A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down

Story as old as time. Fintechs may be cheaper or have a cooler app, but if you ever stray off the happy path, you can kiss your account and/or money goodbye.

What’s the difference between that and traditional banking?

Been party to more than a couple situations with large banks who decided that you violated some hidden AML related policy and with zero recourse. You are lucky to even get your money out of those accounts without lengthy litigation.

Might happen more with fintech, but traditional banking does not remotely make you immune to this. Start doing anything interesting not “normal” and you’ll find out the hard way.

With a traditional bank you can walk into a branch and explain the situation to a human. I've had to do this several times with my large US bank, one time when traveling but thankfully to a place where they had a branch. In the end things got fixed up but not without much time and hassle expended.

I get the impression these institutions run ML software that was written by people who knew it would generate false positives but is now run by people who have been told that it is always correct. I say this having seen a bank manager call the group responsible on an internal phone line and them tell the manager that they suspect they (the branch manager) is a fraudster.