Anext Reviews 2

Stay away. Very unprofessional in communications with zero respect or trust for clients. Account approval process took three month (!) with multiple requests for different documents that not only had to be authorized by licensed notary, but also hardcopies to be couriered over to their office. And after all of that the account still was rejected! A business partner had the account opened with them and closed after an only month without any explanation. All his activity included receiving three wire transfers from the same customer and sending out two payments to the vendor. Don’t waste your time with them and Singapore in general. This country is in decline.

I've amended the rating after Anext has resolved the earlier concerns recapped as follows.

Be cautious sending USD wire transfers via Anext especially when the recipient bank needs to rely on another intermediary bank for its wire servicing.

The Anext wire transfer request dashboard is overly simplified currently, leaving room for error. There should be a field specifically labeled recipient financial institutional name, and one labeled beneficiary account name. Instead, at the time I made my wire request on Jun 8th, there was a field "Name", which I mistook for beneficiary institution name as there wasn't a separate field asking for the beneficiary institution name.

I tried making a USD wire transfer out of my Anext business account destined for my personal USD account at Simplii on June 8th, 2023, and finally on July 6th, 2023, almost 1 month later, managed to recall back (into my Anext account) most of the funds (the original amount less the deductions by intermediary banks involved in handling USD transfers on behalf of Anext and Simplii) after realizing on June 9th that Simplii may have issues crediting the funds to my Simplii account due to a mismatch I had on the recipient name at the time of the June 8th wire request I made at Anext to go to the Simplii account. My error on the Anext wire instructions was indicating Simplii as the recipient name instead of my personal account name, as the Anext form didn't have a separate field for receiving institution name.

Instead of trying to recall right away, I waited at least a week to see if Simplii could still credit my account with the wired amount despite the mismatch on the recipient name. When I requested for the wire to be recalled (from Anext's end), and for Simplii to perform an escalated investigation, both Anext and Simplii claimed repeatedly that they didn't know the funds' whereabouts. Anext stated that the funds arrived at Simplii Jun 9th, which was frustrating as I didn't see the incoming amount in my Simplii account. I later realized that the funds must've been held at CIBC which Simplli relies on for its wire transfers, but I find it astounding that Simplii couldn't call CIBC to sort this issue out, claiming that the wire transfer department doesn't have a phone # to call.

There's no way that in this electronic age that neither Anext nor Simplii were able to trace the whereabouts of the funds for almost a month. While Anext was claiming that the funds had been received by Simplii, it was shocking for Anext to say that neither they nor I had a phone # to call to speak to the relevant wire transfer team (at Anext or at their intermediary bank JP Morgan Singapore) on the matter. I eventually learned from Anext on July 6 that CIBC was the bottleneck. In the few weeks leading to July 6, Anext was claiming that they can't call JP Morgan's wire transfer team (to locate the missing funds) as their only way of communication is through the SWIFT messaging.

I learned July 6 that according to Anext, that JP Morgan Singapore was at least relaying the recall instructions to CIBC, which was apparently ignoring the messages from JP Morgan Singapore, and so CIBC definitely deserves a 1 out of 5 star rating for their wire services.