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The Guardian hails Wise for rebooting remittances

Wise

08.04.15 (updated more than 1 year ago)

Read time 1 minute

###The Guardian has hailed Wise for its work innovating where banks aren't

In today's article, Guardian journalist Rosie Spinks praises cost-saving services such as Wise:

"Historically, one of the main ways that immigrants have sent funds home has been via cash-to-cash transfer services such as Western Union and MoneyGram, known to take as much as 20% of individual transfers. The fact that tech startups such as Wise are innovating to offer bank-free, digital ways instead could prove to be a huge benefit to emerging economies, many of which are skipping banks and going straight from cash to mobile money."

Quoted in the article Dilip Ratha, the World Bank's lead economist on remittances, expressed the need for nimble finance systems, like Wise:

“Asking a bank to take someone’s money and give it to someone else is like asking an airliner or ocean-liner to do that task. The modern banking system has become too complicated to do simple things like sending money, whereas the P2P model in its idealistic form will do much better job.”

Wise's Joe Cross also reinforced the importance of ensuring that the customer wins:

“In the white-collar world it’s inherently bad that people are getting screwed by hidden fees, but when you get into the remittance end of the market, it is literally is about food on the table, so there’s an even deeper moral problem to address. Fundamentally the product we offer is a low cost, very easy and fast international money transfer – P2P is just one way of doing that. Where we don’t have reciprocal flows, then we will operate with partners in the affected country to acquire local currency, without passing the cost of doing that on to the customer.”

You can read the full article on The Guardian's website here.

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