Wise

“And we were 17% of TTD at IPO and we were 13% of wise at IPO out of a little shitty seed fund.”

“When they announced that the stock popped eight percent, that's basically like saying you can make eight percent free money just by listing in the US.”

“I went into overdrive once I stopped running wise, doing 30, 40, 50 deals a year.”

“And I think the customer support agents who joined in the beginning, they all made a million dollars when Wise went public.”

“Wise only raised hundred sixty million primary capital, and we only burned through about a hundred million of primary capital. Hundred million primary capital to build in excess of ten billion of value.”

“I don't believe Wise would have a pricing premium in the US.”

“Not until we were valued at billions. I didn't sell a single, single share of second secondary, but after that I've done it in a, I would say systematic way.”

“Wise was actually a little bit smaller than that when we first invested. I think it was probably about 50 or sixty million dollars in revenue. It's now a multi-billion dollar revenue business.”

“And then right after that, Tavit went public with Wise on the LSE, and I tried to talk him out of it. I said, go, go in America.”

“In my experience, it's usually disappointingly not much, like, there's very few, like, truly globally scalable products that you build once and they just kind of go everywhere every, every country has a nuance usually then, That could be regulatory. It could b…”

“Bit that the edge is, is usually in the creativity. Or when someone figures a different way, a different form of content that suddenly gets cut through, and suddenly everyone's doing, everyone will start copying that. But these kinds of bursts usually have a o…”

“Yeah, so I met them, you'll enjoy this. I got introduced to them by an angel who I had helped previously, and he said, you gotta meet these guys. They're just two of them. They have a great product. They have no customers and they definitely need someone like …”

“So it's like about a trillion in terms of cross-border flows for consumer, about 10 trillion for SMB.”

“Our first customers came from, ah, and the day we launched WISE was when the TechCrunch Blog post went up, and our TechCrunch, first TechCrunch interview happened, and I remember it, and then we, the post went out, and then you saw the first customer that we d…”

“It's about 30% of The 1.5 million customers we acquired last quarter came in through paid, about 70% came in through word of mouth. And if you went back 1012 years, it was about 30% through paid, 70% through word of mouth.”

“So obviously if you search for a BIC or an IBAN code, you'll find wise there because we've built pages on every BIC and IBAN code. We bought and built our own BIC calculator and IBAN calculator and converters so that you can look up your own banks, BIC and IBA…”

“I mean, things that struggled to work were getting above the line to work. When you look at our marketing mix, it looks light on that, and we still wouldn't say I've cracked it.”

“The kind of strategic thesis at the heart of wise is whoever has the lowest cost, highest quality product, will take the whole cross-border market.”

“Wise, we offer this to our own customers as well. So in WISE, you can, in the WISE account, you can push one button and hold all of your cash in government bonds. And that means you'll get a three to five percent interest rate.”

“Western Union is like seven to eight times more expensive than WISE. So they could spend seven to eight times more than us on marketing. And therefore there's no way we would ever be able to compete on those SEM key head terms.”

“Banks are at six percent. We're at .3 in most markets.”

“So we're moving about sixty billion pounds instantly from one side of the world to another, and that is the kind of experience to get people talking about it.”

“We saw, like, I think it was a three to four x increase in our recommendation rate off the back of that.”

“60% of our transfers are instant.”

“The second point is, it's not the financial cost that's the real inhibitor. It's the people cost. It's your time. So how much time have you got to keep running a product that you hope will take off? And what else could you be, what's the opportunity cost? And …”

“We look for payback generally within 12 to 24 months, so you look at the costs, how much would it cost, and then you can work backwards to what that is.”

“This works fine when it's six teams. When it got to 30 or 40, it stopped working. So we started grouping those teams into units. Call them squads. And then you kind of hire somebody to run the squad and tell them you're accountable for the outcomes of the squa…”

“Most of the near banks in the world use WISE. Google Wallet is powered by WISE, Stripe uses so platforms use us too”

“In a five to 10 year period, the majority of our customers won't be using our apps. They'll be in banks.”

“No bank would ever integrate wise would ever use our infrastructure if our consumer business didn't exist. Our consumer business sets the expectations in the market of it's got to be cheap, it's got to be easy to use.”

“Our consumer business has taken something like between 10 to 20% of some of the major banks in the UK's volume.”

“Within the 70% that's word of mouth about say 20 to 30 is refer a friend, and the rest is pure word of mouth.”

“We became profitable in about six to nine months, and there was only one cost we changed to get there, Which was our marketing spend. And I think I've shared this publicly before, and this is about four years ago. We halved our marketing spend. We dropped 10% …”

“So on both accounts, I get it wrong about 20 to 30% of the time”

“The two ones I ask are obviously a product one of talk me through an example of where you've been hands-on in building something. And then I always explain, when I say hands-on, I mean, you ended up having to code it. You had to design it, you had to write the…”

“So I try to get this out of them, and the way I get that usually is by saying, talk, talk me through what really frustrates you about where you are, and then you kind of get into, why does that really frustrate you, and then it'll always come down to the same …”

“We have big operational teams. We already use LLMs to augment those teams. Some places LLMs automate a hundred percent some of those tasks.”

“Wise did this brilliantly actually, you know, they made money, right? Like they generated actual money way in advance of going public. So they held these kind of annual employee tenders where we basically cleaned up the cap table.”

“We sold into one of those for the reasons I said, we ended up being able to return half of fund two and generate recycling capital. I mean, which, because remember fund two is a hundred and five billion, which obviously has done extremely well.”

“So today we're now moving about twelve billion dollars a month, growing at between 30 to 40% year on year.”

“We take about .65% on average across all our routes as price.”

“And we've been profitable for about more than four years now with 20% EBITDA margins”

“We acquired 70% of the users that found out about Wise last month through word of mouth. So, contextually, we have sixteen million customers, and we're acquiring about a million a quarter about ten million actives, and yes, and a million that joined Wise the f…”

“So we have an attribution model, as you can imagine, and we've had one from the early days and it overlays all the kind of cookie the referrer data and cookie data you have on, on visits coming to the website. So you kind of know that. And then you obviously h…”

“When we overlaid the referral data over the NPS survey data, we saw something really interesting. Very low invite rates at one to six, and not just invite conversion rates of users that joined for invites. But when you've got people from six to the seven and e…”

“I remember in the first year we built the NPS survey and we emailed out every week, all the comments to the whole company, which was pretty small. And we kept doing that. I think up till about three or four years, everyone got the NPS comments.”

“When we entered markets, like when we entered the US for the first time, if we entered with a product that was priced at say, 5.9%, and the alternative was six, customers would use us, but they wouldn't talk about us. We only got the advocacy when we were eigh…”

“So IPS is 70%. So it's really, really high. So it's kind of higher than the iPhone and Google, Google search.”

“Like you gotta build a 10 X better product than what's there. And if it's 10 X product better, it basically, it doesn't exist already. Right? So if you're If you're plugging in something else, that that's kind of a misstep.”

“We've been profitable for five years. And then one of the magical things here was like we're actually profitable on every transaction.”

“Every single bill we got, we allocated the cost back to the customer or the transaction that generated it. And then we add our margin on top and that's our price. And when you look at this and you analyze it, you'll find obviously there are 20% of customers ge…”

“It took a year of lobbying and a year of like building, like doing something unscalable effectively before we got the world's first EKYC license in Singapore.”

“And we wrote our mission and sent it to our customers. We got more new customers from that email being forwarded around than any other kind of marketing.”

“Like you can't split test your way to love, right? So this experiment led product management approach where you kind of throw a bunch of things on the wall and then you kind of see what sticks. And generally we don't advocate this. Obviously there's a bit of i…”

“And we found that that we got about, like, as we launched the accounting markets, it was about, you know, like a 20 to 30% more volume, cross-border volume coming through, coming into wise from that market.”

“Because we got like about 12 and a half billion dollars in deposits now, which is like a time.”

“So we now put customers' money in government bonds, US bonds, and when you pay with your card, it dynamically sells those bonds. And that's how we give you an interest rate in like around about five percent right now, given where bond rates are.”

“We now have a bank account at the Bank of England, the National Bank of Singapore, Bank of Australia. And each of these was like as hard as, you know, getting that face-to-face verification thing in Singapore. It took like years of lobbying and all kinds of st…”

“And you end up with a global product team that owns overall KPIs around conversion rate, et cetera. And you have local regional teams that are the conversion rate and the cost to do KYC for their market. And they contribute to the global product code base. So …”

“So we now have, I think about 70 bank accounts around the world. So I think like the top three accounts, banks in the world where we log onto every day, and then we log the price and the quote for a bunch of different routes into a file. You can imagine how ha…”