Yesterday evening I tried to transfer some money from my UK bank account to my French bank account, as I have done on a regular basis for very many years, including earlier this week.
It was suspended because it said it couldn’t verify that the sending account was indeed mine because the name of the account was different from my Wise account name. I have always used the same sending account - the one I have had for 45 years. The account name is in the form of Mrs A.C. Rxxxxx whereas my Wise account is Angela Cxxxxx Rxxxxx .
It offered me no option other than cancel the transfer and resend using a bank account with the “correct” name. This is insane and surely I can’t be the only person in the world this has just started happening to? I have several bank accounts both here in France and in the UK and not one of them is in exactly the same format as my Wise account name . They are all various forms of my correct name, most with a title e.g .Mme
Am I really the only person zith this sudden new difficulty?
If I understand you correctly, it’s part of authentication process for transfers. The bank account name has to be exactly the same as the name you give Wise. The slightest error will mean the transfer is rejected.
What puzzles me is that you’re suddenly finding transfers rejected, when the requirement has been there for a couple of years.
I agree that that is the case for where you are transferring money to - you have to supply the exact details for the recipient’s account. However, this is the sending account. To my knowledge and I have been doing this monthly for years, the account you are sending from could be any account - you just do a bank transfer giving the details that Wise gives you - their account iban plus a unique number for our Wise account. It is a manual transfer, which is one of the options they give you since my bank isn’t in their list of ones that they can directly take money from.
Yes strange, it’s usually a check on the correct name and receiving account lining up, not sending account and receiving account lining up otherwise I would not be able to pay bills to othe companies
It wasn’t that sending and receiving account had to line up @corona, it was that my sending account had to line up with my Wise name. The recipient could be anyone.
As I said before - obviously badly expressed! - my Wise account name is my full name - first names plus surname as per my passport , as required quite a few years back. My bank account in the UK is Mrs + Initials + Surname and there is no way I am changing my perfectly valid bank account to suit Wise!!!
It does seem to be how Wise operate, I don’t know how long for. Is it possible to ring them still? I’ve always found them helpful on the phone, so maybe they can find a way around this.
I have found a way round it. I just said it was somebody else’s account and they allowed me to top up my UK Wise account with it, from where I could do a transfer - so a 2 stage process instead of one. Would you change your UK bank account to match your Wise name?
I don’t suppose this has anything to do with what happened to you Angela, but just yesterday Wise asked me to confirm my tax residency, including my international tax number.
I may change my mind once I am less angry @Jennifer11 but at the moment I am leaning towards using something else for transfers, like Revolut for example. However I never use a mobile phone for banking at Revolut seems to insist on it…
That’s interesting @Helenochka - sounds like a wider scale tightening up process then perhaps. It certainly makes Wise less usable for me. I can cope with validation of things to a point but insisting I change the name of my bank account to match the name they insisted I had on my Wise application is just not acceptable.
On the surface, it was money laudering regs, but I would happily have sent them a bank statement to confirm it was my account but they wouldn’t permit that. The bank account name had to be in the format they wanted (No title, no initials, full names only)
This is such utter codswallop. I’ll be transferring money tonight to Wise from a longstanding bank account so it’ll be interesting to see if I encounter the same issue. Thanks for the workaround, Angela, in case I need it.
Could you open a second Wise account with same format name as sending account just to satisfy them?
I think Wise got done, I thought unfairly, for something recently compliance-wise. So perhaps like a lot of banks would, they are now going ridiculous on compliance over-egging it.
I can tell you though that their fees have reached the maximum acceptable for me and I would look at any alternative if their fees go up again even by cents.