Wise Business Hackathon!

The people that focus on building Wise Business got together for a 3 day event to fix details in the product that can cause friction to you, our customers. This event was also a chance to raise awareness amongst our teams on the importance of continually working on these issues, and discuss how we can best collaborate on this in the future.

Who was there?

43 people from offices in London, Budapest and Tallinn formed 4 new teams for the event. These teams were made up of a mix of engineers, designers, researchers and product managers.

The 4 teams each focused on a task our business customers carry out on Wise — setting up an account, sending money, getting paid and managing business expenses. Teams gathered issues customers had raised by contacting us, leaving feedback on the website or through previous research interviews. So we knew that everything we worked on was a real problem worth solving for our business customers.

We focused on issues that compromised usability. This means the smaller but important details that can make using a service inefficient, ineffective, challenging to learn or generally less satisfying than it could be.

And importantly - problems had to be fixable within the 3 day deadline. The race against the clock was on!

What did we solve in the hackathon?

The teams delivered nearly 30 small improvements to the business customer experience. Here’s the low-down on a few problems they solved:

1. Making it easier to set up a repeat request for money.

You can now click a button to repeat a request and get money into your business faster.

2. Making it easier to request a payment

Customers who don’t have account details can now click on 'request a payment' and are shown how to get the required details.

3. Making your Wise balances the first option to select from when sending a payment

When sending a payment, the order of options to choose from now lets businesses see their Wise balances first.

4. Making it easier to send batch payments.

Businesses can now select recipients they want to pay to rather than having to download them all to an Excel sheet and delete ones they don't want to use.

We all voted based on impact to the customer and the winning team got a huge trophy - which is theirs until the next hackathon!

The motivation to solve more usability problems has lasted long past these 3 days. There are so many positives to working at Wise — but this event was a great reminder of how much focus and energy we really put on solving problems for our customers. We’re already looking forward to the next one!