Stripe in Singapore
- Stripe pays out USD for Singapore Stripe accounts for a fee. The payouts are SGD by default. Stripe only pays out USD to traditional banks like DBS but not virtual banks or Wise.
- If most expenses are in USD, it will generally be cheaper to pay out in USD, pay the fee, and use the USD than to pay out in SGD, save the fee, and convert to USD because we save one exchange rate fee and Stripe’s USD-to-SGD exchange rate might not be better than that of, say, Wise. Then if we need SGD, convert the USD via DBS.
- If we need to transfer USD, say for contractors, using Wise will be more affordable than DBS. But we incur a fee for transferring USD from DBS to Wise. To save on the fee, transfer a lump sum of USD to Wise for several month’s of expense.