Can You Use TransferWise to Make SEPA Payments?

Hi

I’m outside the EU and setup a TransferWise EUR account thinking I would be able to make payments to other European bank accounts as it has its own BIC and IBAN.

Today I tried my first trade and in TransferWise, when I enter in my trade partner’s IBAN, TransferWise is telling me it doesn’t support that bank and can’t proceed. I don’t know what to do. I have a BE account and was trying to send to a PT bank.

I also tried using TransferWise’s SWIFT option but it recognised the BIC I entered and wouldn’t proceed saying that I needed to use SEPA instead as I was trying to send money to another EU country.

I think I’ve messed up a trade.

I realise now after re-reading the Wiki that using TransferWise’s email address to send seems to be the only way to go, but there seems to be such thin volume with TransferWise as the payment option and I was really looking forward to being able to make SEPA transfers with all the EUR denominated offers.

  • Has anyone been able to get it to work and can pass on some tips?
  • Am I out of luck with this trade? and,
  • Am I out of luck with this method of payment all together?

Thanks

Hi @john9234 thanks for the post.

I think you were just unlucky with the seller you trader with. Most of the time this would have worked.

You can open mediation and inform the mediator you were unable to send penalty. Transferwise can be a bit particular about which banks it allows payments too.

The Transferwise email option is only for transferwise to transferwise payments.

You should be able to use your BE IBAN for both SEPA and SEPA Instant payments

Transferwise is great when it works. I would recommend taking another offer and trying it out and also adding SEPA Instant with your payment details to access as many offers as possible.

Thanks for your reply @Pazza

In the end I was very lucky, We used the chat and my trade partner had a TransferWise email and it all went through ok using it. I realised after completing the trade I should have chosen a safer method, eg the mediation as you mention. I’m just very fortunate that it seems most people in the Bisq community want to do the right thing.

Thanks for the encouragement, I will try another trade and for the sake of future forum members I’ll report back how I get on.

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For any future forum users wondering about this issue. Since writing initial query I

  • was able to complete a trade with ‘TransferWise’ as the payment option, and
  • complete a trade with ‘SEPA’ as the payment option

Hopefully it only affects a small percentage of potential banks as the EUR market is much, much larger than my local market so this is an ideal solution.

Best of luck everyone with your trades.

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I have also used Transferwise to send a SEPA payment. Once it worked fine. The other time Transferwise demanded the address of the recipient, which they hadn’t provided, so I had to use a different bank to send the SEPA payment. Fortunately the peer was understanding.

You both have been lucky in finding a peer that let you alter the agreed upon payment method, as instead they could very well have opened mediation on you, and the mediator, no matter how understanding they would have been, would have had to follow the Bisq platform rules, and impose a penalty on you for having used a different payment method.

The best practice in these cases, unless you have means of trusting the peer, because maybe they are people you already traded with in the past, is to open mediation, explain everything in detail, attaching proofs of what happened, and then the mediators themselves will suggest to use a different payment method if both peers agree to it. You would be playing by the rules this way.

Thanks for the clarification. I would have been more comfortable with that, too, and will certainly do that if it ever happens again.

I think you can send money to pretty much any bank account in the world with TWise, yo ujust enter the bank account number and name. It may not show up as a bank to bank payment but would go direct to their bank account and would have your name - but not strictly compliant with the trade specs so a seller could take it to mediation and have you penalized maybe, I’m not sure.
I’m also not sure if this is what you were trying to do, or were you stipulating that it showed as coming from your wise euro “bank” account?

Exactly my doubts… if you use Wise by sending from your own bank account to the recipient, it will definitely show as coming from Wise and so violating the trade procotol, but I’m not sure if sending from your Wise account directly will show as coming from the account coordinates you see for your Wise account, or still from wise itself.

If you send from your Wise SEPA account I am pretty sure the payment will be shown as coming from your WISE SEPA account details.

The problem occurs when you do not send from the chosen currency eg EUR and instead send from another currency eg GBP and let Wise do the conversion.

If you are using Wise as a SEPA account always send funds in Euros from your Euro account and the funds will be sent from your Wise SEPA account. A bonus of this is it is also SEPA Instant. Therefore when using Wise as a SEPA account you can add it both as a SEPA payment method and a SEPA Instant payment method.

The other time Transferwise demanded the address of the recipient, which they hadn’t provided, so I had to use a different bank to send the SEPA payment. Fortunately the peer was understanding.

This is annoying and Wise do tend to do it on occasion. If the payment is not a Wise payment and is instead a SEPA or SEPA Instant payment it is worth knowing Wise will not know the details of the other user. Therefore it should be ok to provide Wise with the address of the users bank. You can use a website like: IBAN Checker: Validate & Check IBAN Number for Errors to find the address of the user’s bank by looking up their IBAN.