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My experience of wise as a personal customer was that my face completely and utterly failed the ai "selfie" verification. I had a series of emails with their su

My experience of wise as a personal customer was that my face completely and utterly failed the ai "selfie" verification. I had a series of emails with their support staff in which they: asked me to email a pdf of my passport and a photograph of me; demanded I used the link again; asked me to open dev tools to get debugging info about why I couldn't complete the verification (it produces a message saying "do not open Dev Tools for security reasons"...); told me that I needed to complete a selfie link from a different device; and then told me verification was complete (I never completed it). At points their support staff directly contradicted themselves and I never "spoke" to the same human twice. Revolut meanwhile updated one day and then instantly blocked my account for having a rooted Android device. I closed my account (on the phone to their support number), withdrew all my money, and left. At least wise has reasonably cheap exchange rates.

vintagedave 3y ago
Yes! This is happening to me _right now_! I’ve been a Wise customer for a decade. I went to make a transfer I’ve made before and was told I need to provide extra documents. These could only be provided using my mobile phone (I was on a laptop.) Their website requires you send a photo of your passport and a selfie, but it needs to be taken by their page. Naturally I got an error message, and contacted Support. I sent their support both a copy of my passport and a selfie I took a minute before, and asked why my account was flagged for authentication - had something happened? (I’d wondered if there had been unusual login attempts, for example.) You can imagine what happened next - a round of support requests where they didn’t answer why I’d suddenly needed to provide documentation, where they repeated using their site or app for the photos, where they roundly ignored that it didn’t work, where some replies seem just copy-pasted and inapplicable. The latest email I got did finally semi-answer the question: due to “regulations”, a non-answer. I live in Estonia, where they’re based, and have twice offered to visit their office with my ID so they can authenticate me. I didn’t expect them to say yes but it makes the failure of their online system clear. The payment I needed to make was to pay a bill in my home country. This took so long the bill was overdue. The company I owed luckily offered me a Web-1.0, antiquated credit card payment service that I didn’t know they had. No idea how insecure it is, but I got the bill paid. That’s more than Wise has achieved! My takeaway: Wise is absolutely unreliable. Your account can be prevented from making payments at any time for unknown reasons. Their support is unhelpful. It can drag on for weeks. If you have any time-sensitive payment (and most are, right?), you have no guarantees. I can no longer rely on Wise. It’s a shame for what used to be a wonderful startup and service.
- throwaway67743 3y ago
  Interestingly I've not had to do any of that but I expect given the age of my account it was grandfathered in and isn't subject to the same rules that newer accounts have, I did notice they unverified my LLC though re obtaining cards but I guess that may just be different regulations they need to follow now, or requirements from partner banks as they've changed 3 or 4 times since I opened my account (very early on, one of the first). Other than slow support I've not really had any issues though, when I do contact them they usually get it right - ie I asked them to add card transactions to web hooks as for some inexplicable reason it wasn't done, they added it within a few days and that was around a year ago. Also they're not based in Estonia, they just have a presence to satisfy license requirements, they're still based in the UK (they also have a Belgian presence for some of their licenses too etc)
solarkraft 3y ago
On verification bullshit and error messages: German neo-banks pretty much all use IDNow for verification, which is your standard human-operated "hold your ID into the camera and wave it around" service. When attempting to use it with a rooted Android device or jailbroken iOS device, it fails with mysterious errors. Support pages and human operators are completely blank on this ("have you restarted your phone and reinstalled the app?"). Nowhere (I found) is it documented that you can't use a freed device with IDNow's SDK. So every time I tried another device, of course I'd use another jailbroken one and it would fail again. Only Nuri's app was so kind to even tell me that the error was due to something in the IDNow SDK and helped me finally find out what the cause of the problem may be. Error messages matter, y'all. A regular customer would probably just perceive IDNow to be an unreliable piece of shit service and the banks to be too incompetent to get their core customer acquisition flow right.

vintagedave 3y ago

Yes! This is happening to me _right now_! I’ve been a Wise customer for a decade. I went to make a transfer I’ve made before and was told I need to provide extra documents. These could only be provided using my mobile phone (I was on a laptop.) Their website requires you send a photo of your passport and a selfie, but it needs to be taken by their page. Naturally I got an error message, and contacted Support. I sent their support both a copy of my passport and a selfie I took a minute before, and asked why my account was flagged for authentication - had something happened? (I’d wondered if there had been unusual login attempts, for example.) You can imagine what happened next - a round of support requests where they didn’t answer why I’d suddenly needed to provide documentation, where they repeated using their site or app for the photos, where they roundly ignored that it didn’t work, where some replies seem just copy-pasted and inapplicable. The latest email I got did finally semi-answer the question: due to “regulations”, a non-answer. I live in Estonia, where they’re based, and have twice offered to visit their office with my ID so they can authenticate me. I didn’t expect them to say yes but it makes the failure of their online system clear. The payment I needed to make was to pay a bill in my home country. This took so long the bill was overdue. The company I owed luckily offered me a Web-1.0, antiquated credit card payment service that I didn’t know they had. No idea how insecure it is, but I got the bill paid. That’s more than Wise has achieved! My takeaway: Wise is absolutely unreliable. Your account can be prevented from making payments at any time for unknown reasons. Their support is unhelpful. It can drag on for weeks. If you have any time-sensitive payment (and most are, right?), you have no guarantees. I can no longer rely on Wise. It’s a shame for what used to be a wonderful startup and service.

throwaway67743 3y ago
Interestingly I've not had to do any of that but I expect given the age of my account it was grandfathered in and isn't subject to the same rules that newer accounts have, I did notice they unverified my LLC though re obtaining cards but I guess that may just be different regulations they need to follow now, or requirements from partner banks as they've changed 3 or 4 times since I opened my account (very early on, one of the first). Other than slow support I've not really had any issues though, when I do contact them they usually get it right - ie I asked them to add card transactions to web hooks as for some inexplicable reason it wasn't done, they added it within a few days and that was around a year ago. Also they're not based in Estonia, they just have a presence to satisfy license requirements, they're still based in the UK (they also have a Belgian presence for some of their licenses too etc)

solarkraft 3y ago

On verification bullshit and error messages: German neo-banks pretty much all use IDNow for verification, which is your standard human-operated "hold your ID into the camera and wave it around" service. When attempting to use it with a rooted Android device or jailbroken iOS device, it fails with mysterious errors. Support pages and human operators are completely blank on this ("have you restarted your phone and reinstalled the app?"). Nowhere (I found) is it documented that you can't use a freed device with IDNow's SDK. So every time I tried another device, of course I'd use another jailbroken one and it would fail again. Only Nuri's app was so kind to even tell me that the error was due to something in the IDNow SDK and helped me finally find out what the cause of the problem may be. Error messages matter, y'all. A regular customer would probably just perceive IDNow to be an unreliable piece of shit service and the banks to be too incompetent to get their core customer acquisition flow right.