Still love it
The consensus from the feedback I have had so far is that for most people Transferwise is the best option for moving money abroad. If you are sending large amounts or need the funds to arrive quickly GoRemit might be a better fit.
I’ve been using Transferwise since we wrote about it, and so far I still love the service. I have sent money to myself in the UK, to my daughter in Singapore, and to my brother in Sweden.
Each time setting up a new beneficiary and doing the transfer took just a couple of minutes online and the funds arrived within a day or two (to Singapore was same day).
I had one small hiccup when I made the first transfer to Singapore, as Transferwise needed my My Number in order to comply with Japanese regulations. I had set up my account before that law came into effect, so that caused a delay for a few days as they requested the documents, I submitted them, and they confirmed them.
Normally they take care of this when you sign up, so anyone opening a new account won’t have that problem. If you have an older account that you haven’t used for a while it might be worth checking to see if all your info is up to date.
So why am I such a big fan?
- The website is in English, it’s simple and easy to use, and everything can be done online easily.
- The fee is low and the exchange rate is as good as you are going to get (they use the interbank rate).
- Setting up new beneficiaries can be done online in minutes, and the site remembers information from previous transfers so sending money to the same person takes seconds to set up.
Any drawbacks?
- You can use a debit or credit card to fund some transfers (for a fee) but the cheapest option is to send money from your bank to Transferwise’s account in Japan. This could take time and cost money, depending on your bank.
- Er, that’s about it.
Right now I think Transferwise is the best option to send money abroad from Japan. If you are still using the Post Office or your bank, I really recommend you check it out. You won’t regret it 🙂
How about you? How do you send money abroad? Any experiences with Transferwise?
I love it. I used it a lot this year and have never had any problems. The biggest issue was just that my bank in Japan only lets me send 200,000 yen at a time via online banking so if I wanted to send more than that I had to go to the bank in person. But that is nothing to do with Transferwise as they let you send up to a million in one go. It is by far the most painless way I have found to send money abroad.
Well, you found it and told me about it in the first place! Thank you 🙂
Check Shinsei out. They are wonderful for online banking, and give you free tranfers every month.
Still easily the cheapest and fastest way to send money abroad by far, especially when compared to the competition in Japan!
One potential pitfall is that the receipts issued by TransferWise might not be accepted by the bureaucracy if we need to claim dependent tax breaks during tax filing returns season – been using Rakuten’s overseas wire transfer service specifically for that.
If anyone has had any experience with that it would be highly helpful =)
Has anyone tried to send money from somewhere else TO Japan using TransferWise? Is this service available from anywhere to anywhere?
It still works, but Japan requires that incoming transfers be doing internationally, so the service is similar to banks from abroad (but with much better exchange rates).
Looking just now at Transferwise, key point for the fee seems to be ¥508,000. This is when the fee hits ¥4000, which is what wiring money via a bank usually costs. If you’re sending the million yen max, it looks kind of expensive, ¥7900, so it seems suited to smaller transfers.
The convenience of it being online is a big positive, and it sounds similar to how using shinsei’s system for domestic transfers works, applied to international transactions. Being able to transfer to multiple accounts is also a plus for US persons caught in the rules web without a US account to which they could use initially, and then make payments from there.
With the normal shinsei service for wiring money (not GoRemit) you can register one account, and you have to go to a physical branch to do that. After that you can transfer with a phone call, tho it can be a little tedious while they read the info back to you to confirm that, and then run thru a list of questions about DPRK and Iran.
Personally, I keep a US$ account at shinsei, and accumulate money there sometimes well before a transfer, so I don’t think I’ve ever done f/x at the time of a transfer.
(And if you’re a platinum customer, you get one international transfer per month, free. The best deal of all.)
Make sure you compare the rate as well as the fee. For most providers, it is much worse.
Sure. I watched the Transferwise video and took a look. They use the interbank rate? Is that TTS at the moment they do it, or maybe TTM (that they’d get the following day) for the day the transfer was initiated?
I’m not sure about other banks, but shinsei presents three TTS numbers depending on your customer status. For example, right now they are 112.23 (0.15), 112.17 (0.09), and 112.15 (0.07). Numbers in ( ) are exchange fees.
I’m guessing, but with GoRemit, since it’s also shinsei, you’d get that first set of numbers.
The “interbank rate” sounds fair, and it probably is better than a person would get, but it’s not something magically correct. That’s wholesale rather than retail–but it’s still a market, with spot trades, and derivatives, and things that go beyond me. People are in it for the money, trying to scrape some decimal places off for their own.
Shinsei’s platinum TTS and TTB rates are now 112.15 and 112.01 so imagine an interbank rate between them of 112.08.
For a ¥300,000 transfer, getting 112.08 vs 112.23 will save you $3.58 (while the Transferwise fee of ¥2381 would eat into that). Not much, IMO.
If it can be managed, instead of three ¥300,000 transfers a year, sending 900k once via GoRemit (¥2000) would save quite a bit.
¥2381 x 3 = ¥7143 – ¥2000 = ¥5143 in savings.
What do you think?
We went into this quite a bit in the comments on the first Transferwise post. The conclusion was that Goremit works better for large transfers and if you need it there within a day or so. Fixed fee of 2000 yen. However, you have to set up new beneficiaries by post (can’t do it online). Recipient bank may charge a fee.
I had to go into the branch last time I sent money with Shinsei to set it up -took about an hour. Only one beneficiary is allowed. The fee is 4,000 yen unless you are Platinum. The fee is charged for unsuccessful transfers, something Transferwise doesn’t do. Current exchange rates (including the fee) seem to be 112.24 for Platinum, 112.28 for Gold, and 112.4 for Standard. Recipient bank may charge a fee.
When I checked just now, TW exchange rate is 112.01 yen to the dollar, Goremit is 113.15 today.
Basically I think Transferwise is better for smaller amounts, has a much easier system to navigate, and blows the competition away in terms of how easy it is to set up transfers to new recipients.
If you are only ever going to send large transfers to yourself, Goremit might be a better fit, but otherwise Transferwise is wonderful.
And you can always use them both for different purposes, eh? 😉