Q2 2021 Mission Update: Speed

Speed

Our instant transfer speed remained flat in Q2, 38% of all transfers happened instantly (landing in the destination account within 20 seconds) but our slowest transfers got faster.

What challenges did we face in Q2?

The biggest impact was from bank closures over the holiday season. We have to predict how much money we'll need in our account to pay out transfers while the banks are closed. We're not always accurate on this, which causes delays to payouts. Banks in Pakistan and Indonesia were closed for up to ten days over the Ramadan holiday period and our accounts ran low on funds, which led to delays.

Q2 showed us that we need to increase the amount of funds we hold in our bank accounts over holidays to make sure we can always pay out transfers on time. We’ll be increasing the buffers we have available locally ahead of longer holiday periods to reduce the likelihood of these delays.

What improvements did we make?

• Speed estimates will be specific to your bank, the bank you send from

In some regions, like Australia and Eurozone, there are super fast banks and mega slow banks. Your Wise experience therefore highly depends on whether you hold your money with a fast one, or not.

We started out by giving more conservative estimates. Now, we look at the last bank you used to pay from, and use the specific speed estimate for that bank to enable us to offer you instant transfer speeds.

We've implemented this for 15 banks in the Eurozone and rolled it out to Bendigo Bank in Australia in Q2. We're hoping to add more Australian banks to this list in Q3.

• New partners in Asia

South East Asia is a growing region for Wise. It encompasses Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines.

The team decided to dedicate Q2 to making more transfers to this region instant.

At the start of the quarter we had the following set up:

• Singapore had instant transfers thanks to our direct integration in Q1
• Thailand had instant transfers but we couldn't deliver instant payments through all partners at weekends
• Our largest partner in Indonesia was fast, but not hitting our 20 second instant target so very few transfers to Indonesia were instant
• Vietnam had no instant integrations, and half of all transfers were taking over 12 hours

In short, we could see there was a lot of work to be done!

In the last three months:

• We changed the technical integration in Thailand to process more instant transfers over the weekend
• Our largest partner in Indonesia improved their speeds, delivering more transfers in under 20 seconds, and we increased the number of transfers we were paying out through our second instant partner
• We connected to an instant partner in Vietnam

We can already see some promising results:

• Instant transfers to Thailand are up 10% to 40%. We'll continue increasing the volumes being routed through our new integration in Q3.
• Instant in Indonesia has doubled from 15% at the end of Q1 to 30% at the start of Q3.
• Most excitingly, 80% of payouts to Vietnam are now instant

We need to focus on continuing to improve the reliability of our partners so that we can guarantee instant speeds whenever you come to Wise.

Accuracy

As well as speed, we also keep close tabs on how accurate your transfer delivery estimate is because it’s important that your money arrives on time. Last quarter, we reported our highest ever accuracy of 91%.

We've stayed fairly flat this quarter, with 88% of transfers arriving early or on time. However, we know we should be aiming for estimates to be accurate not just early, and that's what we're continuing to work towards.

3% more transfers were late this quarter, largely because of the aforementioned delays over Ramadan. We'd have expected accuracy to take a more significant dip but last year we built new estimation logic to spot when our bank accounts are low on funds in certain currencies and adjust the estimates we give customers to reflect when we'll send more money to those accounts.

While it doesn't make our transfers faster, it makes our estimates are more accurate, which we can see in our Q2 performance.