Prediction: zero negative will come out of the name change or redesign, and three years from now they'll be bigger than ever. I'm long on them and they haven't even IPO'd yet. Can't wait for them, and Stripe.

Seriously, have you ever seen a rebrand negatively affect a product? Rebrands have to be thought about retrospectively: you need to think whether it would make sense to go from the new to the old. Number26 for example rebranded to N26 and in retrospect it was an utterly obvious move.

Wise to Transferwise would make no sense especially if they are positioning themselves as more than a PayPal alternative. So this is a good rebrand.

And the generic name isn't a problem, any more than it was for Square. It's a shame $WISE is taken though.

They already had a lot of brand recognition that this really strikes me as odd as well. I'm guessing this is a better name for an IPO?

Edit: A quick googling confirms they've indeed started talking about an IPO recently.

Maybe it’s just that the name became available and the boss always wanted a short, dictionary-word name? Dreams of ubiquity?

I think it’ll make searching a lot harder especially for an international service.

Wise? Waze? Whys? Ways?

But... it seems to have worked for “véz” so maybe this is just the “go big or go home” startup thing.

Completely agree. They are a fantastic service that (as others have suggested they do as well) I use about once a year and recommend to others about twice a year.

I have no idea if I’ll remember the name change a year from now, and as anything related to international money transfer is already sketchy, a rebrand is likely to make me wary.

Seems like a weird idea when there is already a finance company called Wise.

https://www.wise.us

It's when grounded design decisions become ungrounded. Sure, creating an umbrella company called Wise - where TransferWise is one segment they're targeting would be a good way to do it, and then launch other products under Wise, but they shouldn't rebrand TransferWise to Wise.

> The rebrand won't change me using it, but I really can't see the positive in this.

Anecdotal but I was somewhat reluctant to consider them as a "bank" due to their name (seemed like a service geared towards money transfer). The rebrand is not done for the existing customers, but for more easily capturing new ones.

Definitely agree, akin to when BankSimple rebranded to Simple. It was awesome as is.

Anyway, hope they stick around and eventually turn into a financial OS instead of folks needing a bank, plugging into underlying deposit accounts in the countries you need.

Yeah, pretty stupid name, if you want to google it. Why they made the change was explained in the blog post: the old name was too specific and describing only one of their services (the one that they have launched with), that is, international transfers. But they already provide foreign bank account numbers (a.k.a. borderless accounts, which I depend on a lot) and you can keep a balance, and convert money and they have a debit card as well. Almost like banking. And I'm pretty sure they want to get into banking.

Drop (formerly Massdrop) rebranding is also a bad example.

Branding matters. The company is evolving from money transfers to more banking services. The fact that so many are resistant to the change because they consider the company to only do transfers is exactly the reason and the proof for why the rebrand makes sense.

Wise might be generic but encapsulates financial services well and fits in with all the other similar brands like Stripe, Square, Simple, Chase, etc.

Another transferwise fan but I can see it being more high status from the marketing point of view. Like in the old days banks had fancy marble buildings to show they had money and now have expensive domain names. See also stripe vs slash dev slash payments.

Random aside - I'm carrying a transferwise card as my main payment card at the moment and just looking it doesn't say "Transferwise" on it, apart from in small print. It says "Hello World" on the front. I'd not actually noticed that till now in spite of having used it at least 100 times.

my understanding is they want to move further into financial services and "transfer-" was unnecessarily limiting.

As you say yourself, the old name _waa_ "descriptive" but they have not been a simple transfer service for many years.

They offer multi-currency accounts - limit their brand to the transfer part is not descriptive at all :) Also they have enough customers to not worry how easy is to search their name on google.

50/50 chance they pull a Quickster and undo the rebrand I reckon

Meanwhile, there's Wisely, which is widely promoted by ADP.

I think it may be beause of "Transfermate" which does similar things. When i read the title i didn't know if it was the serviced i used 2 years ago.

Has there been leadership change recently?

A shiny new top executive just trying to mark their territory in the best way known to humans and canines.

I’m assuming it’s a move away from their core offering of transfers and currency exchanges into a more broad banking offering.

Agreed. I'm a very happy customer of TransferWise, and I have tested many of their competitors which are mostly awful. But this is unnecessary, confusing and irritating.

IMHO, not a good sign for where the company is headed.

I found their name to have been outlived by the specs of their service offering. Transferwise is about much more than transferring money these days.

Well the top Google result may obviously change once their site becomes more established.

The name collision isn't great, but then again Transferwise was already somewhat of a collision with the other Wise anyway.

Woah, that's a rough collision too.

Am I the only one thinking this collision might be intentional?

I can't help but see the Visa logo when I look at the new Wise logo. Intentional, maybe?

i think this is a genius rebranding considering the similarity of the word Wise to Visa.

“Apple Computer” wasn’t how anyone referred to the company, basically ever. Nobody calls it “Apple Inc.” today (outside of legal stuff, of course). But I doubt anyone called the fintech “Wise” before the rebrand.

I also loves it and I've been using it for 5 years. I regularly transfer money internationally and it works in 24-48 hours for a few dollars per transfer

That pain is so huge I just can't forget it. I am a Canadian resident , a dual Canadian-Hungarian citizen, my brother has accounts in Austria and Hungary, my clients are in the USA chiefly but also all over the EU. So international wires are quite a thing.

Here in Canada, the traditional way I could send money was going to a bank branch , fill out a very long form to be able to do a SWIFT transfer and pay through the nose for it.

Then came VBCE online, an FX company which was OK-ish except you needed to ask them to add everyone wiring you beforehands. And they demanded to have an up to date passport on file.

Then came transferwise and the world turned into a happy place.

I'm not sure if you're directing this comment at TransferWise or at companies in general, but I'll reply from TransferWise's point of view - Disclaimer, I'm an engineer at TransferWise, but this is my own opinion.

TransferWise takes customer support extremely seriously with an in-house team of support reps who are trained in all of our features. On top of that each team may have one or more CS "champions" who are the bridge between product teams and customer support. These champions usually know the product inside-out, and are in slack channels with the dev teams.

So when an issue is not a customer misunderstanding something, and turns out to be an actual bug, the CS rep will work with the engineers to find a workaround, and to get a fix deployed as fast as possible - all while the customer knows exactly what's going on.

Bottomline is that I agree that customer support is hard, and very expensive. But it doesn't have to be broken, and I don't think it is at TransferWise (well, Wise now)

Sounds you got caught up in A/B testing maybe?

It’s to TW advantage to have a higher minimum deposit, but the drop off is likely higher at higher amounts. They probably test high amounts regularly.

But as a single customer you shouldn’t have seen different amounts. That’s just confusing.

I've literally asked for this in every user satisfaction survey they've sent me for the last 5 years, and like you I hope this is a sign they're heading in this direction.

The competition in this space is large, but there are a ton of trade offs between various services and in many countries (hungary, for one) the local alternatives simply suck.

Why do you say they get away with it?

TW for sure reports to my country's financial intelligence agency (AUSTRAC).

I get paid in foreign currency via TW and it's pretty amazing.

Most likely because they pass that buck to their local partners.

In South Africa for example, they've been partnered with exchange4free (dodgy name but legit) but recently changed to Bidvest. If TW isn't reporting, these third parties are. You have to sign mandate forms once a year explicitly for reporting purposes.

I'd love to hear an answer for this one.

We use it for business regularly and repeat transfers become faster over time. We had freelancers (EUR->GBP) receive their money in 2 days, after a while it was down to hours and we even saw 1 hour transfers. The limit became the receiving back making the funds available to the bank account owner.

WU = Western Union?

I see this like Delta Faucets and Delta Airlines. I've never had any trouble thinking of one when I meant the other, and I suspect the same is true here.

Trademarks have 40+ categories. Look up how many trademarks with the word "acme" in them can happily coexist.

I assume they did and figured nobody would mistake a chips brand with an FX service. Legally I'm sure it's not a problem.

I have used it to pay a large foreign tax bill, so not quite a house. If the amount is GBP£30000 (might have changed now), you can arrange a longer pay-in time (normally it is 24 hours) and they will let you have the cash sit in your account for up to a week and then find the right rate.

Later: Appears they have lowered the threshold to £20000 now (see https://transferwise.com/help/articles/2961856/tips-for-gett...)

I'd look at other options like OFX, they end up being cheaper for large transfers and are geared towards the kind of transfer you mention.

They are not covered by any kind of FDIC equivalent (and in fairness there's not really any good deposit insurance regime for international accounts). They claim to use ringfenced accounts for customer funds but AIUI that's all self-certified (and wasn't there at all when they first started, although I understand they've gotten a bit more professional in various ways). I wouldn't worry too much about making a one-off transfer under normal circumstances - the risk of them going bankrupt in the next week is pretty low - but I'd be a little wary of keeping a substantial balance with them over the long term.

Completed multiple 7 figure transfers on a virgin account without a hitch - for the very reason of purchasing abroad.

Saved > 35kEU in rates - the local bank FX rates were daylight robbery.

I would advice doing it in batches, you pay by percentage on doing multiple transfers doesn't affect you on the monetary level.

Concretely there should be no difference, but your spirit would be less impacted.

I did this when I first used TW many years ago, when I had no idea if the service was reliable and the transfers would take days.

Yes, I did that and it worked fine.

Funnily enough it costs more in fees for me to use Wise as my daily account so I've kept my traditional bank cards! I do suspect it varies by country. I'm fortunate in New Zealand that banks generally offer fee-free accounts with reasonable terms and conditions.

Honest question, what do you do with it multiple times a day? You use it as your regular bank and a debit card or something?

Newly in a similar situation myself.

Are there tax implications in the US for doing this type of transfer monthly?

This. I also used N26.

There support used to be bad, now it is atroscious.

The details of my situation are not important, however I was in contact with Christian Krabus - Head of Customer Care (https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-krabus-075a7887/ who it appears no longer works for N26).

I would regular have to ask for status updates; email the managing directors and only then would things get progressed.

My issue stemmed from May 2019 right until Mar 2020; when he stopped responding (and according to linkedin, left the firm).

Basically, every support interaction required multiple pulling of teeth. That should not be how a bank interacts with you, especially when they have your money.

I now use another bank in Berlin, just a normal one, and the interactions are about average ( I ask a question; they take a week to get back to me -- but they *tell* me it will take a week).

In the UK we have the Financial Conduct Authority. For a registered financial institution you have protection of, I think, something like £80,000 in case the bank goes bust and you can also ask them to investigate any complaint.

I have done this once for my own account and a couple of times for others. They really do look into every detail and will award compensation if it's clear the bank was at fault.

Institutions that don't have this protection include Trasferwise and Revolut, both of which I have had issues with in the past.

5k per month is 60k per year. A typical developer makes at least 100k per year in the US; but if you are only support yourself then you can easily live on 40k per year outside of SV and a few other high-rent areas. The math checks out. And sending 60% of your salary back home is something that plenty of people do.

I guess that's the up side of not having free education, free health care system and a good social security.

Well, that's almost enough to match the median household income in the US ($68k) so you probably don't want to extrapolate too far from what they make.

You’d be surprised how rich a society can be with a high IQ demographics, low taxes (I.e. barriers), and free enterprise. In Europe, landlocked no-oil Switzerland is a good example of this.

Going to try Xoom next, looking at conversion rates plus the big name behind (Paypal) which is not short of horror stories themselves.

Well, for starters most transfers I and my friends have had to make are not to our own accounts. There's also the time issue - I have an IB account, and love it, but most of the time I'm using Transferwise because I'm in a different country and paying someone, or because I need to move money between my own accounts quickly. Transferwise is literally instant for about half the transfers they do, which is incredible. Meanwhile with IBKR I'm usually out at least three business days for any USD funds to show up in IBKR, plus whatever time to wait on the foreign currency side. Then there's also the UI - sometimes I need someone else to transfer the money, or IBKR's login system is locking me out, etc etc, and in those cases Transferwise always wins. Or if I'm transferring under 25k and I need to do it outside of market hours - in that case my transaction is an odd lot at IBKR, getting me (oftentimes) bad rates, and I might as well use Transferwise.

Don't get me wrong, I like IBKR and I do use it, but Transferwise is definitely more useful 90% of the time.

Yeah, you're definitely paying a premium for them handling smaller quantities, end-to-end, in one easy tool. IBKR requires knowledge of Forex trading, but is hands down the cheapest and fastest solution - for those that are able to work it. To be fair, that describes basically all of IBKR.

It's still mind-blowing to think IBKR charges $20 per million, when the airport Travelex will charge you $20 per hundred lol.

Could you explain how this works, or point me in the right direction on what to read? I'm interested in not using Transferwise as much if this is better.

> The deal breaker for me is the fee for bank transfers, something I've never paid for before.

You are too young :-). This also might change. German banks start again to take monthly fees for accounts, so why not for single transactions.

This said, I have to deal with accounts in NZ and Europe. Fees as well as speed for transfers between them is a whole other world when using TW compared to classic banking. These kind of costs have exist forever, SEPA conditions are the exception, not the rule, internationally. TransferWises multi-currency account is a nice part of the package. I learned here today, this can be done even cheaper by using a Forex broker like IB, but I don't need this on a daily basis.

Where do you live? Bank wires are pretty expensive everywhere I've seen. (local bank transfers like ACH are free on TW too)

how much is Dwolla in comparison?

their ACH fees does seem a little more expensive

The list of countries where the fees are lower than just using your card from $OTHER_COUNTRY is very short.

That’s a dealbreaker for me, but I’m a happy customer of theirs for transfers.

One in the US is that you cannot use a borderless account for ACH transactions initiated by the counterparty (despite it presenting the details that make it look like you can).