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.
Wise maintains a 70/30 split between word of mouth and paid acquisition
“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.”
Peiris: Mass market ad channels fail if competitors monetize impressions better
“If it, if you have a mass market product that's relevant to everyone, then generally mass market channels will work. And the second part is, who else is competing for that eyeball at that point in time? Can they monetize that user better than we can, and there…”
Only 10 to 15% of Remittance Customers Search Google Before Transferring
“There's still a bunch of the market, not much, so I'd say about 10, 15% of the market, that will Google before they send money.”
Wise processes roughly £60 billion in instant cross-border transfers
“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.”
Wise Saw 3-4x Higher Recommendation Rate After Adding Savings Graph
“We saw, like, I think it was a three to four x increase in our recommendation rate off the back of that.”
Wise CPO: Opportunity cost of team time dictates when to kill products
“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 …”
Wise targets 12 to 24 month payback on new initiatives
“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.”
Peiris: Direct bottom-up team review processes stop scaling at 30-40 teams
“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…”
Wise powers Google Wallet, Stripe, and most global neobanks
“Most of the near banks in the world use WISE. Google Wallet is powered by WISE, Stripe uses so platforms use us too”
Wise's word-of-mouth growth is 70-80% organic, 20-30% incentivized referrals
“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.”
Heavy monetary referral incentives fail to drive profitable customer growth
“What happens is it drives users, but it doesn't drive what I call customers. So a customer, if you define as a profitable user, like it's very easy to drive users, right? Because if you give an incentive like that, but when you when you look at the growth of t…”
Nilan Peiris: I get hiring decisions wrong 20% to 30% of the time
“So on both accounts, I get it wrong about 20 to 30% of the time”
Wise asks product candidates at all levels if they've personally coded or designed
“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…”
Asking candidates why they couldn't fix past frustrations reveals their operating limits
“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 …”
Peiris: Wise uses LLMs to fully automate certain operational tasks
“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 moves $12B monthly and grows 30-40% year-over-year
“So today we're now moving about twelve billion dollars a month, growing at between 30 to 40% year on year.”
Wise has been profitable for over four years with 20% EBITDA margins
“And we've been profitable for about more than four years now with 20% EBITDA margins”
Wise maintains a 70% Net Promoter Score, outperforming iPhone and Google
“So IPS is 70%. So it's really, really high. So it's kind of higher than the iPhone and Google, Google search.”
Peiris views customer support headcount as the cost of poor product quality
“So the people costs are customer service team, operations teams, But I like to think of that as the cost of port quality. So you bring up customer support. If the product's not clear, you hire lots of people in the back office.”
Wise's most effective acquisition campaign was simply emailing customers its core mission
“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.”
Wise currently holds approximately $12.5 billion in customer deposits
“Because we got like about 12 and a half billion dollars in deposits now, which is like a time.”
Wise spent years lobbying to secure direct settlement accounts at central banks
“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…”
Showing post-transfer fee comparison graphs tripled Wise's customer referral sharing rate
“Yeah. That's really the sharing rate. When, so we always had the share button after you completed a transfer, but putting that there with this graph.”
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 → |