
The Guardian hails Wise for rebooting remittances
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.
Set up a free Wise account here.
Try out Wise's new SWIFT/ BIC code toolkit here.
Wise is the smart, new way to send money abroad.
Find out more
Why we introduced a hybrid model of flexible working at TransferWise
Covid-19 changed the game when it came to how we all work. Flexibility is now key when we’re looking to attract and retain the very best talent around the...

Our 2020 annual report: the financial discipline you deserve
Wise is building a new way to move money around the world. A way that’s faster and more convenient than the banks that came before us, and at a...

Wise’s gender pay gap
What is the gender pay gap? The gender pay gap is the difference in average hourly earnings between men and women working within the same organisation. The...

Welcome to the Wise Q4 2019 Mission Update
TL;DR To the Wise community, We’ve just finished Q4 and have headed into a new year and new decade. It’s time for an update on how much closer we’ve...

TransferWise once again receives TÜV Certification, rated “good”.
This article summarizes some of the results from the report that experts at TÜV Süd wrote about TransferWise.

Xero and TransferWise: A better way to bill pay
Announcing the partnership of Xero and TransferWise, which gives SMBs in the UK an easy bill payment solution through Xero