Finance & Legal Wise

Those of you that use Wise for currency transfers (as it's currently the best out there), you may have seen this.

The bit that sounds ominous is the potential for additional 'requirements'. If this is the usual voluminous list of documents that are needed to do anything official around here, I'm out:



From January 2023, your Customer Agreement will be with Wise Pilipinas Inc. instead of Wise Payments Limited.

This means that whenever you use Wise to send, receive, or hold money, we’ll be regulated by Philippine laws. This will allow us to bring you new features and improvements adapted to your local needs.

What’s changing:

• You’ll be able to send up to 500,000 PHP (or equivalent in any currency) per day. This daily limit includes transfers sent from your Wise balances.
• You’ll be able to receive up to 400,000 PHP into your account each month. This monthly limit considers the total amount sent to your account across all currencies within a calendar month.
• There’s no limit of how much you can hold in your account.
• If you’ve got a Wise debit card, your legal agreement and the way you use it will stay the same.

We’ll be making all these changes behind the scenes, so you can keep using your account normally. But we might ask you for some additional documents in the next few weeks to meet our new requirements — we’ll let you know via email when they’re needed.

Read more about our Philippine Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

 

Firstly well spotted....

Guess depends what these (IF) documents are?
That said very unexpected I have to say.

Don't care for the - Wise Pilipinas Inc. instead of Wise Payments Limited. Maybe nothing though ?

Everything is always getting tightened up regulation wise pun intended by governments.

I doubt Wise would want to increase any requirements.

Time to have plan B C D in place. Sure most here have various options.

 

Be a good idea to transfer a good amount across before January 2023

 

I have never used wise but i was thinking of giving it a try until i saw this.
Does anybody know what the limit was before ?
If you want to make a big spend like a house and lot or even some major surgery then you better plan ahead.
I have to wonder where this limit comes from, is it Wise or is it Philippine government, if it's the government then i expect it will apply to all transfer companies.
Seems a strange thing to do with the way things are you would think they would welcome as much foreign currency transfers as possible not limit them, must make sense to somebody...

 

My American friends who use Wise have not received this email from Wise. I got it and my Wise account is in Australia so maybe only affects Aussies....so far

 

As far as I know there was always a limit to the amount you can transfer over to PH, a couple of years ago this was just short of half a million Pesos, I'm not sure who imposed this limit but think it was the government there? one time I sent over P1Mill using Transferwise, I did this in increments of around p250K over a few days and this was never questioned by anyone. Just yesterday I sent money using wise, I has set up the transfer for £1000 but when I went over to my Bank account to transfer the money to wise, they only allowed me to do £500, however I was able to do this twice to get the £1000. In my time of using Wise for around 6/7yrs now I never did have a problem with them, prior to that I used World First, but was paying much more per transfer, they have now ceased trading I believe?

 

World First are not good, used many years ago for many years. They refused full stop sending a larger payment of over 1million php implying I broke their T&C. I recon they were having some internal issues at the time.

Anyway Wise are under the regulations imposed really by the USA banking authorities as I'm sure the more aware on here know well. And the Philippines will of course tow the line accordingly and we as end users have to play along with these rules.

Yes breaking down payments can work providing the algorithm does sense that's what you are doing.
Unfortunately it's a suck it and see IMO.

It's all nothing till it's something...

I've received no email from Wise as yet.

 

The old established banks fees are extortionate IMO, especially with the exchange rate given, they monopolised this for to long, thus the need for the newer distruptive types. With Wise I have never been set any limit so far, however with any large amount or unusual transaction from any institution they can ask for further verification under the KYC code even if you already have a long standing relationship. Banks being now fully responsible for all transactions over a certain amount.

Maybe getting off subject but important to know the wider verifications on what's really going on here.