Finance & Legal Best Posts in Thread: Wise

Same for us with UK banks - only problem is the fuss the barstewards make when we want to move a tiny bit of OUR money.

 

I also got that email and I believe it has to do with what they have on file as your place of residence. If thats in the Philippines, they will move you to over to Wise Pilipinas.

I think they simply want to enter the local market. e-money like gcash is very popular here, so they might as well want to secure their share of that. For that, a local subsidiary is a natural first step, if not even required by law.

 

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.

 

Jim,
Wise has a bank account in England, so if you use them you can pay from British bank into British bank.
Just try with a modest amount first to build your confidence in the system.
Here's the link for new UK customers. You save not just on the transfer costs, but also get a better exchange rate through Wise

 

I transferred GBP1000 last Friday with Wise. Arrived in BPI 3 hrs later. No problems.

 

I don't see why WISE, a very professional and efficient bank with various currency accounts allowed, would want to get involved with anything to do with the Philippines - where inefficiency is the weak foundation on which everything is built. FFS, many so-called 'Philippine businesses' are still operating via FB and obscure email accounts! And they don't even reply to the queries their crap systems receive.

I can only postulate that the Ph government has forced them (if this story is correct and not a scam - which it seems not to be) and therefore may force every remittance company to be the same. It seems WISE would operate the sending but this new Philippine arm would operate the receiving??? Or would the Philippine side operate both? Sounds like a recipe for disaster unless it is Philippine in name only.

I assume it is easy for the government to tell a business that if they want to remit here they have to put control into the VERY SAFE NON-CORRUPT EFFICIENT hands of Filipinos (good luck with that one!). If they refuse then they lose that part of their business.

When I last remitted here, it was a maximum of 500,000 per transaction or else the bank had to hold it up whist enquiries were made (this could be very rigorous: e.g "What's it for?" > "Savings" > "Ok"). But that amount could then be sent to one bank account. Now they state 500,000 per day can be remitted but only 400,000 per month per bank account - so that requires 38 bank accounts (if anyone is sending the max, a total of 15 million pesos per month and, if so, then please be my BFF).

Two other sort-of-related issues:

1. Our banks we use to transfer money to WISE, etc., are not going to allow 500,000 pesos (equivalent in your currency) out per day for a month! They OWN the money (even though it is ours!) and don't want us spending it. There is even a chance they will freeze our accounts. I was wary when sending even 1 million over a period of a month using two remittance companies and 4 receiving bank accounts. Endless stops of the transfers (by my bank), enquiries and other shite (all supposedly in my interest).
2. There is a Donors Tax in the Philippines (aka 'Gift Tax') for any amount given to any person (related or not) over the sum of 250,000 pesos per calendar year. The tax on the excess is 6%. Checking the internet you will find various versions of this tax over the years but I think this is the most recent. That tax has to be paid by the DONOR, not the recipient - HTF are they going to get tax from someone living abroad, unless they get the donor's tax authorities involved. So sending large amounts to the country might arouse the very-efficient BIR to look into it. The maximum permitted 15 m per month would need to be sent to 60 different people. I don't know about you but I have only two friends and one now lives in Scotland. There is a thread here discussing this Tax and how to prove the money is intended for the use of the sender himself - perhaps having to split restaurant bills to show what he ate and what his wife (the recipient from the donor) ate!

That, of course, is based on sending 15m per month (as I will be doing as soon as my foreign lottery hits the jackpot!). But for normal people, sending about 100,000 or so per month should create none of the above issues - only the worry if the money gets into the correct bank account after passing through a Filipino system.

I just wish that cryptocurrencies would become stable and reliable but it seems not. And if they ever do, governments will legislate them to ensure they become as controlled as banks are now. In fact, governments are working towards making societies cashless so they can record every transaction (but assume not buying a penny chew) and further control their citizens.

 

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?