Transferwise Borderless Account

[jamesbrown]

I'm not sure I understand your question. With a TW USD borderless account, you get a "proper" US bank account number and routing code, so from a client's perspective it's no different from a domestic wire transfer.

Is the USD account a holding account operated by Transferwise? To whom do your clients direct payments; YourCo or Transferwise?

[SuperLooper]

Is the USD account a holding account operated by Transferwise? To whom do your clients direct payments; YourCo or Transferwise?

Here's a screenshot of the dashboard. It lists my Ltd as the account holder, but Transferwise as the address. I gave these bank details to my client and it "just worked".

[seanalltogether]

So I did a USD transfer from HSBC to Transferwise, and used Transferwise to then convert the funds to GBP. HSBC charged some fees for this transfer, which is why the overall saving was only around £30.

My next step is to have my clients pay the USD directly into my Transferwise account, so avoiding HSBC altogether. The first such payment is due to arrive this week. When it arrives, I intend to transfer the same USD amount from both my HSBC account and the Transferwise account on the same day. This will give me a more useful comparison, and I hope it will show a significant saving with Transferwise.

Ok that makes sense. I still have a USD bank account in America as well, so I don't pay any fees to get money from that account to Transferwise, it's simply a direct debit. So my total savings is £100 on a 5k transfer vs HSBC internal exchange, which I imagine you will see as well with a borderless account.

[yasockie]

My only concern with this is Transferwise don't seem to allow transfers in a given currency to an account outside a given country.
So if you wanted to keep your USD as USD in an actual bank in the UK, you'd have to convert to GBP first and let your bank convert back to USD or something crazy like that.
If you feel that USD will do better over time than GBP, your only choice is to keep it on Borderless account and the new 'fintech' aren't that good with the 'tech' bit of it just yet:

Why Monzo, Revolut, Loot, and Curve went down on Sunday March 5 - Business Insider

and there is another outage of many 'fintechs' today.

Not good if you absolutely must do a transfer today.

[SuperLooper]

So I did a USD transfer from HSBC to Transferwise, and used Transferwise to then convert the funds to GBP. HSBC charged some fees for this transfer, which is why the overall saving was only around £30.

My next step is to have my clients pay the USD directly into my Transferwise account, so avoiding HSBC altogether. The first such payment is due to arrive this week. When it arrives, I intend to transfer the same USD amount from both my HSBC account and the Transferwise account on the same day. This will give me a more useful comparison, and I hope it will show a significant saving with Transferwise.

Following on from my previous post, today I transferred the same USD amount ($4200) from both my traditional HSBC USD account and from my Transferwise Borderless account. The Transferwise came in £43 cheaper.

GBP received from HSBC: £3175
GBP received from Transferwise: £3218
GBP at spot exchange rate from Google: £3248

So on a $10k transfer I'd expect to be saving around £100 which is worthwhile.

[seanalltogether]

Following on from my previous post, today I transferred the same USD amount ($4200) from both my traditional HSBC USD account and from my Transferwise Borderless account. The Transferwise came in £43 cheaper.

GBP received from HSBC: £3175
GBP received from Transferwise: £3218
GBP at spot exchange rate from Google: £3248

So on a $10k transfer I'd expect to be saving around £100 which is worthwhile.

Interesting, you're definitely getting a better rate from HSBC then me, do you have a business account? I just did a quote now and got.

$4200 on HSBC = £3129.59
$4200 on Transferwise = £3,210.70

[SuperLooper]

Interesting, you're definitely getting a better rate from HSBC then me, do you have a business account?

Yes, I have USD and GBP business accounts with HSBC.