Wise (aka Transferwise) offers push notifications for foreign currency exchange rate alerts, but I had trouble creating them. I could easily create email alerts, but I wanted push notifications as well. Although it’s possible, it’s not obvious.

The Solution

When you create a rate alert, subscribe with an email address associated with a Wise account. When you do this, the final confirmation page will offer you options for email and push notifications. If you use an email address not associated with a Wise account, you will only see confirmation that you’ll receive rate alerts by email with no evidence that receiving push notifications was ever possible.

As of January 2022, here is the complete flow.

1. Visit https://wi.se/rate_tracker.
2. Create a rate alert and subscribe by email using the exact email address associated with your Wise account. (I haven’t tried email addresses with + in them, but I assume they won’t match, even though that would be helpful.)
3. Wait to receive the email to activate your rate alert by confirming your email address. Visit the link in the email to confirm your email address.

This last page includes checkboxes for both email and push notification, as well as a button to unsubscribe.

Why Did This Confuse Me?

I wanted to receive rate alerts by push notification. Their Rate Tracker page claimed it was possible to do this by downloading their app. I already had their app installed on my phone, so I looked for the feature in the app. As of January 2022, it isn’t in the app. This was the first point of confusion.

I returned to the Rate Tracker page, where it suggested to “Join Wise” in order to get push notifications. I already have a Wise account, so I tried logging in, believing that they would serve a different Rate Tracker page to logged-in users than to anonymous browsers. This changed nothing. This was the second point of confusion.

I decided to try again by subscribing by email, in case that offered a clue about what was happening. I chose an email address that makes it convenient to filter incoming messages, because that lets me add a filter that would give me an email notification. This was not the email address associated with my Wise account, because nothing on any of these pages suggested that that was needed. Nowhere did I see anything in these repeated attempts that even hinted at being able to get push notifications. This was the third point of confusion.

I wanted to receive rate alerts by push notification, but I had to subscribe by email first. This is just not how I was thinking at the moment. I didn’t want email alerts; I wanted push notifications in the app. There were no words on any page that I encountered that promised push notifications at the end of the “subscribe by email” flow, so I didn’t know that I needed to do that, let alone subscribe to a rate alert with exactly the One True email address that Wise was expecting me to use.

I have asked Wise to improve the flow, which would make this article obsolete.