How fast was Wise in 2019?

Another year has flown by at Wise. Time to look back and recap on what we’ve worked hard on this year, to make things faster and better for our customers. Here are a few highlights we thought are worth mentioning:

We are getting closer to our mission of instant payments

Sending money should be as fast as sending an email. At the beginning of the year, 15% of our payments were already delivered instantly - within 20 seconds! As of today, that number has grown to 24%.

For that we have to thank:

• Our integration with UK’s Open Banking API, so you can send money right from your UK bank, instantly
• Making almost all transfers to Ukraine instant, by automating UAH payouts
• Having more banks join the SEPA Instant network in Europe, increasing the share of our instant to EUR transfers
• Enabling instant payments to China, by speeding up our internal processing of these payments

2019 concludes with two more exciting developments. By the end of December customers who’re sending money to Mexico will be able to do so faster. Payouts for transfers below 980 USD will be instant for all transfers between individuals - a limit that we are looking to increase in the future. Similarly, our Pacific team is also currently working on making payouts to Australian recipients nearly instant.

Non-instant payments are also getting faster

As for the payments that we can’t yet deliver instantly - in countries where the local payment systems are slower - we have managed to make those faster too. By the end of this year, we started delivering 21% of those in less than an hour - an increase of 17% since last December. Combined with the percentage of instant transfers, this means that close to half of our customers get their money in less than an hour.

We’ve improved delivery time accuracy

This year, we also got better at estimating just how long it’s going to take for your money to reach its final destination – 7% better, to be precise. Now 72% of our payments are delivered on time with accuracy, increasing to 85% as soon as we receive customer’s money. To help us improve delivery estimations for the last mile of money transfers - the time it takes for money to reach your bank after we have sent it out - we asked for your help. We received feedback from thousands of you and have adjusted delivery time estimations for 149 banks so far. Thank you!

We launched speed comparison

Many of our customers are familiar with our price comparison. However, for some of you transfer speed is just as important as price. So, to show you the best possible transfer that suits your needs, we’ve embedded speed in our comparison tables, helping you find not only the cheapest – but also the quickest way to send money abroad.

We have made improvements to how we communicate transfer delays

We think you should always know where your money is and why it's delayed. So, during the second half of this year, we started working on improving how we communicate transfer delays.

We’re still at the beginning of this journey, however, most of our customers whose transfers get stopped for manual checks now receive an email and a push notification informing them about a delay. We are gradually extending this to other types of delays as well.

What’s in store for 2020?

In 2020, we are looking forward to continuing making our transfers faster and more accurate. We also plan to continue the work that we’ve started on informing our customers about any unexpected delays, as this is one of the main frustrations you’ve shared with us.

A big thanks to all our customers for supporting us, and all the teams at Wise that worked hard to get us closer to where we are today!