The Ledger
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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 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 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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 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.”
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 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 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 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…”
Wise charges an average take rate of about 0.65% across routes
“We take about .65% on average across all our routes as price.”
Launching the Wise Account feature drove 20% to 30% more cross-border volume
“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.”
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…”
Wise maintains 70 global bank accounts to track competitor pricing daily
“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…”
Wise secured Singapore's first e-KYC license after a year of unscalable lobbying
“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.”
Wise emailed customer NPS survey comments weekly to the entire company
“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.”