Brendan Dawes
The Art of Form and Code

Using Transferwise Borderless Accounts To Save Money When Getting Paid by International Clients

Probably like you, my clients are spread across the globe. Even though home is a Victorian seaside town in the North of England, the beauty of the web makes that fact irrelevant, meaning the work is without borders. Yet borders rear their ugly head when it comes time to getting paid by an international client. The fess banks charge, not to mention the time to process a transaction always seems crazy to me. Why does it cost so much to process a payment that exists purely as an electronic transaction?

I happened to have a moan about this on Twitter — a great platform for a good moan — and Jon Moss came back to me and told me about Transferwise. Transferwise's core business is the transferring of money across countries. I've used it several times when I've needed to pay for something, such as a supplier on Alibaba, saving money in the process compared to banks, but were it really came into its own was when I used their Borderless Accounts.

Borderless accounts mean you can setup a bank account in other currencies such as EUR or USD and get bank details for that country. So for EUR you get German bank details. For USD you get USA details — all for free.

On my invoices I put the relevant local bank details for that currency which the client can use to pay me. After getting notified in the Transferwise app I can then transfer the money into my business account — all for a very small fee. The transfer into my account usually takes less than five seconds.

This is now my default for getting paid by international clients and I would highly recommend it.