I have spent quite a bit of time and energy exploring various international wire transfer service providers, including Afex and TransferWise. TransferWise has been all over the news lately (for example TransferWise Valued At $3.5 Billion As Founders Sell Stake, Forbes, May 22, 2019). In this article I point out some ways that TransferWise could be improved.
TransferWise offers a great advantage over Afex in that if you are a TransferWise customer and you arrange for somebody to send you an international bank wire, the money will reach you without the sender having to obsess about putting particular information into the OBI (originator to beneficiary) field for the wire. (With Afex, the only way the money will reach you instead of some other Afex customer is that the sender puts your Afex account number into the OBI.)
TransferWise assigns a distinct destination bank account number to each TransferWise user. This means that the only things the sender needs to get right are:
- the bank account number (for example 256662797) and
- the beneficiary name (account holder name) which for example is “TransferWise FBO Carl Oppedahl”
At this point everybody can guess one of the benefits of the TransferWise service. Just like Western Union Edge and Afex, TransferWise offers the ability for a first customer of the service provider to send an international transfer at no charge to a second of that same service provider, free of charge. TransferWise has what are called “borderless accounts”, and as you can see here, “it’s free to send money from one borderless account to another.”
Yes for purely domestic money transfers there are dozens of free-of-charge ways for one person to send money to another person. Zelle, Paypal, WeChat, and many other service providers offer this kind of free transfer. But when you look for a way to send money internationally and free of charge, the list of service providers shortens to almost nobody. As far as I can tell the complete list is Western Union Edge and Afex and TransferWise.
This has motivated me to explore TransferWise with a goal of finding out how it works and what its advantages and disadvantages are. And I have identified some particular failings of TransferWise which, if corrected, would make it a much better choice for businesses and other sophisticated senders of money.
Ability of second or third person to log in. For any business service, it is absolutely necessary to have a way for multiple people to log in and do stuff. Western Union Edge and Afex have this all figured out. A main user can set up subsidiary users who can log in and do stuff. Right now as far as I can see, TransferWise only permits a single user to log in. So if my firm, for example, were to switch to using TransferWise for our incoming and outgoing international money transfer activity, I personally would have to do everything. It would be impossible for our bookkeeper to log in and generate a report. It would be impossible for an assistant to log in to set up a proposed money transfer. This needs to be corrected.
The only thing that TransferWise offers is a very clumsy way to set it up so that an assistant can call on the phone or ask questions by email. But no way that an assistant can log in to do things.
Ability to configure which accounts a subsidiary user can reach. Right now if I log in at TransferWise, I can see both my personal account and my law firm account. Transferwise needs to set it up so that I can determine what a subsidiary user can see. The usual situation would be that I would want my bookkeeper or assistant to see only the firm account, not my personal account.
Get rid of mixed recipient list. Probably I have some recipients defined that make sense only for my personal account, and other recipients defined that make sense only for my business account. I might not want people who are in my office knowing who I send money to with my personal account. The way it is now, no matter which account you select (personal or business), a single recipient list is visible that applies across both accounts. Each account needs to have its own recipient list.
Ability to configure what a subsidiary user can do. Right now when a person logs in to TransferWise, it is all or nothing. If the person can log in, the person can do anything including sending money someplace. It needs to be possible to set up role-based permissions so that, for example, my bookkeeper can generate reports but cannot send money someplace.
Recipient nicknames. Western Union Edge and Afex each permit the user to assign a “nickname” to each beneficiary (which TransferWise calls a “recipient”). In contrast, TransferWise only displays the bank account holder name, which is really bad. Why is this really bad?
One reason this is really bad about TransferWise is that I might have a particular recipient set up in the system several times. The recipient might be set up both for ACH payments and wire transfer payments. The ACH payment is less expensive but slower. The wire transfer payment is more expensive but faster. From time to time I might wish to pick which way to send money to the recipient. With nicknames, I could identify one recipient as “Binford ACH” and another as “Binford wire”.
A second reason this is really bad about TransferWise is that sometimes the beneficiary name (bank account holder name) is very non-intuitive. For example maybe I am sending money to an Afex user “Binford”, in which case the beneficiary will actually be Associated Foreign Exchange, not Binford. But the poorly designed TransferWise user interface will only display “Associated Foreign Exchange” and will not permit me to display “Binford”. Or if I am sending money to a TransferWise user “Binford”, the beneficiary will actually be “TransferWise FBO Binford”. The poorly designed TransferWise user interface will only display “TransferWise FBO Binford” and will not permit me to display simply “Binford”.
So TransferWise needs recipient nicknames.
Update: I am astonished to see that the Android app has a “nickname” function. There is no hint of this in the browser-based user interface. I went to the Android app and I gave nicknames to many of my recipients. I then went to the browser-based user interface. The nicknames are not there! This is very strange. It seems to be impossible to set up nicknames in the browser-based user interface.