Just wondering if Patreon has ever considered partnering with TransferWise for payments?
They’re not another PayPal or Stripe, what they’re doing is far more disruptive because unlike other online payment services, TransferWise has the lowest fees for sending/receiving money in different currencies because they use the real exchange rate.
Here’s a quick video to explain how it works:
Problems that TransferWise could solve:
Enable different payout currencies for international creators
Much lower fees
Payments go directly to creators’ bank account (cuts out the middleman like PayPal etc)
Please look into partnering with TransferWise.
As a creator in the EU, it’s always frustrating having to pay hidden currency conversion fees. So even if Patreon currently charges a low fee of 5% , with all the currency conversion fees, it’s not unusual that I end up paying maybe another 3-5% on top of that.
That’s a very good question, and I don’t know what their policy is on that. But all public pages/posts on Patreon should be SFW since payment processors demanded that, so hopefully it’s not an issue for them any more? It certainly sucks that payment processors are so strict about it.
In their usage agreement, it states that it does not provide services to businesses or support transactions that involve: (…) adult content.
The thing about payment processors is adult content is not about whether it’s visible or not. The problem is that adult content carries elevated risk. Chargeback is HUGE with adult content, making everything much riskier. Plus, unless you have extremely strict, robust filtering/enforcement, they might be unwittingly participating in illegal activity. They have to be strict on it. It’s a part of business.
So unfortunately, unless Patreon can strike a deal with them, TransferWise is out of the question
Hey @Maarika, thanks for making this post! As a Brit myself, I use TransferWise monthly and am personally a huge fan of their service
I’ve passed this request to our payments team who are constantly evaluating new partners to help creators. Plus, as we mentioned in our new creator plans, one of the things we’ll be able to do is invest in core features and services to make Patreon better for all creators. One of things on our roadmap is to build a world class payments infrastructure, including annual plans and internationalization, especially for Euro and GBP countries.
+1 to the request for support for TransferWise. We’re already using it for other aspects of our multinational team, so we keep a pretty close eye on exchange rates, and TransferWise has much better exchange rates than Payoneer. Perhaps even if not available for payments by patrons, it would be great to have it as an option for creators to cash out with.
I have to say that even though I haven’t used Transferwise before, I’m hearing good things and I would love to have a way to convert money with lesser fees… So I’d say I would love for Patreon to explore this too!
It would be great of Patreon could work together with Transferwise as it would safe a whole lot of costs on both sides. As we are having a worldwide community we also will receive funds in lots of different currencies and Transferwise is actually the best way to transfer those funds to us with the least cost.
This has become all the more important now paypal has just removed the ability to add US Bank accounts. They now have a 3% fee on USD transfers so the transferwise trick no longer works with them.
Please look at adding transferwise support for payouts as soon as possible.
