Hi Julia,
Thank you for reaching out and raising this query. We certainly understand your concern about moving your payment outside Upwork. Please be aware that keeping working relationships on the Upwork platform is an essential part of maintaining transparency, helping ensure accurate information, and providing you with payment protection and dispute assistance. It also helps protect your personal financial account information and prevents situations where a client might try to get around our systems that protect you.
This is less safe. More specifically, when relationships are moved outside of Upwork — something called circumvention — it undermines user experiences, limits the protections we can offer, hurts our ability to attract quality clients and talent to create new opportunities and matches, and weakens the marketplace as a whole. Because of this, circumvention is a serious violation of our Terms of Service unless you pay the Conversion Fee.
