2018: TransferWise’s year of partnerships

We have had a great 2018 at TransferWise. From new currency launches to our business Mastercard®, we are really excited at some of the fantastic new features we shipped to our four million plus customers - old and new. But it isn’t just product improvements we would like to celebrate this year because 2018 has undoubtedly been the (first) year of the partnership for TransferWise, and they’ve come in all shapes and sizes.

TransferWise’s mission is to help people and businesses working, living and operating around the world to send spend and receive money without having to worry about getting ripped off when exchanging currencies. We have been campaigning for transparency on fees for foreign exchange providers along with trying to educate consumers to the true cost of sending money abroad since the early days of the company. Every team at TransferWise is striving to make this a reality, but some of our teams are doing it in a slightly different way - by creating partnerships with other companies and banks in order to deliver our message outside of our core product.

Bank partnerships is something TransferWise has done in the past, for example with German bank N26, but this year we are working with banks with a renewed vigour and have created a new team to tackle the challenges of forming partnerships and delivering great customer experiences. During the summer, our Bank Product team launched a new partnership with Monzo Bank in the UK. The team’s goal is to bring our cheap, fast and simple transfer experience directly to people and businesses by integrating our service into their banks’ apps directly.

Some of the team members from TransferWise and Monzo who worked on the integration

Before partnering with TransferWise, Monzo customers had no way to send international transfers. Monzo didn’t have to chose us, they could have integrated with the SWIFT network that the traditional banks use or used another partner. Instead, they opted to go with TransferWise because we are setting the new standard for price, customer experience and transparency in the world of money transfers. These are principles which Monzo align with and they wanted to offer their customers that same experience. Since launching together we have had thousands of users send millions of pounds in total through the integration, saving them a huge amount of money and time compared to using banks and other services.

The Bank Product team isn’t stopping there; we launched another integration with bunq in The Netherlands later in 2018 and are working globally with other banks to launch many more partnerships in the new year and beyond.

Beyond banks, this year our affiliates team, whose mission it is to form strategic partnerships to help consumers discover TransferWise, focused on expanding their partnership efforts globally. In 2018, the team formed a new partnership with Le Figaro, France’s oldest daily national newspaper to help educate their large readership about the lack of transparency in the industry and the hidden cost of international transfers.

Another major affiliate partner is Monito, a money transfer comparison site completely aligned with TransferWise’s mission of ensuring transparency in money transfer fees and the exchange rate. They display prices across many providers and show people the best deal possible on their transfer, which we fully support.

TransferWise’s business development team has been hard at work this year, ramping up our efforts to spread the word about the amount of time and money big businesses can save by using our services. Many businesses around the world are sending thousands of payments internationally a month or even a day, losing them or their recipients huge amounts of money to hidden bank fees. By using TransferWise, through our batch payments tool or integrating our APIs to their own systems, businesses can take advantage of our first class transfers with their super low prices while passing the speed benefits on to their employees or customers receiving the funds.

One of many fantastic partnerships formed this year by the business development team was with Wolt, a food delivery service. They take advantage of TransferWise to help operate their business in 11 countries. By using TransferWise, they not only cut their costs but it also means they only need to partner with one platform to handle all their payments globally, easing expansion concerns. Our super fast payments help keep their business running smoothly to ensure Wolt’s customers get their meals as quickly as possible.

Last but not least, our Small/Medium Business (SMB) team launched a fantastic partnership with accountancy software Xero to round the year off. TransferWise for Business accounts allow you to hold money in over 40 currencies and provide local bank account details for five of them (USD, GBP, EUR, AUD, NZD), which businesses use to receive money from their customers all over the world. The SMB team focus on providing world class experiences for our smaller business customers and are building new features to make operating internationally as simple as possible for them.

Many of these businesses use the accounting software Xero to manage their money and, before we teamed up with them, importing your bank statement from your TransferWise for Business account into Xero was not all that simple. To help these users out, the team launched a partnership with Xero based on their bank feeds feature to import businesses transactions straight in to their accounting records, saving them time and leveraging the platform to automatically reconcile as much as possible for the user.

To announce the launch of our Xero partnership, we were very excited to exhibit at Xerocon and received first hand feedback from accountants on the additional value they could bring to their clients off the back of this partnership. It’s important for us to have direct communication with our customers in order to learn more about their problems and build the right solutions. If you’re an accountant or bookkeeper and you think your client could benefit from our services, we offer an accountant referral programme which you can find more details about here.

But it doesn’t stop there. All of the teams introduced here are going to carry on working hard in 2019 to launch more partnerships and build on existing ones to help as many people as possible benefit from using TransferWise, be it down to our price, speed or convenience. If you are interested in working with us, then don’t wait for a team to get in touch with you. Please reach out to us at one of the emails provided below, the teams would be more than happy to chat.

If you have a big idea for leveraging our platform, then you don’t even need to talk to us first. This year we also launched our Open API so head over there, generate yourself some tokens, and get hacking!

TransferWise has had a very successful 2018 on all fronts, especially in terms of new partnerships formed with banks, businesses and affiliates. As always, we will strive to continue and do our very best for all of our partners and hope to continue our growth in future. All of us here hope your 2018 has been as great as ours has and wish you a fantastic year ahead, with plenty of new partnerships and successes.

Would your business' or blog’s customers benefit from learning more about TransferWise through a partnership? Then get in touch with the affiliates team at partnerwise@transferwise.com.

Are you a “banker” who dreams of giving a world class customer experience and fair pricing? Reach out to banks@transferwise.com for more information.

Does your business have a big fx bill from an unreliable provider? Or do you have another payments problem that needs an innovative solution? Ask the business development team to see how we can help - bizdev@transferwise.com.