Hi all, I’m in the process of moving my business from France to Japan. All my clients are EU or US, B2B companies.
Some of my clients have strict vendor payment processes, and I’m a bit worried about losing them if paying me becomes complicated or requires unfamiliar platforms.
I might be wrong but my understanding is that for my foreign clients, paying me through an intermediary like Stripe or Wise would be smoother than asking them to wire money directly to a Japanese bank account, with less fee and more visibility on who pays what and who gets what.
Even though the invoices I’ll issue under my 個人事業主 will be in JPY, I’d like to minimize friction on the client side — ideally by letting them see prices in their own currency (EUR or USD), or sometimes passing conversion fees to them and sometimes covering them myself (though I’m afraid this could make my bookkeeping messy).
The options I’m considering are Stripe, Wise Business, and PayPal Business:
- Stripe: I already have (good) experience with the product back in France, but fees with Stripe Japan seem to be almost 2× higher than in Europe.
- Wise Business looks cheaper fee-wise, but I’ve only really heard good things about their personal accounts, not so much the business side.
- PayPal Business… I don’t have a great image of PayPal. Maybe unfairly, but I mostly associate it with small obscure webshops rather than B2B services.
Does anyone have a recommendation?
(PS: I'm in touch with potential accountants but the conversations are slow, we haven't gotten there yet and I'd like to move fast.)
by Comptest
3 comments
I use Wise Business, and bill my clients in EUR, USD and GBP outside of Japan. They pay by bank transfer to an EU (for EUR), US (for USD) or UK (for GBP) bank account in the same normal manner.
They can also pay in JPY to an IBAN to a bank in the UK if you really want to use JPY.
Have used Wise to collect payment from clients in the UK and Canada with no issues at all, so that’d be my recommendation.
Deel worked well for me, FWIW.
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