The Transfer Market
Wise and the Business of Moving Money
“Football fandom is gloriously irrational. We’ll book flights and hotels for the final before we’re even out of the group stage, convincing ourselves this is finally our year. And honestly, that’s exactly how it should be.”
Thus says sports presenter Gary Lineker on his podcast, The Rest is Football. He then pivots:
“Wise works in over 160 countries with more than 40 currencies. When you’re paying for that flight or grabbing dinner before kickoff, you get the mid-market exchange rate. No markups, no hidden fees. I’ve spent enough time abroad to know how quickly those charges add up. Wise takes care of it so you can get back to what really matters, like debating starting elevens, deciding all-time elevens, and everything in between.”
The segment is part of a marketing campaign launched by payments company Wise to boost customer awareness. The company has around 19 million customers, with 70% coming via word-of-mouth. Now, it is scaling up its marketing effort to drive further growth, spending upwards of 5% of revenue to do so. Like other brands, it sees the World Cup as an opportunity, hiring a campaign manager to oversee tournament marketing. According to the State Department, the competition will bring up to 10 million international visitors to the United States over the next month – many of whom will need to buy US dollars. (Dallas was a blast, by the way).
Catering to travelling fans is a niche market, but Wise’s overall market is a collection of niches. The company’s London-based founders established the service so that they could swap currency exposures – one was paid in pounds but needed Estonian kroon to pay his mortgage back home; the other was paid in kroon but needed pounds to meet his living expenses.
“We’ve got like a real patchwork of different kinds of audiences who it’s great for, for different reasons, in different parts of the world,” said Wise’s former marketing director recently. “For people that are sending money to another country to support friends and family, it’s a fantastic product. For people that just happen to be working in another country, might have a house still in another country they have to pay for, or they’re moving large amounts of money around, even small businesses. So there’s not one coherent audience globally or even within any given market. So, it’s a kind of real conundrum to how do you package that one kind of brand that works for all those different audiences.”
Wise switched its primary listing from London to Nasdaq last month as part of an effort to “bring more of Wise to everyone in the US, as customers and as owners.” We talked about the company when it first listed in 2021, but its strategy has evolved since then as it targets its patchwork of audiences. To find out how the economics of that strategy hold up, read on.