TransferWise announces $280M investment

I used to study remittance flows for a living. This was a problem that was (is?) begging to be solved. Incumbents like Western Union have always been very expensive and borderline evil. There are well known “corridors” of remittance flows that are still yet to be captured - like Kerala (India) &lt;&gt; Saudi Arabia (Middle-east more generally); Mexico &lt;&gt; US; US &lt;&gt; LatAm etc.<p>My guess is TransferWise captured the UK&lt;&gt; Poland corridor and expanded from there.<p>This problem is a great one to solve because the customers have a real pain and one can be very targeted about capturing high-value corridors.<p>I wish TW the best. Lower fee, Lower friction, Lesser time == Great for customers!<p>Anyone looking to build a startup in this domain should start here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldbank.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;topic&#x2F;migrationremittancesdiasporaissues&#x2F;brief&#x2F;migration-remittances-data" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldbank.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;topic&#x2F;migrationremittancesdiaspo...</a><p>(This data is useful to understand origin&lt;&gt;destination of remittance flows; Its a greater than $150B market and a lot of untapped&#x2F;Uncaptured areas; lots still left to do!)

I recently had a client ask me to pay them with Transferwise. It was a horrible experience. After weeks of trying to get it to work, even with the help of support, we eventually gave up and used bitcoin instead.<p>The Transferwise website was horrible. It gave error messages and kept telling me to fill out some field that didn&#x27;t exist. After sending screenshots to their support team, they just sent me back links that didn&#x27;t work.<p>After several back-and-forths with support they eventually fixed that issue, but then on a later step the website told me to upload &quot;the documents&quot; and gave an upload control. I carefully read every piece of text on the website, and nowhere did it explain what documents it was asking me to upload. It wouldn&#x27;t let me proceed until I uploaded &quot;the documents&quot;. I sent screenshots of all this to the support team and they didn&#x27;t know what documents I was supposed to upload either.<p>Eventually support helped me fix that, and I got to a later step, where it asked me for the username and password I use to log into my bank. I am not comfortable providing this to anyone, so I refused. This was the last straw that finally led to me giving up at using Transferwise.

As a customer, I love TransferWise. The banks charge outrageous rates and fees. The competing money transfer&#x2F;currency services promise the best rates, but make you sign up before telling you. Then you get constant calls from your &quot;personal currency advisor&quot;. In the end you find out their rates are higher, and now you&#x27;re on call with a sales person. This includes companies HN posters in a previous thread were recommending. TransferWise is upfront and self-service. The one time I had to email support they were great too.<p>On the business side, TransferWise tells an interesting story about peer-to-peer currency exchange, but I think that&#x27;s a media play. In practice most transfers will not immediately match with reverse flow. TransferWise have to keep a buffer of each currency and trade on the open market, just like the banks do. That in turn exposes them to currency risks, and it wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if they lost a lot of money on 24 June 2016. As a VC funded startup they could eat that as a learning cost.

Transferwise has been a godsend for me the past couple years as I&#x27;ve been moving my life to the UK from the US. XE was bought out awhile ago and hiked their fees up, while banks like HSBC have always had high rates to begin with.<p>Although I&#x27;m wondering if jumping on a bitcoin exchange like GDAX to go from USD -&gt; bitcoin -&gt; GBP would be even cheaper these days?

For everyone that&#x27;s interested in TransferWise, I&#x27;d recommend Revolut ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.revolut.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.revolut.com&#x2F;</a> ) instead.<p>They have no fees for transactions or currency changes (up to a quite high limit), as well with a lot more features (international prepaid MasterCard that charges no fees ever being my favourite one, and you can go to ATMs for free as well).<p>I&#x27;ve been a happy customer of them for quite some time and I have absolutely nothing bad to say about them, but the opposite.

Literally just used TW to pay an international contractor in ~30 seconds. From a customer standpoint, this is great news. Well wishes to these folks.

I&#x27;m now paid in USD, but I live in Canada. My bank offered me the &#x27;competitive&#x27; exchange rates of 2.5% more than the market offered.<p>TransferWise is literally saving me thousands of dollars per year. I can&#x27;t thank them enough.

I wish they would issue credit cards soon. Every time I pay with credit card while travelling, my bank charges 1.5% for each transaction, in addition to bad conversion rate.

TransferWise has saved me a _lot_ of money over the last couple of years. The website has gotten worse I must say but otherwise their service has been nothing but satisfactory. I&#x27;m still hoping they&#x27;ll offer a credit or debit card to make it possible to pay in foreign currency on the spot without paying horrific conversion fees.

TransferWise held up a few thousand dollars I was sending to a friend in Europe who had been stranded. It wasn&#x27;t like they just didn&#x27;t send it for 24 hours, it took TransferWise <i>three weeks</i> to make whatever determination they were going to make, and cancel the transfer instead of sending it to my friend. They also made some incredibly bizarre accusation when canceling the transfer, that they believed the money was for &quot;contraband&quot; (drugs? guns? TransferWise didn&#x27;t say). Considering my friend is the youth pastor in my hometown, well... So I&#x27;m not sure where TransferWise got their information, but there you have it: They held my money for three weeks before canceling the transfer for incredibly dubious reasons.

Hopefully they can use some of that dough to improve their support.<p>I&#x27;ve been trying to do a business (US) to business (EU) transfer using TransferWise for the last few days and it&#x27;s been a nightmare. First they can&#x27;t accept an ACH payment, then they cannot match the wire transfer to my business account, support doesn&#x27;t answer, their automated &quot;Action Required&quot; emails have links to help topics that don&#x27;t exist and their phone support can&#x27;t do anything and asks you to email them instead, with the emails never receiving any kind of acknowledgement.<p>Maybe it works fine for sending your friend a fiver, for business use it&#x27;s a total fail so far.

These guys are the best!<p>I&#x27;ve used transferwise to move dollars into euros the day before Brexit. They could not ship the money in time because of the overall transaction volume, and so they offered me the best of the rate I had locked in and the market rate after Brexit!

I hope TW uses some of the money to build out recurring payments. That is the biggest thing stopping me from using it for B2B payments (think SaaS product with monthly billing). If there are workarounds, would be happy to hear.

I generally goto remitrate to check best rates offered today : <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.remitrate.com&#x2F;best-exchange-rates&#x2F;compare-USD-to-INR" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.remitrate.com&#x2F;best-exchange-rates&#x2F;compare-USD-to-...</a><p>In my experience, Transferwise has been one of the most expensive ones if not the most expensive. Folks at remitly, ria almost always offer better rates compared to Transferwise (atleast on two occasions when I was sending it)<p>I would at some point want to give them a try though.

no surprise. good product. just trying out their borderless account for EUR-&gt;GBP. A fair whack cheaper than transferring into my Natwest account.

I can send rupees to my indian bank account at a very competitive rate from the US. But getting it back means going through the bank&#x27;s FX system which marks it up by ~3%. Are there FX brokers to which I can route money from my Indian bank account so that I will not be charged the 3% rate for the subsequent INR-&gt;USD conversion?

I use TransferWise a lot - I work in the US, but send money back to my NZ account regularly. I sent some money last night and it took 2 hours to show up. Can&#x27;t recommend TransferWise highly enough!

I don&#x27;t understand what TransferWise offers beyond what PayPal does. Why not just send yourself money using 2 PayPal accounts? Are they cheaper or faster?

Obligatory &quot;But what if you just used Bitcoin!&quot;

Can anyone say how TransferWise compares to CurrencyFair?

Also for holiday money where I need a card I use www.weswap.com - great product.

I believe, With a brokerage account, it&#x27;s easy to get your foreign currency sent to a bank account in another country.