Wise: Platform Foundations From B2C to B2B

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Let's start at the beginning, going back to 2017. What was Wise like back then? What were the company priorities, and how big was it?

Wise started building the necessary infrastructure for people to make retail payments from one geography to another. They demonstrated that they were at least seven to eight times, sometimes even 10 times, better than banks by choosing a low-cost method of moving money. The traditional way of moving money was inefficient, slow, and expensive, like carrying a suitcase and handing it off from person to person. Banks were complacent, and their service levels weren't great.

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Let's start at the beginning, going back to 2017. What was Wise like back then? What were the company priorities, and how big was it?

TransferWise introduced a new treasury model for moving money, known as the local liquidity pool method. Some banks used it, but not all. In the suitcase analogy, instead of physically moving a suitcase across borders, they had a suitcase ready on the other side, which saved time and costs. Their service levels were phenomenal, with a high NPS score that drove strong organic growth through word of mouth. This was when I joined.

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So how did you approach it? Let's delve into identifying the product-market fit.

Over the course of three weeks, I spoke to about 48 or 49 banks, leveraging my network. I manually tabulated the results and extracted insights. I concluded that what these banks wanted was beyond our capabilities and recommended shutting down the team. It was painful, but within 24 hours, I asked my team to leave, and they found other projects within the company. I continued searching for what to build next.

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