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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried Wise (formerly TransferWise)? I don't know if they have issues with transfers to Ukraine, but in general they have provided an excellent service for paying contractors in foreign currency.

We also use Deel and I can recommend it. It's $50/month for contractors which is usually sufficient depending on employment law (FTE through Deel is more expensive ). They handle all payments and we just connect our bank account. Contractors can choose to be paid in their currency which is facilitated through Wise.

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In a previous role I used to pay contractors all over the world - Estonia, Kenya, France, Italy, Spain, Peru, South Korea, China and the UK just to name a few.

TransferWise was awesome at what it did, and it was pretty quick too. In some cases I could send money straight to my employee's phones - particularly in Kenya (via M-PESA) and China (via some sort of Wise-WeChat partnership). The fees were very competitive & reasonable, and their customer support was great in the few times I needed it to be. Can't recommend them enough.

Huge fan of Wise.

I use Wise to transfer USD to CAD and pay friends/family via Interac (Canadian electronic bank transfer where all you need is someone's registered email address).

It's a brilliantly smooth experience, perfectly acceptable fees given the alternatives. Being able to go US bank account -> Canadian interac is worth a lot to me. I'm grateful they exist.

I haven't. To detail the issue, going through the banking system, there seems to be a non-zero chance that the transfer will be parked at a bank in NY. No one knows why, but everyone assumes it's because the US government decided to look at the transaction. Sometimes the money is returned, sometimes it's forwarded on... I haven't been able to talk to anyone at that bank or in the government, to tell them why I'm sending money to UKR.

I definitely recommend Deel. Your payments will be to one company and they'll handle everything else.

I can't comment on whether they work well for payments to Ukraine because we don't have any contractors there. But we've had no problems in the countries where we do use Deel.

That could be a reason to use Wise. You send money to Wise (in the same country), and they transfer money to the account in the other country. I think it works in part by assuming that they have currency in that other country, so they can avoid conversion fees.

Although I have no idea if that works for Ukraine. This page has some interesting bits: https://wise.com/help/articles/2932349/guide-to-uah-transfer...

You could also consider offering your contractors payment in Euro, if they're able to setup an account that can receive it. That way you'll avoid the issues caused by exchange rate volatility, although you might still run into KYC issues due to recipient location.

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