IF you are someone who has been trying to work remotely, whether it’s for a company or for yourself, but the company you work for or the clients you have want to pay via PayPal then no doubt you have run into the issue of struggling to receive your funds.

In most countries where PayPal operates, companies or clients typically connect their bank accounts to PayPal, so their payments come from their bank accounts, rather than paying people through their credit cards. This presents a big problem when you are in Jamaica where most of our e-commerce solutions – WiPay, Ezee Payments or any e-commerce service – focus on receiving payments through a credit card payment.

Like most countries in the Caribbean, PayPal doesn’t connect directly to Jamaican bank accounts, and we will need to use a middleman to forward those funds from PayPal to our local bank account.

I recently started using the service called Wise, formerly known as TransferWise. This is a virtual bank service for which you can register and it provides several functions that can really help us, but for the purposes of this article we are going to stick to how you can use it to receive your funds from PayPal.

The biggest advantage to this is that with Wise you can send your money to any bank locally and you can keep the funds in US dollars (USD) if you are depositing it to a local USD account, or the funds will automatically convert to Jamican dollasr (JMD) if your account denomination is in JMD.

When you go to Wise.com you will set up the account. They do take an initial US$20 fee to create the account and you can either pay with a credit card or they allow you to do a wire transfer to them for the set-up, which can be done by visiting your local bank. They will provide you with the details for sending the money.

Once the account is set up you can specify what currency you would like to receive money in. I set up the USD currency and they provided me with the virtual bank details to receive US currency. They give you the bank account number, routing number, checking account and bank address information.

People or companies from around the world can now wire their money to your virtual bank account.

Now to connect your Wise account to PayPal, visit PayPal.com, go to “Account settings”, then “Money, banks, and cards”, select the option to “Link new bank account”, and then proceed to add the details for the account number, routing number, chequing or savings that Wise has given you for the virtual account.

In the event you get a message in which PayPal is asking you to call them to connect the account, you will need to call PayPal and they will do an over-the-phone verification after which the bank connection will be complete. Call the bank for assistance and don’t email them — the over-the-phone team assists with these matters and the email team will usually tell you that they cannot connect the account.

You will then go back to your Wise account, click on “Recipients”, select the currency you want to receive, and then it will ask you if you want to set up ACH, Wire or Swift account. This information is what you are going to receive from your local bank here in Jamaica.

I’d suggest using the Wire or Swift feature; I set up the Swift option. What this means is that when I transfer the money from my PayPal to my Wise virtual bank account that we set up, once the money reaches my Wise wallet it will then wire the money to whatever local bank account I set up in Wise. This can be either your JMD currency account or your local USD account. You can connect either a personal or business account to Wise and forward your money accordingly.

When withdrawing the funds from PayPal, select the new bank account you added and those funds will show up in your Wise account within 1-4 business days. You will get a notification from Wise when the funds have hit your account.

To receive incoming payments into your Wise account costs US$4.14 and can take 4-5 working days to show up in your account. Wise will tell you the cost to transfer the funds to your local account on your confirmation screen. You can visit their website for a complete breakdown of their fees.

There are 3 main reasons I want to highlight as to why you shouold want to have access to PayPal, even though we have other payment services.

1) PayPal is the largest payment platform in the world that most people have access to.

2) If you are working for an international company or platforms like Fiverr, Freelancer, etc they usually pay out globally through PayPal and not credit cards because they are able to connect their own business accounts directly to PayPal for easy payouts.

3) You can now have your funds from PayPal go directly into your business account for services you may have provided to people internationally.

I hope this helps you in receiving your money from international companies, clients, or friends from PayPal.

Keron Rose is a digital strategist who works with Caribbean entrepreneurs in building their digital presence. To learn more, visit KeronRose.com or check out the Digipreneur FM podcast available on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or Google Podcast.