Nilan Peiris
Chief Product Officer, Wise. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveoperator
Nilan Peiris is the Chief Product Officer at Wise, leading growth across product and platform channels. He previously served as Vice President of Growth at HouseTrip.
2shows
2appearances
63statements
21resolved
9supported
1contradicted
43%fully supported
4said about them ↓ Everything Nilan Peiris said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Peiris: The lowest-cost, highest-quality product will win cross-border payments
“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.”
Peiris: Neobanks cannot sustainably subsidize payments with deposit interest
“If a neobank starts, like using that money to subsidize another product, it becomes unfeasible because then people would churn.”
Western Union's high margins allow them to outspend Wise on search marketing
“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.”
Peiris: Wise halved marketing spend and lost only 1% of revenue
“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% …”
Wise periodically halves marketing spend to flush out accumulated budget inefficiency
“This kind of inefficiency will build up all the time in marketing. So about two or three years later, we kind of ran the same drill without a need to do it. Say, we're going to halve the marketing spend. Tell me how much we're going to drop revenue, and we bar…”
Wise CPO predicts AI will eventually eliminate human oversight in workflows
“You can kind of see how it gets to the point that, that, that human, that person will also not be needed in a while as well.”
Peiris argues product teams cannot split-test their way to customer love
“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…”
Wise utilizes weak product ownership, allowing regional teams to commit global code
“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 …”
Nilan Peiris: Truly globally scalable products built once are extremely rare
“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…”
Wise charges a 0.3% fee compared to 6% at traditional banks
“Banks are at six percent. We're at .3 in most markets.”
Wise predicts majority of customers will use bank integrations within 5-10 years
“In a five to 10 year period, the majority of our customers won't be using our apps. They'll be in banks.”
Wise CPO: Consumer product creates the leverage for B2B bank API adoption
“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.”
Wise consumer app has captured 10% to 20% of major UK banks' volume
“Our consumer business has taken something like between 10 to 20% of some of the major banks in the UK's volume.”
Wise attributes 70% of its new user acquisition to word of mouth
“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…”
Wise found referral rates doubled at each step up the NPS scale
“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…”
Wise needed an 8x to 10x price advantage to trigger organic advocacy
“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…”
Building 10x better products requires avoiding existing third-party infrastructure
“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.”
Wise maintains unit profitability on every single individual transaction it processes
“We've been profitable for five years. And then one of the magical things here was like we're actually profitable on every transaction.”
Allocating exact costs per transaction allows Wise to optimize pricing distributions
“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…”
Product teams should skip split testing if they will not roll back
“But you just, in order to get, get an impact, if you know you're not gonna roll it back, then, okay, you should just roll it out and try to reduce the need for the validation.”
Wise pays 5% yield by dynamically liquidating government bonds at card spend
“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.”
Peiris: Product marketing closes delta between perceived and actual product value
“I define product marketing as this closing this delta between the perceived value a customer has of the product and the actual value that you've delivered them.”
Peiris: Word-of-mouth growth requires an order-of-magnitude product improvement
“You have to be an order of magnitude better than the alternative to get word of mouth.”
Nilan Peiris: Growth edge comes from novel creative bursts, not generic playbooks
“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…”
The other half of the tape: Nilan Peiris's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Matt Lerner 4
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 4
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Nilan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Wise | 1 | 36 | 36% 4/11 | full record on 20VC → |
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Wise | 1 | 27 | 50% 5/10 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |