Instant 24/7 payouts to Ukraine

Every day, a lot of people who send money to Ukraine with Wise say goodbye to expensive bank fees and horrible exchange rates. Although we were happy to help our customers to save money, we knew we were far from our objective of instant transfers.

Sending money to Ukraine with Wise has been quite slow. The majority of transfers only reached the recipient’s account 2 days after the transfer was set up. That’s because, unlike most other currencies, processing UAH payments previously required a lot of manual work for Wise. This wasn’t sustainable, so we started to work on automating UAH payouts.

UAH payments closer to lightning speed!

Thankfully, these changes have already made a huge impact. Before, more than 50% of the transfers to UAH took a couple days to reach the recipient. Now, it only takes seconds, or a few minutes at most, to pay out Ukrainian Hryvnia. But not only that – instead of only paying out during business hours on work days, we now also pay out 24/7!

Here’s how that impacts our customers’ lives

In the last week of manual UAH payouts, the majority of payments effectively reached the recipient bank account in Ukraine 2 days after our customers set up the transfer on Wise. By now, all transfers to UAH are going out automatically. Over 90% of those transfers are now same day transfers.

Why do 10% of payouts still take longer?

Sometimes payouts get rejected by Privatbank. This is because the entered recipient name or recipient phone number doesn’t completely match up with what’s in the Privatbank system.

It can even happen if you’ve sent to a UAH recipient without problems for years. And now you’re getting an automated error message that says something isn’t right. This is a bad customer experience — we feel your pain.

So, if your payout gets rejected, make sure you check out our FAQs for tips on how to update your recipient details.

Wise is working hard with Privatbank to make sure fewer of your payments are being rejected. We know it’s not a great customer experience, which is why we’re committed to changing that. With Privatbank’s help, we will be able to bring this rejection rate closer to zero.

A borderless world brought to you by a borderless team

At Wise, we aim to bring our little revolution to every corner of the world. We work hard on creating a borderless world where people can move their money instantly, conveniently, transparently, and eventually for free. We know it won’t be easy, but we are determined to make it happen.

We work towards this borderless world in a team with 76 nationalities. For example, 24/7 instant UAH payouts were made possible by this team of borderless human beings:

From left to right:

• Katja, Latvia, payment processing
• Yurii, Ukraine, banking conversations & local insight
• Pradatta, India, engineering
• Gina, Germany, product
• Bright, Ghana, engineering

We know that we’re not there yet, but our team continues to work hard to reach our mission — so payments to Ukraine can be faster, cheaper and more convenient for you.

Onwards!