International payments - recommended bank or service?

[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]

Is https://wise.com a good option?
I am now reading the discussions here.

[RetireJapan]

Wise is great, especially if you are dealing with one of the countries they offer 'virtual' bank accounts in.

[Bubblegun]

Wise is great, especially if you are dealing with one of the countries they offer 'virtual' bank accounts in.

Absolutely wise!

[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.

[MacAddict]

Thank you very much for the informative responses.