I dunno, this seems like it will get picked up by people with more influence and be the flaming pile of story it deserves to be, but still, in my small way, I wish to add to the Permanent Internet Record.
I use Wise (formerly Transferwise) a lot, it's a low-friction way to deal with money in transit when your life involved multiple currencies. (Mine involves at least five.) The fees are... well the fees are a lot better than what your bank will charge you for the same service, and that's the Wise business model.
A while ago I got a business account from them, for an actual business I started in California. A bootstrapped tech thing. I was hoping for more of that well-programmed low-friction goodness -- and except for a colossal double-charge fuckup that ended up costing me about $100 in fees despite it being 100% Wise's mistake, a mistake I even documented for them in a nice "steps to reproduce" fashion: except for that, it was really good. And the fact that I ate those fees tells you how much I liked it overall. I figured I'd saved a lot more than that by using their service, so I wasn't going to bother fighting them on what was clearly a software bug, I would just be "wise" about how I used my debit card in the future.
(Detail: they approve charges based on prior approvals for the same merchant, even if you don't approve the new charge; and if you pay from a basket of currencies and then get the chargeback in a different basket, all conversion fees are on you. Fun bug to fix, I hope someone actually did.)
Alright, so fast-forward to today -- and suddenly, with two working day's notice they are cancelling all US business debit cards. Lovely.
Not that big a deal for me: an inconvenience, surely, but having my November payments bounce is not going to tank the company, I'm still bootstrapping and there's not that much going through. But imagine you're further along with your startup, and have a big AWS bill to pay Or Else. Well in that case, you've just been screwed by Kristo Käärmann.
This looks to be a massive screw-up, but of course I have no idea how massive. Maybe there just aren't that many of us using Wise for US businesses with legit expenses? (The accounts still work, so if you're using Wise for, say, sanctions-busting payments to your Russian dev team, that's probably still on.)
My best guess, after their software bug bit me in the double-charged ass, is that they were caught off guard by some intricacy of the US system and are as disappointed as their customers, but without the actual pain.
But they didn't have to add insult to injury, did they? As of this writing, the "more info" link in the email takes you to a page with... wait for it... the exact text of the email itself, verbatim. Also, "temporary" doesn't mean what they think it means, but I will cut them non-native-speaker slack on that one.
So there you have it. Hello effing World. I need to find a new provider for my small-business account, and so does every other US business that's used Wise. (I wouldn't trust them with a business account in any country now, but to be fair, I'm not going to stop using them for moving currencies around.)
I have to admit I'm now very curious how big a deal this ends up being. My heart goes out to those who trusted Wise with their business banking, as I was certainly planning to do.
