anxiety, but small transfers are So far so good
anxiety, but small transfers are So far so good. a few things could be improved. i am an old lady, by modern standards, living in the Us and buying a house in France. Wiring the money though the normal bank equates to getting raped by their exchange rates, so I looked for an alternative. I do not trust computers and internet, but knowing that Wise is publicly traded and ruled by financial institutions helped me get onboard. I also asked around if anyone had used it and found a few people who had succesfully, although for transactions of less than 1000 dollars or euros .First you register for an account, give IDs online. easy enough. If you have questions, such as “How to make a large transfer and justify the provenance of funds” the answer you get is computer generated, or at least very general and not very helpful. the “how to’s” that are on the site are general and very disorganized, it takes a lot of mining to get a picture of how this works and it still isn’t clear. Also you are directed to u tube videos done by people barely out of teenage in their kitchen. Meanwhile,  I am thinking is this where I send the money for my house? So I did a very small transfer paid with credit card, later a bigger transfer with ACH, a ten fold larger one with ACH for which they opened a deposit account in my name ( they call it a “balance account”, it is in your country’s currency and serves as a temporary holding tank in which you deposit funds waiting to be exchanged and transferred.This way, you don’t have to wait for the money to clear your bank to take advantage of an exchange rate) So now I am ready to make the large house-buying transfer. I am still very anxious. I DID read some of those god awful reviews where people’s money got on hold forever. I certainly hope they were drug dealers, so my money does not get the same treatment. I am so far using the web site, not the App, but I am not impressed by their set up.Definitely not intuitive. also, when you buy something anywhere else, there is a review of your order and the terms before you click. NOT HERE. you click, it is gone. the “how long that exchange rate is good” for is at very least very confusing. it takes a few transfers to understand how that works. If you cancel your transaction, they threaten to punish you by upping your exchange rate on future transactions. Anyway, it is a learning adventure. 
for a one time small time transfer, it is a lot of agravation. for recurring transfers for international living, it might make sense. we’ ll see.