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Q3 2022 Mission Update

Our mission is to build money without borders — making it move faster, more conveniently, and eventually for free. Read how much closer we got to our mission from July to September 2022.

Mission Round-up.

The last few months of currency volatility have presented some new challenges. In spite of these, 5.5 million of you moved £27 billion with us and saved over £560,000,000 on cross-currency transactions * compared to other providers.

While our average fee for sending money didn’t get closer to zero, we stayed steady on speed and made big strides for customer convenience.

It’s now faster to get a Wise card, get issues resolved, and get your ID verified. We finally enabled wire transfers in the US and enabled another 103 countries to receive US dollars. We are also much better at spotting and preventing scams, and have made it easier for you to report suspicious activity to us.

For our Wise Business account holders, you can now bulk pay bills with Quickbooks, send limitless transfers to business recipients in China, and get paid directly through Wise.

Our fees.

Our average fee increased.

In Q3, we continued to invest in our infrastructure to help make Wise cheaper (and faster) in the future. This investment, alongside the current currency climate, meant we experienced higher costs than normal. So, last quarter we had to increase our fees on some popular currencies, like sending to and from US dollars. This is sadly reflected in our Q3 average fee increasing to 0.64% (from 0.61%).

However, we did manage to decrease fees on some of our currencies. Thanks to a new partnership, we dropped the fees when you send money to Chile. We also negotiated cheaper fees when you send money to China via Weixin.

Fees are now also lower when you send money to Brazil since we’re now sending money under our own FX licence (rather than relying on a bank partner’s FX licence). This lowered our costs and we’re able to pass these savings back to you.

Read more about fees
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Our speed.

Half of all transfers (still) arrive in under 20 seconds.

Q3 was a mixed bag for speed. While 50% of transfers are still instant, we didn’t make the progress we’d have liked.

We did manage to make a few improvements. After integrating with new partners it’s now faster to send money from Japan and to Chile. Transfers to Hong Kong also sped up and 56% of transfers to HKD are now instant - arriving in under 20 seconds.

We’re also carrying on our work to speed up the financial crime checks we run. We hope to have this wrapped up early next year to significantly reduce delays while also keeping your money safe.

Unfortunately, as in Q2, some transfers to Brazil are getting delayed due to challenges we have in getting funds to our partner account quickly enough. We will be connecting to our partner's banking API which should speed this up next quarter.

Read more about speed
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Convenience.

We got easier to use.

The key indicator that we’re offering a truly convenient product is your ability to use Wise without any hiccups. That’s why we’re now measuring convenience (or lack of it) by how many customers contact us for support.

Improvements made to our product and controls meant transactions are being paused less often and as a result customers contacted us less than last quarter.

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Contacting us.

We also added more agents to our Support Team for whenever you do need to get in touch with us which halved the amount of time you have to wait when you contact us by phone and email.

Is chat coming back? We don't have immediate plans to reopen live chat. We know some customers prefer to get in touch this way but we don’t want to spread ourselves too thin and undo the progress made on our email and phone response times. We'll come back to live chat when we’ve got the capacity to service this channel to a high standard.

We're still here to support you via email and phone, and don't forget about the Wise Help Centre where you can log in for more personalised support.

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Transparency.

Pledging price transparency for Ukraine.

In September, the European Commission and the National Bank of Ukraine launched a pledge that binds companies to disclose all fees when customers send money to Ukraine, including the fees hidden in exchange rate markups. Wise is one of the companies that signed up because that level of transparency has been part of our product since day one.

It's the first time that the language around transparency is so explicit and leaves no wiggle room for companies to continue ripping people off. That's why a few of the obvious bigger players were missing, but hopefully, they'll sign up soon.

This is big because banning hidden fees is now a reality. It's great this started with Ukraine, but we look forward to this becoming the norm everywhere.

Join Nothing To Hide - our campaign to ask businesses, government and civil society to end the lack of transparency that keeps remittance prices artificially high. We believe there should be nothing to hide. No more excuses.

Join Nothing to Hide
:copyright:European Union, 2022

Photo: Deputy Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, Oleksii Shaban; CEO at Wise, Kristo Käärmann; European Commissioner for Financial Services, Mairead McGuinness. Copyright: European Union, 2022

Moving money.

What's new?

In Q3, we made sending and receiving money more convenient. It’s now easier for you to find and send money to your friends who also use Wise.

In the US, we’re now supporting wire transfers and we made it cheaper and faster to send US dollars (USD) to Singapore. We’re also supporting eWallets in China and Malaysia.

And customers in Canada can now use Interac, the most requested payment method, to send money or top-up into their balance.

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Wise account.

What's new?

Last year we changed our name to Wise to show the world we do so much more than transfers. One thing which hadn’t changed though was our app. Well, we heard you loud and clear now it’s time for some big updates to better serve our Wise account customers.

The first of many updates is a brand new home screen and app navigation. Now available to most users, our new design gives you easy access to your most frequent actions – like following your favourite exchange rates, or quickly receiving money from a friend.

The new home screen is specially designed for you - allowing you to discover new things, manage your existing payments and save more on your international money.

Explore the Wise account
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Wise Business.

What's new?

In Q3, we launched a range of new features to save you time day-to-day.

You can now multiple bills at once with QuickBooks, assign team roles on mobile, and get paid faster by customers. We’re also testing some really exciting new features like cashback and custom account roles which we’ll update you more on next quarter.

In the meantime, if you’ve got suggestions for how to make the Wise Business account more convenient then make sure you head over to our Mission Roadmap to submit your ideas.

Explore the international business account
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Wise Platform.

In Q3 the Wise Platform team launched an exciting new feature and partnered up with some new companies.

The new International Receive feature allows our partners to use Wise as a correspondent, and leverage our global footprint to receive funds from all over the world.

We also have two exciting partner updates. We expanded our partnership with Swiss finance disruptor, Yapeal, to enable sending money to over 80 countries for Neo-Bank customers directly in the Yapeal app.

We also partnered up with financial wellbeing platform, Wagestream, to deliver cheaper and faster international payments to their customers.

Read more about Wise Platform
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platform uptime
99.961%
customers verified < 1 hr
86%
transfers arrived on time
84%
queries answered on time
55%

Join the revolution

We had over 300 Wisers start new roles in the last quarter and we have 328 open roles right now. We’re looking for Product Directors, Heads of Customer Support, Heads of Disputes & Collections, as well as many roles in engineering and product. Come join us.

Search Wise Careers
  • Based on comparison data analysis, 17/10/2022.

    ** Based on aggregate savings across all collected provider data between 14/7/22 and 18/9/22.