Nowhere in this blog does it mention what the business actually does, which is always a red flag. I've seen plenty of stripe bashing posts on HN that end up with the business being in newsletter scams or adult content.
If you've ever dealt with financial institutions in a meaningful way, you'd know that the self-service variety, or the HSBC variety, will create hurdles and enforce policies arbitrarily with no recourse, care or concern for your well-being.
ISPs that host illegal content can indeed be outside the risk tolerance of a financial services company. The blog post is very careful to say "one of our companies" and censor the name of it on screenshots so I'll be interested to see what it is.
You can look up the blog author yourself if you're interested. It looks like the typical small NZ "does several things because the local market is so small" kind of business. Local laws here are a bit more strict on hosting content so that seems unlikely, and would the minions at Wise even look into that side of things?
Yep, small is correct, the blogger's companies are all focused on South Canterbury and headquartered in Timaru (for non-Kiwis, 55K people live in South Canterbury, and 29K of them live in Timaru. Massive shit-ton of cows though).
Oh no… god forbid - adult content lol. Yes regardless of the content if the business is legal and they only changed an address that’s not a reason to have this level of shit support and no way to escalate and contact a human…
I don't agree with those policies but it's a possible reason for a financial services business to break a relationship if they discover incidentally that this guys business is breaking the law. Changes the blog post completely and the business info should have been included.
As a heuristic, using TransferWise is traditionally associated with Russian money laundering scams.
