Ask HN: How does your company send international contractor payments?

We have bank accounts in Hong Kong, China, and the US and need to pay contractors all over the world. I'm trying to find a reliable, low mental overhead, inexpensive solution for sending them payments. Countries like Ukraine, Pakistan, the Philippines.

We primarily operate in USD. Our contractors almost universally prefer to receive USD and generally have a USD account in their home country. Almost any online info or comparison tool assumes you are dealing with an exchange rate.

Currently we usually send payments from Hong Kong because the fees are lower (around $12USD per transfer), but we are having trouble with accounts getting closed for non-specific "administrative reasons". After about a year of trying to learn what that means, we think it's because we are sending money from a business account to personal accounts in a foreign country and that is categorized as high-risk for fraud.

Sending money from the US account would work, but it's much more expensive (~$45USD/transfer, so roughly $500/year/contractor), and we would usually need to move the money there first since that's not the account it generally shows up in.

We generally have around 5 contractors at any given time. This tends to limit what's possible in terms of custom solutions or payment accounts with services like Payoneer.

Honestly I'd pay $2500/year in a heartbeat if it would all just work, but we end up constantly having to follow up on rejected wires, mis-typed account names and miscellaneous other stuff that it feels like the banking system should have figured out by now.

1). Any suggestions for how to efficiently get USD from country A to a personal account in country B? 2). In a general sense, are there better approaches?

Thanks for your input!

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