With Wise, you can send US dollars to bank accounts that are denominated in USD outside the US. This way, businesses who need to pay USD invoices or send money to an account outside the US can do so without using their bank.
USD is sent to bank accounts outside the US via the SWIFT payment network. This is different than a regular Wise transfer and might take a day or 2 longer. It also costs a bit more, but is still cheaper than more traditional methods of sending money overseas.
If you’re sending USD to a bank account in Hong Kong, we’ll pay out your USD locally through CHATS system.
How it works
Set up your transfer. You’ll need to add a new recipient.
Select the recipient bank account country. Even though the account’s in USD, choose the country you’re sending money to.
Add the account number and SWIFT code of the recipient’s bank account. Transferring to an email address isn’t supported yet.
Pay for your transfer. You can pay using any of the currencies we support, as well as USD. We’ll send the USD to your recipient as usual.
Your recipient may have to pay a fee to their bank when the money arrives — it’s a part of using SWIFT.
How much it costs
Wise supports sending USD to people outside of the US, but to do this, we need to send your transfer via the SWIFT network.
Sending with the SWIFT network is a bit like travelling from one airport to another — it’s not always possible to take a direct flight, so you may need to travel from one city to another via several connecting flights. The SWIFT network works essentially the same way.
The money will travel from one country to another, but to do that, there are often correspondent banks involved. These correspondent banks often charge their own fee.
To improve this, Wise covers the fee automatically if we predict that your payment might get charged. To predict these fees, we have built a prediction tool for the correspondent bank fees and speed, based on historical data.
When we predict that no correspondent fees will be charged, we only charge a sending fee of 2.90 USD. When we predict that some fees will be charged, we charge 14 USD.
This way, we make sure that you pay as little as possible, and that your recipient is receiving the right amount.