Has anyone used Wise to send funds to your friends/family overseas recently? I need to make a transfer (RM4k) to the Philippines, but looking at replies on Wise's recent tweets has me worried. People are complaining that their recepient isn't receiving the money, accusing Wise of theft, not responding to issues, etc. I see that Wise is one of the best rates, unless fellow forumers have other suggestions? I have also not used BigPay for remittance, any pros and cons?

For me it works both in Malaysia and Singapore thru contactless. In MY I've used it in convenience stores such as FamilyMart, MyNews and in SG I used it on the MRT, restaurants, supermarkets and convenience store, all works well.

Everything is on it's default setting. One thing you can try is to change the spending limit to maximum under Manage > Account Limits > Contactless (this flow is for iOS) and maybe that might trigger the system to allow contactless. It's also worth noting my card is new, I am new to Wise and received my card in November. If all else fails, maybe can try contacting their support team and tell them that the contactless on the card is faulty.





Here are a couple of screenshots to show my payment success via contactless in MY and SG.

So I did some testing with the contactless, and if my assumption is right, it might be down to the actual card terminal (or bank acceptance?). I tried at 2 places recently, one at KK Supermart and another one in the same FamilyMart as my previous post. KK was using a Public Bank terminal which looks like this.



While FamilyMart's terminal is like this (machine with keypad, issued by Maybank).



I have not tried at any other places, or ones with more modern terminals (touch screen and e-wallet compatible). When I tried at KK, contactless did indeed fail, however at FamilyMart it was a success. Do you guys recall which banks terminal you interfaced with when making payment?

It should be standard, but maybe for whatever reason the Wise card is special. Hopefully Wise will start supporting Apple Pay and Google Pay here soon.

That's really weird that MRT didn't work for you when it did for me. May I know if you had SGD in your Wise account prior to entering the MRT? Or are you only holding MYR and doing on the fly conversion? In my case, I converted my MYR to SGD prior to tapping anywhere. Also, it did a "pre-auth" check (charged SGD 0) when I first tapped my card, then it only charges the amount on the next day. Attached are screenshots of my transactions. Note that I only used the MRT, and don't have experience for bus.

I am still able to change the country (dropdown not disabled), both on mobile and on web. Are you guys on the latest v8.1 on iOS? When I did it 2 days ago, I just change country only, and left my address as is.

It really depends on your luck and hope for no delays as they send it by normal mail untracked. Last time mine took about 3 and a half weeks to arrive. I believe they do have expedited delivery, but I'm not too sure on the cost. Otherwise you may try the country switch "workaround" to get the digital card added into your Apple Pay / Google Pay, assuming the country you are going to accepts contactless at most places.

No. As long as you have EUR in your account, it will always deduct from the EUR currency first. Only if you don't have, it will auto convert from any other currency (MYR for example).
Refer to this following image example with the bullet points.

For 1) I believe you can't customise the digital card name as it is auto generated by Wise without input from the user. Or at least, that's my findings.

For 2) I prefer to use digital for all online purchases, so that in the event the card details gets leaked, you can easily freeze / delete that digital card without compromising your physical card (you can still make physical purchases no worries). Furthermore, Wise allows you to create up to 3 digital cards, so you can create another digital card - suppose to pay for goods on an overseas online store - and delete the digital card after without affecting your regular e-commerce websites with your existing digital card. BigPay also supports what they call a virtual card, which is the same concept as Wise's digital card, with similar functions.

For 3) No, you do not need to convert ahead of time and you can let it auto convert from RM to Yen. For me, I sometimes convert ahead of time for the purpose of budgeting, or if the currency I'm converting to is on the rise and want to lock in the "good rate" ahead of time.

Yes, it will always use the Yen currency first. You may refer to the following image and the bullet points.

As mentioned before, this image will answer your question. Basically it will automatically determine which is the best currency to convert from your available balances to help you save (In this case SGD rate to convert to USD is better than MYR). Subsequently, also mentioned in the image, you cannot set a preferred balance to deduct from. If you want to avoid this in the future, you have to convert to that targeted balance using your currency of choosing (MYR for example) before making the purchase.

Yup, just that first purchase need to use PIN to activate the contactless feature of the card.

Normal for it to say pending, as the amount is being processed to transfer to merchant's bank account. Usually will clear in 2 days.