ues to grow and expand every month – for exam­ple, it now has approx­i­mate­ly 2.3 mil­lion ATMs around the world linked to a Wise deb­it card. That makes using your Wise account – just about any­where in the world – incred­i­bly easy, fast and secure. Here’s an exam­ple of just how low Wise fees are. We found this com­par­i­son cit­ed on the com­pa­ny’s web­site and thought it speaks vol­umes about the sav­ings you’ll enjoy once you set up a Wise account of your own. Let’s say you want to send $500 (USD) to a coun­try in Europe. If you do the trans­ac­tion through the Bank of Amer­i­ca, it will cost you approx­i­mate­ly $12.74. If you let Pay­Pal han­dle it, the trans­ac­tion will cost you a whop­ping $29.66 (USD). But if you have a Wise account and use your deb­it card, the deal costs just $3.96 (USD). Those are real sav­ings, and in this day and age, these infla­tion­ary times, sav­ing mon­ey in areas like this adds up to more dol­lars in the bank.

Final Thoughts

We know you’re wor­ried about spend­ing more mon­ey right now on every­thing from gaso­line to gro­ceries. So why spend more need­less­ly when you’re send­ing mon­ey to a fam­i­ly mem­ber who lives in anoth­er coun­try? Why not save as much as you can, whether you do these mon­ey trans­fers reg­u­lar­ly or it’s just once as a present to a niece or nephew going to school abroad? Wise gets the funds there quick­ly, secure­ly and does­n’t over­charge you in the process. Instead of pass­ing hid­den fees onto its cus­tomers, Wise does every­thing pos­si­ble to save you mon­ey. So the next time you want to send mon­ey over­seas, stop and think: who will do this trans­fer for me quick­ly and save me mon­ey? The answer is always – Wise will!