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Tim Cameron – Wise: Scaling Cross-Border Payments in Australia.

June 25, 2020 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

“We hire people who have shown a true affinity for their customers in previous roles. Talking about the profit you’ve delivered without sharing the customer problems you’ve solved is not really the way to get your foot in the door.“

Tim Cameron – Wise

Tim Cameron is Australia New Zealand Country Manager for Wise. Wise (now Wise) launched in 2011 with the vision of making international money transfers cheap, fair and simple. They now have over 7 million customers and process over US $5 billion per month in international transactions. With investors including Sir Richard Branson, and PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, Wise is one of the world’s most successful and profitable FinTech. 

Tier One People’s Dexter Cousins chats to Tim about his own journey with the business and their plans for Australia.

What we talk about.

  • How Taavet Hinrikus and Kristo Käärmann built Wise out of their own problem paying bills across borders
  • Why being first into a market — Singapore, Brazil, Japan, the UAE — is so resource intensive, and why Wise does it anyway
  • Tim’s path from unit economics analyst in London to product manager to ANZ Country Manager
  • Hiring for customer obsession, and what happens in a Wise interview when you only talk about profit
  • Why Australians pay the highest money transfer prices in the developed world, and the work with the ACCC to change it
  • The TransferWise for Banks product, the Up partnership, and 10,000 new business customers a month

You have quite a few years of history with the Wise business. Could you share a little bit more about what Wise does?

Wise is a global technology company. We’re building the best way to move money around the world. We make it possible for our customers to send, spend and receive money internationally at the real exchange rate. 

The business started about 10 years ago. Our founders Taavet (Hinrikus) and Kristo (Käärmann) are two friends from Estonia. Working in London, being paid in one currency but having expenses in another whilst honouring commitments back home made them realise how much money they were being charged each month.  They quickly worked out a reciprocal agreement to help make money transfers amongst themself in the currencies they needed, using Reuters exchange rate online to figure out the fairest exchange rates. 

When their friends heard about it, the idea snowballed. It was a lightbulb moment as they realised this was a problem for millions of people globally. A discovery more than a decade ago led to Wise’s existence. 

How did an Aussie living in Melbourne end up joining Wise in the UK?

While I was living in Melbourne I saw an ad for the role in the UK. I took advantage of the great visa arrangements between Australia and the UK, applied and the rest is history.

During my first years with the business I worked on the unit economics model, built with the express purpose of helping us to understand how to price and how to invest in marketing. My role then naturally started to gravitate more to the data. This was key in helping to understand, fix or build new parts of the business. 

In a software company, this means working with engineers, without them nothing gets changed or fixed. Understanding problems, coming up with new product ideas, and then implementing them for the benefit of our customers is what led to my role as a product manager. At Wise our teams are structured around the Product Manager as the central node.  I operated a full stack team tasked with launching Wise in new markets and optimising existing markets. 

I was lucky enough to launch Wise in 10 countries in my role as a product manager, before I returned to Australia as the Country Manager.

What were the challenges you faced launching the Wise product in all of these locations?

We’re often the first to do something in a market or country. For example, the first online money transfer, making transfers instant, or introducing electronic verification. These challenges might be technical, regulatory or commercial and when you’re the first company to do it, it can be very resource intensive. 

We’ve set the global standard of what a good customer experience looks like in the UK and Europe. We know what we need, what the end product looks like. Singapore is a great example of bringing a global standard to a new market. Four years ago customers in Singapore had to be verified in person, there was no way to verify them online. 

We set up a tiny office in the centre of Singapore with one employee just to carry out ID verification to people to use Wise. Fast forward to today and we fully integrate with Singapore’s national identity database to make it seamless for Singaporean customers to get onboarded.

We’re really proud  we’ve now made it possible for any new business in Singapore, to utilise this new global standard.

The values and philosophy of the business have been echoed in your hiring process. Could you tell us more about how Wise have managed to find talent?

We hire people who have shown a true affinity for their customers in previous roles. Talking about the profit you’ve delivered without sharing the customer problems you’ve solved is not really the way to get your foot in the door. 

We want people who can identify the opportunities within the business as it grows. For them to discover what they are good at and really focus on fixing problems. 

Kristo, our co-founder and CEO cares a lot about the mission. He wants to be able to say  Wise is setting the new global standard in bringing transparency to international money transfer.

 

What have you learned on your journey of Product Manager to Country Manager.

The role of a Product Manager role is an integral one to any software business. I’m not a huge fan of the saying a Product Manager is the mini CEO. What’s great about the role is being the lead, being on the front line and at the centre of the battle of ideas.  It’s all about making sure you’re building towards the company’s goals. Wise has a very clear company mission and a platform for product managers to really shine.

Moving back to Australia and taking up the role of Country Manager was a huge decision. I’ve moved from HQ of a large growing company to the most remote outpost. The Product Manager is much more of an internal role working across teams. My role now requires lots more external facing. 

This includes working with banking partners, negotiating and being the point of escalation for improvements. I am now the face to Wise in Australia for regulators and at public events. Whilst I didn’t have the most experience in these areas, I felt confident taking the role knowing Wise had the resources to support me on the journey.

How have you managed to take the essence of the culture of the business and move it to Australia with you?

We’ve done a great job embedding the Wise culture of autonomous teams and putting customers first, here in Australia. I have been lucky enough to enlist some old timers to move from London to Australia to help seed culture. 

We are all about empowering employees to do what’s best for our customers. It was a wise decision by Wise founders Kristo and Taavet to allow our employees to figure out what’s best for our customers. 

We’re doing this across time zones and managing different communication styles. At the same time Wise does have full stack support and operational support coming from Singapore which is not too different time wise. This has resulted in us thriving. 

How long has Wise been operational in Australia?

We launched our “send money” product in Australia in 2015.  We now have offices Melbourne and Sydney with risk/compliance, marketing and comms teams here and support coming from Singapore.

Globally we’re processing over 7 billion Australian dollars for customers every month. I think the number we’re most proud of is we’re saving our customers, over $1.5 billion Australian dollars a year or $5 million AUD a day compared to using their bank. Globally, a quarter of our international money transfers are delivered instantly. The transaction happens in less than 20 seconds while the customer is still on the Wise app. 

You’ve got some really interesting partnerships. Have you got any other exciting partnerships lined up? 

We’re about to roll out Wise for banks product and we have partnered with Up Bank here in Australia. This allows banks who want to integrate with Wise to power international money transfers for their customers. We’re also exploring a lot of partnerships around our business product. Globally, we onboard about 10,000 new businesses every month. 

Some of the partnerships we’ve built are, GoCardless, so people can settle the direct debits they’ve received internationally. We have integration feeds with Xero and QuickBooks. Anyone using the accounting software can avoid doing any manual entry. We also have a project with Xero going on in the UK which allows Xero customers to use Wise to pay their bills. 

What does the future hold for Wise? 

2020 Has been a big half year for us. We’ve announced an integration with Alipay for customer sending money to China. We launched the UAE’s first fully online money transfer service. Our customers are currently holding £2 billion in Wise’s multi currency accounts. We’ve just released a feature  allows our customers to send money to each other across borders instantly using just the mobile number. 

We’re hoping to continue this same momentum in the second half of the year. Our real push here in Australia is to make money transfer as cheap as possible for customers especially as we actually pay the highest prices for money transfers of any developed country in the world. Australian banks can get away with charging big markups and hidden markups, we want to change that.

Many people don’t realise they’re not getting the rate they see on Google. The result is the majority of people paying far above the odds to send money overseas. We’re working with the ACCC and other regulators to show solutions we use in Europe and how they could be applied in Australia. We know how big a problem it is and Wise has the ability to solve it.

Links from this episode.

Tim Cameron on Fintech Chatter.

What happened next.

Six months after this interview, APRA granted Wise a Purchased Payments Facility licence in Australia and Tim was re-elected to the Fintech Australia board. He came back on the show to talk through what the licence unlocked and the 2021 plan: Tim Cameron on Wise’s Australian payments licence.

TransferWise renamed itself Wise in February 2021 and listed on the London Stock Exchange that July. In 2025, Country Manager Tristan Dakin picked up the same thread — instant payments, the cost of sending money out of Australia, and what Wise Platform now does for banks.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed. TransferWise was renamed Wise in 2021; the current name is used throughout.

Dexter Cousins
Welcome to the Fintech Australia podcast, brought to you in partnership with Tier One People, Australia’s leading fintech executive search consultants. I’m your host, Dexter Cousins.

This is Episode 19 and today I’m joined by Tim Cameron, Australia New Zealand Country Manager for Wise. Launched in 2011 with the vision of making international money transfers cheap, fair and simple, Wise now has over 7 million customers and processes over $5 billion per month in international transactions. With investors including Sir Richard Branson, and PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, Wise is one of the world’s most successful fintech. I chat to Tim about his own journey with the business and their plans for Australia.

Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Cameron
Thanks for having me on Dexter. It’s great to be here.

Dexter Cousins
Mate, it’s taken us a little bit of time to get here but it’s great to finally make it happen.

Tim Cameron
It has, some things have popped up in the world. But it’s great to be here today.

Dexter Cousins
What I thought might be a nice idea, as you’ve got a bit of a history with the Wise business, if you could share with the listeners just a little bit more about what Wise does globally. Give them a sense of the scale of the business, because you’ve got to be one of the most successful fintech in the world right now.

Tim Cameron
Thanks, Dexter. I’d love to give everyone a bit of an overview of what Wise does. Wise is a global technology company. We’re building the best way to move money around the world. We make it possible for our customers to send, spend and receive money internationally at the real exchange rate.

Wise was started about 10 years ago now. Our founders Taavet (Hinrikus) and Kristo (Käärmann), two friends from Estonia, realised just how much money it costs to send money between the UK and Estonia. Taavet was the first employee at Skype, and he was getting paid in Euros but he was living in London. He had living expenses in pounds. Kristo also worked in London, but he had to pay his mortgage back in Estonia. They were both sending money overseas with their banks, and they realised that they were paying about 5% to the bank each time.

They needed what each other had, so they figured out a fair way to exchange the money between themselves using the mid market exchange rate without the bank taking any cut. Kristo would deposit pounds into Taavet’s bank account. They would look at the Reuters exchange rate online, the mid market rate, and Taavet would figure out exactly how many Euros he had to pay to Kristo. This snowballed from here, they started facilitating these types of transfers for their friends. Eventually they realised that this problem wasn’t just for Estonians in the UK, but it was a problem millions of people around the world face. Kristo and Taavet discovered this problem a decade ago, and they’ve been executing on that ever since.

Dexter Cousins
It’s another one of these overnight successes that takes 10 years.

Tim Cameron
We can go into a bit more detail if you’d like. In this highly regulated industry, nothing here has been an overnight success.

Dexter Cousins
You’ve been with the business for about five years now. You’re obviously an Aussie, but you joined in the UK, is that right?

Tim Cameron
I actually saw a job ad for Wise in London while I was living in Melbourne and took advantage of the great visa arrangements between Australia and the UK, and applied and was lucky enough to get a job building our unit economics model. Which was a key input to how we price and how we invest in marketing, and was really the best way to get an understanding of the business.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. You evolved with the business and you’ve taken on some fairly key roles as well. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey that you’ve been on to get you to the point of returning to Aus as Country Manager.

Tim Cameron
As you said, I joined about five years ago. For about a year I worked on this unit economics model. This was the cost allocation model that really helped us understand how to price and how to invest in marketing. That really helped me understand the business.

I found myself gravitating more and more to, not just understanding the data or understanding the business, but fixing or building new parts of the business. To do that in a software company you need to be working with engineers. They’re the ones that actually make the changes that help customers. The way Wise is set up means that product managers are the central node of a team working with engineers. Understanding problems, coming up with new product ideas, and then seeing that through to actually lead to better outcomes for customers. That’s what led me to working as a product manager.

Initially, I was working on South American expansion teams. Alongside another product manager I launched Wise in Chile, Peru and optimised some things in Mexico. Quite shortly after joining that, I got the opportunity to start up a new team from scratch. That was the Middle Eastern and Africa team. It was a full stack team and it was our job to figure out how to launch Wise in new markets in the region and optimise the existing markets. It would involve finding banking partners, working with regulators to educate them on how Wise does things, getting into the weeds of the operational issues. I think at the end of the day, that all led to us being able to build a great, sometimes quite localised product for each market. That’s the role I was in up until the start of this year. I launched Wise in 10 countries in that time. It was really great to be able to see customers able to send money to Nigeria, to their loved ones, or to Turkey to pay for some inputs for their Amazon selling business.

Dexter Cousins
Tim, what were the challenges that you faced launching the Wise product in all of these locations?

Tim Cameron
An interesting challenge at Wise is that we’re often the first to do something in the market. We might be the first online money transfer company to enter a market. We might be the first to attempt to make transfers instant, or we might try and introduce another product feature, like electronic verification that’s yet to be seen in a country before. Doing that always has a number of challenges. They might be technical, regulatory or commercial. Solving these problems when you’re the first person to do it is often very resource intensive. The thing is, we can dedicate these resources because we’ve set the global standard of what a good customer experience looks like in the UK and Europe. We know what we need, what the end product looks like. Now we need to spend the number of years required to get that product to market.

Maybe a good example of bringing that global standard to a new market is in Singapore. Four years ago, customers in Singapore had to be verified in person, there was no way to verify them online. To get up and running in Singapore, we set up a tiny office in the centre of Singapore with one employee. Every customer who wanted to send money from Singapore had to show up to the office just to get their ID documents verified before they could use Wise. We weren’t even sure that customers would show up, because it’s quite a lot to ask.

Dexter Cousins
I’m smiling here, because I’ve just had one of the big four banks tell me I need to go into a branch, even though I’m a customer, to give them ID so I can actually use my online banking.

Tim Cameron
We did that for a long time. At the same time we had this little shop set up, we were talking to regulators, proving we were committed to helping Singaporean consumers and sharing with the regulators how we were doing things in the UK and Europe and in other places. Showing how online verification leads to much better consumer outcomes. All this while we were verifying consumers face to face.

We were eventually able to transition to verifying customers by them sharing their ID documents in the app or online, and that allows us to run a bunch of extra checks that we couldn’t run face to face. It was better for consumers and it was better for us. After that we were able to integrate with Singapore’s national identity database, something that’s not available in UK and Europe, and make it even more seamless for Singaporean customers to get onboarded. That journey was definitely not an overnight journey, it was a three, four year journey.

One thing we are really proud of is that now anyone else in Singapore that wants to start up a business like Wise, they can just jump straight in and use this new global standard. We feel the impact we’re having is more than just the direct benefits our customers get. It’s really the benefits of bringing what we’ve learned, investing years in some cases getting that to market, then everyone being able to reap those benefits. This challenge isn’t limited to Singapore. The challenge means we’re testing, learning, recharting our course. It’s resource intensive. We’ve just done similar things in Brazil, in Japan and the UAE. We’ve done, not to the same extent, because Australia has a lot of similarities to the UK and Europe. We really want to make money transfer instant, as convenient as possible and as cheap as possible here in Australia.

Dexter Cousins
You’ve touched on some countries there where financial inclusion is a huge issue as well. It’s great to see the values and philosophy of the business really living that, rather than it just being words up on a wall.

Tim Cameron
It’s something we really hire for too. We hire people who have shown they’ve cared about customers in their previous roles. You come to an interview at Wise and talk about the profit you’ve delivered, but not the customer problems you’ve solved, it might be a tough road getting your foot in the door. That comes from the founder, Kristo, our CEO. Kristo cares a lot about the mission. At the end of the day, the big difference Wise will make to the world is setting this new global standard and bringing transparency to international money transfer.

Dexter Cousins
It’s amazing what you’ve done over a five year period. I often say to people, particularly if they’re looking to come out of a large corporate or a big bank, that start up years are a bit like dog years in comparison. One year in a start up is worth seven years in a large corporate. I think it’s testament to what you’ve achieved in just a short journey. In a five year period the exposure that you get in a rapidly scaling business, it’s just phenomenal, right?

Tim Cameron
It’s so good. I think getting in just anywhere, even if it’s at the ground floor of a fast growing business, someone that’s done Series B, C kind of investment. Then just taking all the opportunities that are presented to you as more and more people are onboarded gives you such a great opportunity to grow. Also find what you’re good at and really focus on fixing problems that you’re best suited to.

Dexter Cousins
One of the other things that you touched on was the role of a product manager. It’s been interesting to see that position evolve, particularly over the last five years. So much so that we see that as probably being the ideal position for anybody who ultimately wants to be a chief exec, because you just get so much exposure across the business. What have you learned from that journey of Product Manager to Country Manager?

Tim Cameron
I think you’re right that the product manager role is an integral one to any software business. I’m not a huge fan of the saying that a product manager is the mini CEO. Because actually, it’s unlikely that you’ll be the direct lead of anyone in this cross functional team you’re working with. I think what’s good about that is you have to lead through, be on the front line. It’s more a battle of ideas rather than a battle of product manager says so. At least that’s the way it works at Wise. It’s all about making sure you’re building towards the company’s goals. It really helps that Wise has a clear company mission. That is about making money transfer instant, as convenient as possible for customers and as cheap as possible. That platform enables product managers at Wise to really shine.

It was a big decision for me to make, moving back to Australia and taking up the role of Country Manager. As you said at the start, I moved from HQ of a large growing company to the most remote outpost, given our HQ is in London. There were a lot of things to think about when making that decision.

Dexter Cousins
One of the things we’re known for is to help international fintech launch here in Aus. We find that the Country Manager role is probably the most complex search that we have to do, because it is such a difficult position to get right. It requires so many different skills and experience and areas of expertise from just one individual. How are you finding the move to Country Manager? Have you got any tips to share with people who might be thinking about taking on a similar role?

Tim Cameron
Very important to think about what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing. At Wise as a Product Manager in HQ, it was much more of an internal role working across teams. Now my role is a lot more external facing, working with banking partners, negotiating or being the point of escalation if we need to improve things. Representing Wise to regulators and also at public events. I’ll say that’s not something that I had a large amount of experience doing, but it was something that I knew Wise had the resources to support me on as well. Knowing that Wise could support me on that journey was super important.

Dexter Cousins
What about the culture? Having been in HQ and experienced first hand the culture that originated from the founders, have you found that it’s been easy to take that across to Australia with you and have a seamless culture? Or are there differences between the two businesses?

Tim Cameron
I think we’ve done a great job embedding the Wise culture of autonomous teams and putting customers first, here in Australia. It has helped that we’ve had some old timers move out from London to Australia, as well as Singapore, to seed that culture. Our culture is really a lot around empowering employees to do what’s best for our customers. I think it was a great decision by Wise founders Kristo and Taavet to allow employees to figure out what’s best for their customers. It must have been a hard decision to make, to be honest. When we’re doing that across time zones, it does require slightly different communication styles. But at the same time Wise does have full stack support in the timezone, with a lot of operational support coming from Singapore. That investment again helps us thrive and helps us carry on the culture in the region.

Dexter Cousins
Tim, could we talk a little bit more specifically about the business here in Australia. How long have you actually been in Australia?

Tim Cameron
Wise has been in Australia since 2015. In 2015, we launched what we call our send money product. Customers could send money from Australia overseas, or receive money into Australia.

Dexter Cousins
Cool. How big is the business in Aus in terms of people?

Tim Cameron
We have a number of employees. We have risk, compliance, marketing and comms in Australia spread across Melbourne and Sydney, with support coming from Singapore. In terms of customers, globally we’re processing over 7 billion Australian dollars for customers every month. I think the number we’re most proud of is that we’re saving our customers over one and a half billion Australian dollars a year, or $5 million AUD a day, compared to using their bank. Globally, a quarter of our international money transfers are delivered instantly. We say that is less than 20 seconds while the customer is still on the Wise app or website. That’s a number that personally we’ll be pushing to get to 100%, both here in Australia and globally.

Dexter Cousins
You’ve got some really interesting partnerships. I was at Intersekt last year when the partnership with Up bank was announced. Have you got any other exciting partnerships lined up?

Tim Cameron
You’re right, we’re shortly rolling out the TransferWise for Banks product. This allows banks who want to integrate with Wise to power international money transfers for their customers. If there’s anyone working for an Australian bank listening today and you would like your customers to get the same experience as Wise, let’s talk.

We’re also exploring a lot of partnerships around our business product. Globally, we onboard about 10,000 new businesses every month. We’re really building our feature set out for businesses around building multi user access. Some of the partnerships we’ve built are GoCardless, so people can settle the direct debits they’ve received internationally. We have integration feeds with Xero and QuickBooks. Anyone using the accounting software can avoid doing any manual entry. We also have a project with Xero going on in the UK that allows Xero customers to use Wise to pay their bills.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant. Any new news or updates that you want to share before we wrap up?

Tim Cameron
For sure. We’ve had a big first half of the year. We’ve announced an integration with Alipay for customers sending from Australia to China, or any country to China. We launched the UAE’s first fully online money transfer service, which is something I personally started working on a long, long time ago. Anyone who’s got friends and family in the UAE, they can now send their money back fully online, which wasn’t possible until now. We’ve recently announced our customers are holding 2 billion pounds with Wise in their multi currency accounts. We’ve just released a feature that allows our customers to send money to each other across borders instantly using just the mobile number.

We’re hoping to continue this same momentum in the second half of the year. In Australia, we really want to see money move instantly for our customers, and we’ll be pushing as hard as we can to make money transfer as cheap as possible for customers. One thing we really want to see in Australia, and one of the main reasons I came back, is Australians actually pay the highest prices for money transfers of any developed country in the world. That’s because banks can get away with charging markups or hidden markups.

Dexter Cousins
Tell me about it, mate. I’ve been suffering for 16 years.

Tim Cameron
I’m glad you figured it out. I don’t know if you’re a customer, Dexter, maybe we can chat about that one offline, we’ll sort you out. The big problem is a lot of customers, people don’t know just how much they’re paying to their banks in exchange rate markups. They log on, they see the fee is free or $10. But they don’t realise at the same time, they’re not getting the rate that they see on Google. As a result, the majority of people are paying far above the odds when they send money overseas. That’s something we’ll be working on. Showing how solutions in Europe are prevailing and how that could be applied in Australia. We’re working with the ACCC and other regulators to show how big a problem it is and what needs to be done to solve it.

Dexter Cousins
Tim, it’s been great to have you on the show. If people want to find out a little bit more about Wise, I know you guys are hiring at the moment, where can they go?

Tim Cameron
We’re hiring in a number of roles across the globe at the moment. TransferWise.com/jobs has all of our open roles. TransferWise.com if you need to send money overseas.

Dexter Cousins
Tim, it’s been great to have you on the show. Thanks for sharing your journey, but also some of the cool work that Wise is doing globally as well. We’d love to get you back on here about how the new product launches are going.

Tim Cameron
Thanks, Dexter, I’d love to come back on and share that news in a few months time.

Dexter Cousins
Well, that’s the end of the show, folks. Thanks for tuning in. And thanks to our partners Fintech Australia. Remember to subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google and all of your favourite players. Check out the show notes for additional info on our current opportunities. If you’d like to sponsor the show, or you’re looking to hire game changing fintech talent, check out Tier One People.

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