Wise Engineers: On a Mission to Make Money Without Borders the New Norm
Wise Engineers: On a Mission to Make Money Without Borders the New Norm
It’s hard to imagine a more international citizen than Ankita D'Mello. Today she is a product manager in Wise’s New York City office, but within the last few years she has also called London and Singapore home. She even lived the first four years of her life on a cargo ship captained by her father, cruising around the Asian Pacific.
D’Mello’s international sensibility has led her to think about money a little differently than most people who’ve stayed put all their lives. Way back in 2012, when well below 1% of the world population was using a phone to send funds, domestically or internationally, she wanted to buy flowers for her sister’s birthday in Singapore. But the local florist wouldn’t accept her credit card—and a new Wise customer was born.
Even beyond being an early satisfied Wise user, D’Mello’s personal understanding of the logistical difficulties around money transfers give her a deep empathy with Wise customers. It reinforced for her how important it is for people and businesses to have fast, reliable access to their money, particularly when that money needs to cross international borders.
“In the pandemic, some of the products that I worked on actually helped people survive,” she says.
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Even in early 2023, it can be argued that the digital payment industry is still in an early phase, and Wise has benefited from being one of the first major players founded outside the United States. Begun as Transferwise, the company was the brainchild of two Estonians with a Skype pedigree, who found themselves in a currency trap. Taavet Hinrikus was working for Skype in London but was paid in euros. Kristo Käärmann was working for Deloitte and also living in London, was paid in pounds but needed to pay a mortgage in Estonia in euros. To avoid paying hefty conversion rates and fees, they came upon a simple solution: they put money in one another’s bank accounts.
That bit of quirky pragmatism quickly yielded a powerful insight: banks have a near-monopoly hold on the business of sending money across national borders. Especially as international travel and commercial globalization ballooned over the last half century, traditional banks have made tremendous profits by charging hefty—and often hidden—fees to people and businesses who want to send money from one country to another. Find a way to provide that service more cheaply and transparently, and customers will find their way to you. Transferwise, as it was known then, secured early financing from venture firms like Index Ventures and individuals like PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, and set up shop in London and Tallinn. It was a near-instant hit, especially in Europe. Wise went public in July 2021, and today has a market capitalization of $10 billion and some 5000 employees worldwide.
While growth is almost always something to celebrate, any startup veteran will tell you that it brings its own set of challenges. How do you embark upon new ventures when there are barely processes in place for the existing ones? How do you enter into new national markets when the institutional players and competition are completely different from the early markets? And maybe most important: how do you scale a company up—especially globally—and ensure that your product offerings will win the day?
Balazs Barna, Wise’s head of US Engineering, says that the key to extending the company’s culture is that it combines the “customer obsession of Amazon and the mission driven mindset of Tesla.” That’s a compelling formula, but how does a company actually make that happen in multiple places, particularly in a market like North America where Wise lacks the brand recognition it enjoys in Europe? Barna, who works in the company’s relatively new (and growing) Austin, Texas, office but hails from Hungary, points to a few crucial factors. One is the knowledge that each market has its own quirks and strengths.
The second is to find the right local banking partners. It’s an expensive step, but in most cases Wise doesn’t have access to a country’s central banking system and so it needs partners. But the third, and probably most important, factor is how the company organizes and empowers its teams. “The most efficient way to build products is for teams to bring value,” Barna insists. “And how we organize teams is around the customer problem. So we don't really tell them how to prioritize or how to solve the problem. We just see the problem itself and then allow the team to figure out how to do it.”
Barna says the company tries to keep the teams small: three-to-five engineers, plus a product manager and analyst. “They're going to iterate really, really fast on this problem without getting approvals from senior management.”
If that sounds like a fairly edgy way to run a global company, it is. For the right people, working on an autonomous team is the ultimate puzzle-solving satisfaction. D'Mello says that every Wise product manager “comes to the table with some sort of vision of what they're looking to do.” Her team is especially focused on money movement, particularly between US and Canadian dollars. No one from corporate headquarters told her to concentrate on that, but she and her colleagues obsess over every detail: the relationships with banks, with treasury departments, with operational teams. “There's so many different cogs that have to work in tandem for that process to be really smooth,” she says. “That's what customers don't see, right? And we don't want them to see it.”
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That may be many people’s idea of workplace fun, but still, even the smartest team leaders need to take their cues from some place. Dave Hancock, an engineer lead from the UK who now works in Wise’s New York office, says the four pillars that focus his team are price, speed, transparency and convenience. A strict focus on those elements will usually steer a team in an effective direction, even if it’s somewhat unconventional.
Wise teams are perpetually creating similar products to help customers tackle issues, or receive better service. One recent example is Auto Conversions, which automatically exchanges users’ money between two currencies once a preset rate is hit. Another initiative is increasing the speed of transactions, which can be tricky in some markets because it depends on governments, but Wise teams are constantly shooting for speed with more than 50% of all of its transactions now being instant.
For her part, D'Mello takes direction from constant interaction with actual Wise users. “I did a ton of customer interviews to really understand how customers were using our product, why they were using our product,” she says, estimating that she met some 80 Wise customers in her first six months in. “That's the stuff that you'll never be able to see from analytics.”
For example, in 2021, D’Mello learned from partners at Plaid that there were some 40,000 unique monthly searches for Wise in their exchange, and that 80% of those searches were for money moving apps. Tapping into the Plaid network, she realized, would allow Wise customers to use some 6000 financial apps all within the Wise app.
She was able to tackle a new product within her team that focused on Canadian and US dollars. From a technical perspective, the task was primarily an integration with Plaid’s API, although the Wise team added some features “to make the experience more elegant for our customers,” she said. The process wasn’t quite seamless; some of the Plaid data on direct debits was hard to understand. But after about three months, including testing, they got the new product to customers. And feedback has been terrific; “particularly customers who have recently moved to the US or use Wise as their primary account say that this is one of the most useful features we have provided them with,” she says with pride.
Equally important is making sure that the members of a Wise team understand and trust one another. Geoffroy Barruel, a product manager in Wise’s New York City office, boasts that “there is no closer relationship than the one between a product manager and their engineers.” As early as the recruitment process, Wise managers make it clear that teamwork and mutual support are vital. “We have built a culture of feedback, which is especially true between the dynamic duo of these teams,” says Barruel.
Empowering small teams yields workplace satisfaction that Hancock vastly prefers to the top-down, bureaucratic culture he encountered in an earlier Wall Street job. “Actually getting a stake in what you build is probably one of the most important pieces. Having ownership in what you build and therefore being proud of what you've shipped, but also having a financial connection to what you build is really satisfying.”
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One factor in effective team building is the large percentage of employees in Wise’s US offices who come from abroad. But maybe most of all, the global nature of Wise’s team gives its employees a strong empathy for people who need their money to be global, too; D'Mello describes “people who are stranded in different countries, people who've lost their jobs, people who really need their money. When you talk to these customers, it's very fulfilling - it gives you a lot of motivation to come to work every day and make things even better for them.”