Nilan Peiris
Chief Product Officer, Wise · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
27statements → 16claims → 10claims resolved → 50%fully supported → 3.96/5average certainty → 1.74/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →
5 supported 4 partly supported 1 contradicted 6 not checkable as stated how the 16 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
16 assertions · 8 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 16 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 10 are resolved, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Nilan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
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…”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Nilan Peiris on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Nilan Peiris said on Lenny's Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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 …”
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.”
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.”
In-product marketing is the discipline of closing actual and perceived value gaps
“And closing this delta between what you've done and what you perceive to be done is what I call product marketing, like within the product and that in its own rights, a discipline I've learned.”
Asking candidates about current frustrations reveals their fundamental problem-solving limits
“What frustrates you the most about where you're working right now? And this is as people, people always tell you why they want to join Waze or join whatever company you're coming to, and that's not that interesting, but what's interesting trying to figure out …”
Wise charges an average take rate of about 0.65% across routes
“We take about .65% on average across all our routes as price.”
Wise measures word-of-mouth growth by overlaying survey responses onto traffic data
“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…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) | Sep 24, 2023 | 48m |