Dear Customers:
Right now we are experiencing temporary issues with accepting your payments at wise.com (a fintech service which manages our Estonian entity CADEX-SOFT's bank accounts). This post explains what is happening and measures we are undertaking to address the trouble.
Executive Summary:
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Due to ongoing KYC procedures by Wise.com CADEX-SOFT is currently unable to receive incoming clients' payments and confidently provide production license keys in return.
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Funds do reach Wise but are paused and are not credited to our account. Our portal does not allow us to see whose funds have arrived and are waiting.
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Estimated time can be at least one more week but this is uncertain.
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Per Wise support team, the funds may return to payers if the Wise's underwriting team cannot complete their job on time.
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Such KYC procedures were regular in the past but typically took 1-3 business days making no substantial harm. This time it dramatically undermines customer experience and our operations, and forces us to find short- (and longer-) term solutions.
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A short-term solution will be to use our entity CDX GROUP (UAE) (a sister company of CADEX-SOFT, with similar full direct ownership of mine), as an authorized party to accept payments on behalf of CADEX-SOFT.
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Our Sales team will provide you with instructions on how to proceed depending on your case.
Details:
What
On October 18 wise.com abruptly initiated KYC (Know Your Customer) procedures on our account requesting details. Although some outgoing and incoming transfers still work (such as service subscriptions via bank card or random incoming clients' payments), most have been put on hold. (By the way, my personal account in Wise continues to function as usual.)
We have full access to our Wise's customer portal but it does not even allow us to see which incoming payments are waiting to be credited - so we don't even know which customers we could proactively contact to explain the delay.
Upon receiving Wise's inquiry, we certainly quickly provided requested papers. However, their compliance team's responsiveness is very slow and only in a few days did they respond that they meant other papers (although we provided exactly what they requested, what they asked for on the second step was nowhere mentioned). It took them other two days to reply that these papers were good but ... uploaded to a wrong account. Apparently due to some browser's cookies clicking their email link to submit papers for business account opened my personal account page.
On October 25 they responded the following:
Thanks for sending that information over!
Our team is reviewing the provided documents — we’ll be in touch if we need anything else, or if we have an update about your verification.
This should only take 3-10 working days.
Best regards,
Wise"
Well, 3 and 10 working days make big difference to say the least!
I am in a daily contact with their support team which takes about 24 hours to respond.
This is what I received on late evening of October 30:
Customer Service unfortunately cannot speed up the process as it is done by another team."
Why
Wise, being a financial institution, has to comply with financial regulations and we had such KYC inquiries on a quite regular basis in the past (once every 6 months or so). They were typically very fast but this time it takes them an extended period of time leading to undermined customer experience and our operations.
Based on recent reviews on the Internet, it seems there are numerous users - both individual and business - suffering from this right now. Their support team notified us that if their compliance team cannot complete their due diligence on time, they would be sending funds back, which will cause even greater frictions and confusions for our customers and us.
Our actions
We have been an excited and loyal user of Wise for the last few years but this experience shakes our confidence in them.
This is the reason why we have to undertake special measures to reduce the negative impact of the current situation, as follows:
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Customers (recent and existing) with agreements, already executed with CADEX-SOFT with upcoming invoices will receive invoices issued by CDX GROUP, to be paid to it.
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Existing customers who recently sent their funds to our CADEX-SOFT account at Wise will receive our notification. If the Wise's compliance team completes their KYC procedures and the funds get credited to our account, we will just proceed in a normal way. If the clients' funds are sent back by Wise, we will reissue the invoice from the CDX GROUP. We will reimburse bank commissions that might have been applied due to this change. In either case, we will be providing temporary production license keys to cover this period.
With exception to Estonian or UAE companies (which are not numerous in our customer base), this change causes no VAT tax implications.
I sincerely apologize for all the inconveniences being caused by our neo-bank and I am looking forward to getting things back on track.
Thank you for your patience and cooperation while we are resolving this.
Roman Lygin