Whether or not this is a problem depends on the kind of transfer you’ve made:
It’s not a problem if you sent money to your recipient’s bank account, and entered their bank details when you set up your transfer.
It is a problem if you didn’t know your recipient’s bank details, so you sent money to their email address.
If you made a regular transfer using your recipient’s bank details
Using the wrong email address for your recipient won’t stop your money being delivered. But it will stop your recipient receiving emails from Wise.
For instance, we always send your recipient an email confirming that you’ve sent them money. And if we don’t have the correct email address for them, they won’t receive that email.
What to do
Contact the person you’re paying. Let them know you’ve sent the money, but they won’t get email confirmation from Wise. For many people, this won’t be a problem — they’ll see when the money arrives by checking their bank account. If your recipient’s unhappy with this, try cancelling your transfer and starting again.
If your recipient’s unhappy and you want to cancel
Whether or not you can do this depends on how far along your transfer is in our system. So before you get started, check the status of your transfer.
Log in to your Wise account
Go to Home to see your activity list
Find the transfer in question — it should be marked as pending
You can cancel if your transfer’s set up, your money’s on its way to us, or your money’s being processed.
You should still be able to cancel your transfer at these stages. We’ll send the money back to your bank account, and you can set up another transfer using the correct email address.
Learn how to cancel your transfer
Contact your recipient if you don’t see the cancel button, or your transfer’s complete.
Once your transfer’s complete, it’s out of Wise’s system and into the banking system. This means we can’t cancel it or change the email address. Your recipient will receive the money, but they won’t receive email confirmation from Wise.
What to do
Get in touch with the person you’re paying. Explain that the money’s in the banking system, so it’s too late to cancel. Tell them they’ll receive the money anyway — they can see when it arrives by checking their bank account.
If you sent money to your recipient’s email address, and didn’t use their bank details
If you’ve sent money to your recipient’s email address — and you entered it incorrectly — we can’t complete your transfer.
Here’s why: as soon as Wise receives the money for your transfer, we send your recipient an email. That email contains a link where they can enter their bank details.
If your recipient doesn’t receive this email, Wise won’t receive their bank details. And that means we can’t send them your money. Please contact us to get this fixed.
Tip: You can only send money to email addresses on the Wise website. You would have ticked a box confirming that you didn’t know their bank details. If you didn’t do this — or you sent money on the Wise app — you set up a regular transfer.