In several recent posts I blogged about Afex.com, a provider of international wire transfer services. By now we have migrated nearly all of our international wire transfer activity away from previous vendors and over to Afex. The user documentation for Afex is, said charitably, extremely limited. The documentation seems to assume that the reader is already an extremely experienced user of legacy wire transfer services, such that the reader only needs to learn a few things about Afex to be able to do all of the things that the reader already knew how to do with a legacy wire transfer service. What’s more, the documentation does almost nothing to explain how you would actually use the system if you are an intellectual property firm.
If you already have service set up with some wire transfer service provider, it would be very tempting to stick with what you know and are familiar with. But as I mentioned here and here, many of the legacy service providers really charge quite a lot, both in bank fees and in currency exchange rate fees, compared with what Afex charges. So it might be smart to start using Afex. The problem being that the documentation is so poor.
With this in mind, I have written a user guide that draws upon our experience using Afex.com to pay foreign IP firms and foreign IP offices (e.g. WIPO, KIPO) and using Afex.com as a way to receive bank wires from foreign IP firms. You can see it here. Please post comments and suggestions below.