“I hate you a Merry Christmas.”
This unexpected message popped up on our street’s WhatsApp group from one of the neighbours. Seconds later, with impeccable timing, he followed it up with a hurried “WISH!!! I meant to type WISH! 🤣🤣🤣 ”
I say impeccable timing because his follow-up arrived just as I was about to tap the send button on a smart-arse reply. Close call. Smart-arse comments are only funny before the correction; if you make a smart-arse comment afterwards, everyone thinks you’re being a smart-arse.
Still, now I feel inspired to fire off a dozen WhatsApp messages of badwill of my own to people who are sufficiently far away not to represent any immediate danger, following them up immediately with an explanatory note that I had meant to write “All the best for the New Year!” but that a random typo had caused autocorrect to change it to “Go fuck yourself and your ugly wife.”
Come on, who hasn’t made this simple mistake at one time or another? Besides, they should count themselves lucky to hear from me at all, given that my mobile telecoms were a gnat’s cock away from being blocked for non-payment.
Yes, everyone is feeling the pinch but no, I am not so short of money that I feel the need to shoplift from my mobile contract supplier. But thank you for empathising. I do pay my bills. Except, leading up to this Christmas, I discovered that I wasn’t. More precisely, my business bank account wasn’t.
After two years of delivering reliable and utterly uneventful business banking, my not-really-a-bank Wise (previously known as Transferwise) suddenly began sending me emails threatening to stop the service unless I supply some extra forms within two weeks. Was I about to be ‘Faraged’?
Wise, you may know, is one of those international money transfer services where you hold multiple virtual accounts, each with their own unique IBANs, in various currencies. That suits me as I am tax-resident in France but practically all of my clients are in the UK; they pay me in UK pounds and the sum gets converted to euros instantly at minimal cost. Ordinary business expenses are then paid by direct debit directly from the euro account. Wise led me though the necessary ID and registration checks to set up a business account two years ago: a sensible obligation under money laundering legislation.
However, something happened at the beginning of December – a legal thing in Belgium, I hear – which must have put the wind up Wise like last night’s reheated bean casserole. It demanded that I complete and return a mysterious ‘authorisation letter’ otherwise it would no longer be able to offer me business banking.
I say the ‘authorisation letter’ was mysterious because Wise provided a link to download a template for me to use… but the link was broken, redirecting to the Wise homepage. Obviously this is a bank with no staff so I fought my way through 147 irrelevant FAQs before reaching the super-reluctant Oh Well If You Absolutely Insist Here’s A Form To Send Us A Message page.
“What ‘authorisation letter’? Where is it?” I asked, more than once. Days later, I would receive email acknowledgments of my query along with a reminder that I should submit the ‘authorisation letter’ as soon as possible, unhelpfully not answering my query but helpfully adding that now I had only one week left to do it.
I was travelling (for work as it happens) when it dawned on me that perhaps the weblink to the mysterious ‘authorisation letter’ might only be broken due to a casual typo. I tried every possible permutation of the domain and experimented with alternative punctuation until the answer dawned on me. What if autocorrect on the computer they use at Wise Towers didn’t liked the European spelling of authorisation and had switched it to rootin’ tootin’ authorization (i.e. with a ‘z’) without telling anyone?
So having pasted the original weblink into my browser’s URL field, I changed the ‘z’ to an ’s’ and tapped Return. It worked – I was in!
I duly navigated my way to the PDF template most appropriate to my business as a sole trader and obtained the now-not-so-mysterious ‘authorisation letter’. This, it turned out, expected me to list in detail all the appointed representatives to whom I have granted permission to use my business bank account on my behalf. Until I could name this representative, I could not submit the form.
Evidently Wise has trouble understanding the expression ‘sole trader’.
I was obliged to complete the form by naming myself as the appointed alternative representative who can act in my place when I am not available. I even had to provide two signatures: once as my own representative, and another to confirm that my first signature was genuine.
Genius bit of form design, that. It ranks alongside the following splendid example of customer signage:
The problem was that I needed to print the letter in order to sign it, and if you remember, I was travelling at the time. So when I got home at the end of the week, on deadline day in fact, I printed, completed, scanned and returned the form. Oof! Just in time!
A couple of days later, suppliers began contacting me to say that my latest direct debit had been refused. Naturally, everyone wants to be paid before Christmas, but my bank was not paying. Sure enough, Wise had frozen my account pending their authorisation letter check. Unfortunately, this also meant I couldn’t actually pay my own salary to myself before Christmas either, nor could I transfer funds in or out to my other Wise accounts.
I ran around settling monthly subs for my mobile phone, internet connection, cloud services etc, the direct debit dates for all of which were piling in now that the end of the year was nigh. How long would Wise take to complete their check? Annual subs for big stuff such as liability insurance were coming up. The tax office will be asking for its quarterly payment soon, and that’s not the kind of sum I keep in petty cash.
After two dullards in Wise’s call centre tried to fob me off with “That department will deal with your query in due course, not to worry”, they stopped answering any more of my calls. I got a similar “We’re here to help, but it’s not our department, so we are not going to” response from the Wise channel on X. I even volunteered to close my business account out of my own free will if it was causing them so much embarrassment with the Belgian authorities – but Wise wouldn’t even let me do that.
…
Today is Christmas Day and all is well. My Wise business account was eventually unblocked. Everyone got paid on time. I managed to pay myself too, so Christmas was saved.
What’s that? Why am I still banking with Wise after what they put me though? Well, I admit I did get quite huffy and tried to move my business to another bank in a hissy fit. The first one I tried was Revolut and I never got any further. Its onboarding is a kafkaesque glory hole which prevents you from completing the registration process until you enter a six-figure serial number that you can only obtain once your have already registered.
After two days of dicking around trying to register with Revolut, I gave up. If that’s what popular, everyday app-based banking is like, I’ll stick with Wise for a bit longer. At least until one of these banks hires somebody to work in customer support. Preferably someone who gives a flying fuck.
No hard feelings, then. I even thanked Wise for belatedly sorting out the massive headache they had caused me and I sent them my very best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.
It’s not my fault if autocorrect might have mangled the message slightly.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He welcomes suggestions for international business banking alternatives that would be suitable for a profession libérale rather than a nail bar or online shop.
In the words of the great Joe Walsh, 'I have accountants pay for it all.'
Over the years I have found that my time and energy are much better spent doing what I do best rather than the tedious and somewhat laborious task of managing finances. I do the computer systems and the accountants do the money, a fair division of labour by anyone's standards.
And the beauty of this system, it just works, they do their job, for which they are handsomely recompensed, the bills are all paid on time and I don't have to give a flying fuck about how the operation actually takes place. Win-win
Merry Christmas to all
A Christmas Dabbsy article! Allah be praised!