Paying overseas suppliers from a payout account

Why the outbound leg is its own problem

Our guide to dropshipping payment methods in Nigeria covers this leg in one country. What it cannot do is take apart the leg itself: what a provider requires of a business payment, and what it still asks for after you press send. For where this leg sits in the chain, see our overview of how sales channels pay out.

One note on sources. The rules below come from Wise's help centre, which publishes them as rules. The Payoneer and WorldFirst material comes from those companies' own product pages — a different kind of evidence, labelled as such each time rather than blended in.

Who the payment has to come from

Before a provider looks at where money is going, it looks at where it comes from: When you are sending money on behalf of your business, the money must come from your business bank account. This must be the same as the name of the business registered with us.

Two tests in two sentences: the funds have to originate from a business bank account, and the name on it has to match the business name registered with the provider. A sole trader paying a factory from a personal current account fails the first; a company whose bank account still carries a former trading name fails the second. Neither looks like a compliance problem from outside. It looks like a transfer that will not complete.

The account type matters on the provider's side too: Unfortunately, we can't accept payments from business bank accounts if you only have a personal Wise account. Charities and trusts sit in the same bucket — their payments count as business payments and have to be made on a business account.

Get the pairing wrong and the payment cannot be processed; the fix is yours to carry out: cancel, open a business account, start again. You can cancel while the money is still moving — your money is still on it's [sic] way to us you can cancel yourself, the possessive written that way in the original — and verifying a new account takes its own handful of business days, which is time your supplier spends waiting.

Whether your business type is on the list

Eligibility is decided by legal form, from a published list — and the restriction attached to that list carries a limit that is easy to miss.

Wise says that for a business registered in Brazil it supports only three entity types, and that for a business in the United Kingdom it currently does not support trusts or three kinds of limited partnership, while stating in the same article that These restrictions apply only to new business account registrations. If your business account is already verified and active, your account and services aren't affected. That qualification is part of the rule, not a footnote to it.

The supported list, as published: sole traders and freelancers / limited and public companies / Partnerships (some UK exceptions apply — see below) / Trusts registered in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.

The Brazilian narrowing, again aimed at new registrations: If your business is registered in Brazil , we only support / Empresário Individual, including MEI (Micro Empresa Individual) / Sociedade Limitada Unipessoal / Sociedade Unipessoal de Advocacia. The page expands MEI as "Micro Empresa Individual"; we have quoted it as written.

The UK exclusions, on the same new-registrations basis: If your business is in the United Kingdom , we currently don't support / Trusts / Scottish Limited Partnerships (SLPs) / English Limited Partnerships (ELPs) / Northern Ireland Limited Partnerships.

Separately, an activity list rules a business out however it is incorporated: cryptocurrency, tobacco and adult content among the published prohibited activities, Australian superannuation and self-managed superannuation funds, businesses offering goods or services relating to Cuba with US relations, and businesses with bearer shares. Change legal form later and expect to be re-verified, with proof of the change.

The balance that may only pay itself

This catches out sellers who have already solved the inbound side in Brazil, and it runs the opposite way. Under the heading for sending Brazilian reais held in a Wise account: Due to local regulations, IOF (Imposto sobre Operações Financeiras — financial operations tax) will be charged if you send or withdraw from BRL in another currency. / If you're sending from BRL that's in your personal account, you can only send to external personal bank accounts that you own. / If you're sending from BRL that's in a business account, you can only send to external business bank accounts owned by the same entity.

Read the last sentence slowly. A business balance in reais may be sent to external business bank accounts owned by the same entity. A supplier in Shenzhen is not the same entity. Neither is a sourcing agent, a fulfilment partner or a freelancer. So reais in a business balance are not a source of funds for paying a third party abroad at all — they are a route back to your own company's bank account and nothing else. If the plan was "collect in reais, pay suppliers from the balance", the plan does not survive that sentence.

Paying from a balance, or in from a bank

A supplier payment takes one of two shapes: send from a balance you hold, or push money in from an external bank account each time. Sending directly from the account is described as often faster, provided you have moved money into the balance first.

Cost follows the route. Transfers between two Wise accounts are free and instant unless a currency conversion is needed. Paying out to a bank account elsewhere is charged by currency, and on conversion the help centre is unambiguous: We'll always charge a conversion fee if you send money to a different currency. One more line contradicts the instinct that "sending dollars" is a single product: Please note, if you're sending USD, EUR, or GBP to a country outside of the US, SEPA Zone or the UK — we'll charge a higher fee.

No fee figures, percentages or thresholds appear anywhere on this page: a copied number goes wrong without telling you. The layers those fees sit in are taken apart in what cross-border settlement actually costs. Sending limits exist too, set by the currencies you send to and from and by how you pay, published per currency rather than as one headline figure. And if the option to pay from your main balance is greyed out, one documented cause is a fixed-target transfer — where the recipient receives an exact amount — with too little in the account to cover the fees on top.

Paying several suppliers at once

Past a handful of suppliers a month, batch payments are the published answer: upload one of the provider's batch templates, then make a single pay-in covering every payment in the batch. Suppliers are named explicitly among the intended recipients, alongside contractors, employees and investors. The boundaries matter as much as the feature:

• Web only. You can only set up a batch payment on the website.
• Recipients have to be real recipients. You can't send batch payments to your Wise Contacts (other Wise accounts without account details to receive money). You can only send these payments to recipients added to your Recipient list .
• Brazil is excluded. Batch payments are currently not available for Brazilian business. With the restriction above, a Brazilian seller paying a supplier roster from a local balance is blocked at two independent points, not one.

The reference your supplier needs to see

Suppliers reconcile by invoice number. If the reference does not arrive, your payment lands as an unexplained credit and somebody chases it by email. Wise publishes a table for this: For a lot of business transfers, this reference is crucial, so please check the table below to see the limitations on references in our receiving currencies. That sentence sets its scope: the limitations are for its own receiving currencies. Three more things are easy to misread, all three in the table's headings and cells:

• Its three column headings are "Currency", "Reference length allowed" and "Reference sending method". The third is not a format specification; it says how the reference travels. For a group of currencies, Swiss francs and Singapore dollars among them, the stated method is that it is sent via email only — the text does not ride along with the bank message your supplier's bank receives.
• Two rows are exceptions rather than lengths. The Colombian peso row says there is no reference, with the reason in the same cell: As recipients in Colombia must fill in a form to receive payment, any recipient would be aware of your incoming transfer. The Japanese yen row says no reference is included, and its sending-method cell is left blank.
• One length is conditional on the domestic route used, and the rails differ by currency: the South African rand's method is stated as a SWIFT transfer and the US dollar's as an ACH transfer, while most others are described simply as a bank transfer.

The allowed length differs by receiving currency and the table carries a figure for each; we are not reprinting those, for the same reason we are not reprinting fees. Read it on the day, and design your invoice reference to fit the shortest currency you actually pay in.

"Listed" is not the same as "supported"

There is a published list of countries and regions you can send money to, and it is routinely read as a list of places you can pay a supplier. The page says something narrower: Choose the one you're interested in to get more information, including what types of transfers you can send, and whether you can send business transfers. Whether you can send business transfers is, by that wording, a per-country question. A country in the list is reachable; that is all it tells you.

The list is a four-column table in which every header cell is empty, so there is nothing to infer from which column a country sits in.

One escape hatch is published alongside: You might still be able to send money to your recipient's country/region if their account is denominated in USD, EUR or GBP. If a supplier's country is awkward, the currency their account is held in may matter more than the country — ask them before you conclude the route is closed.

Proving where the money came from

This is not the identity check you passed at signup — that is our KYC guide, and it is about who you are. This is a separate set of documents that can be asked for at the moment you send, about where this particular money came from. Sellers conflate the two, then feel singled out when a verified account still gets questions. Three published details change how you prepare:

• You cannot pre-submit. There's no need to send documents in advance, because we can't check them before you set up a transfer. The review starts after the transfer does, so the files have to be ready on your side before you press send.
• A bank statement alone is usually not enough. Bank statements can help us to verify where your money came from, but they're usually not enough on their own. Pair them with the invoice, contract or payout report that explains the credit.
• The published list is examples, not a checklist you can complete. These are just examples, and we could ask for documents that aren't on this list. Translation is not required; documents can be sent in the original language.

Where you pay money in to fund a transfer, the proof of payment has to show your full name and account number, your bank's name or logo (for US dollars, Canadian dollars and Indian rupees, both), the provider's own name and account number, the date the payment was initiated, the amount, the currency, and your reference. Text pasted into an email is not accepted, nor a photo of your screen, bank-card photos, provider receipts or password-protected files. Over SWIFT the requirement is a specific message document: the proof of payment we need is an [sic] pacs.008 document, the article's own wording. From Australia or New Zealand a screenshot of online banking is explicitly not enough on its own; a recent bank statement showing your name, the issue date and your bank details is also required.

What Payoneer and WorldFirst say about themselves

Everything below is a company describing its own service on its own site — a weaker source than a published help-centre rule, and not dressed up as one.

Payoneer's supplier-payment page confirms the pattern this guide is about, using money that arrived from your sales channels to pay the people who supplied the goods: Whether you're earning funds to your Payoneer account first, or you just want to pay your contractors and suppliers from other payment sources, we have you covered. The funding routes it lists carry limits that have to travel with them: There are five ways we can help you send money around the globe. / Pay from your Payoneer balance / Pay by credit card / Pay by ACH bank debit (US only) / Pay by direct bank payment (UK only) / Pay by PayPal (US only). Three of the five are stated as available in one country only, so the routes actually open to a seller in Indonesia, Brazil or Nigeria are fewer than the headline count. The same pages describe payments to other Payoneer accounts as instant, and offer batch payments.

On cost, its help library says less than you might hope: The fee depends on whether you make a payment in the same currency as the recipient's bank account currency, or whether there is a need to exchange currency to make the payment. You can get complete details of the fees from the Fees page in your Payoneer account. / The relevant fee will be displayed for your review prior to completing the payment. Read the confirmation screen rather than budgeting from a blog post. Its help library also keeps "Withdrawals/Bank Accounts" and "Pay to a recipient's Payoneer account/recipient's bank account" as separate topics, matching the distinction this page is built on.

WorldFirst positions its business account around this leg explicitly: We'll help you pay suppliers and staff around the world as easily as if they were around the corner. Its navigation lists Solutions for / E-commerce sellers / Paying Chinese suppliers as a named use case, and its importer page advertises payments in a wide range of currencies, bulk payments by file upload and Xero integration. That is the extent of what its public pages establish.

We are not ranking these three: our comparison of PingPong, WorldFirst, Payoneer and Wise does that on the receiving side, and Wise vs Payoneer goes deeper on two of them.

What this guide does not tell you

A guide is more useful when it marks its own edges. We have written nothing about the following rather than filling the space with a plausible guess:

FAQ