Wise delivers strong core service with competitive rates and fast transfers, but faces significant trust issues stemming from account verification delays, account freezes without notice, and serious complaints about account access and fund handling.
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I have used Wise for many years and, in the early days, it was good. Increasing success and size seems to have compromised its customer service. One suspects that Wise is running down the quality and training of its customer-facing staff so that when they are inevitably replaced by AI, it will come as a pleasant surprise to customers. When a transfer between my Wise account and my account at another bank got lost for three weeks, Wise had no clue as to where it was or how it got there. The situation called for calm and clarity; Wise opted for panic and confusion. Three channels of communication were available – chat with six different agents, email with seven named and other anonymous agents and email that I wasn’t allowed to reply to. A better arrangement would be to replace chat and email with a single-channel dedicated online message portal that shows a record of the conversation. The worst of the chat agents made multiple bizarre claims and concocted versions of events that the written evidence clearly disproved. Of the 47 emails that we exchanged over five days, those from Wise were peppered with a lack of understanding, false statements, false accusations, broken promises and failure to act on instructions. There were also many apologies of the ‘sorry for your inconvenience’ type; on the plus side, Wise staff said they’d use their poor performance as a case study for further review. Time will tell how effective this is. Wise’s ‘deep dive’ (corporate speak for ‘we thought about it and wrote some soothing words’) of my complaint was quite good, so it gets two stars rather than the one its customer service earned. Wise sent me £120 in compensation, the smallest amount they judged they could get away with. To show how miserly Wise is, I will round this up to £200 and give it to charity. Wise’s new complacency is unlikely to win the fintech much favour and you should think twice about opening an account with them. When it’s left to computer systems to do the work, Wise is quick and cheap, but when there’s a hiccup and people are involved, you can see the smugness of a big bank come through in its disrespect for customer concerns.
Based on 55 verified customer reviews, Wise holds an average rating of 4.0 out of 5 — rated Great on ReviewTerminal. 76% of customers gave 4 or 5 stars.
