International payments - recommended bank or service?

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MacAddict
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International payments - recommended bank or service?

Post by MacAddict »

I have a question about international payments.
I am looking for a bank or service that an overseas (UK and USA) contractor can occasionally deposit my payment, and I can freely access within Japan.
Dealing with Mitsui and Michinoku Japanese banks (my current accounts) have not been helpful.
What bank or service do you recommend? Thank you.
MacAddict
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Re: International payments - recommended bank or service?

Post by MacAddict »

Is https://wise.com a good option?
I am now reading the discussions here.
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RetireJapan
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Re: International payments - recommended bank or service?

Post by RetireJapan »

Wise is great, especially if you are dealing with one of the countries they offer 'virtual' bank accounts in.
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Bubblegun
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Re: International payments - recommended bank or service?

Post by Bubblegun »

RetireJapan wrote: Sun Feb 13, 2022 2:56 am Wise is great, especially if you are dealing with one of the countries they offer 'virtual' bank accounts in.
Absolutely wise!☝️☝️
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imaginatorium
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Re: International payments - recommended bank or service?

Post by imaginatorium »

Yes, we use Wise and are very happy with them. But notice that there are two quite distinct ways in which a person in the Netherlands (for example, but I happen to have examples of both) can send you money.

1: A casual (retail) customer - I can just give the details of our Euro account, and they make a local transfer, which is either free or very inexpensive. We have to calculate the Euro amount, and we are liable for any exchange rate fluctuations.

2: A trade customer - we want to give the maximum possible discount, so we need to know that we will receive exactly some yen amount. This customer sends a yen payment to us through Wise, which they then fund with a local transfer to the Wise Euro account number. This is a bit more fiddle to set up (and I can't immediately recall the details), and in particular they have to be able to copy paste my name in katakana, for example.

The obvious country where I don't think we have yet used Wise is the US. I do not understand the US system (for anything, actually!) very well, but it rather seems there is not a very simple local transfer mechanism - customers always want to use credit cards, with the associated extra costs.
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MacAddict
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Re: International payments - recommended bank or service?

Post by MacAddict »

Thank you very much for the informative responses.
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