Skip to main content
Talk to us ↗

Podcast

Wise – The Future of Cross-Border Payments.

January 31, 2025 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

Tristan Dakin – Wise

About this Episode

Dexter Cousins welcomes Tristan Dakin, Country Manager at Wise on this week’s Fintech Chatter Podcast. They chat about the innovative solutions Wise provides in the payments technology space and the complexities of instant payments. Tristan speaks about the company’s growth and the challenges of operating in a highly regulated environment.

He shares insights into Wise’s culture, the importance of transparency in financial services, and the future of fintech in Australia.

About Wise

Wise launched in 2011 making international money transfers cheap, fair, and simple their Vision. Today, their multi-currency account helps millions of customers and businesses manage their money globally.

Their story started in London with Taavet (paid in Euro’s) & Kristo (paid in Pounds) solving the issue of making money in one country but needing to meet payment commitments in their home country. Expensive fees and bad exchange rates each month led them to make a simple workaround. Taavet would pay Kristo’s mortgage in Estonia and Kristo would pay him back in pounds.

No waiting, no stress, and no extra cost, they quickly realised that they had hit upon a great idea and Wise was born. They have since added a multi-currency account, a debit card, and a business account, and changed their name to Wise.

About Tristan

Tristan joined Wise in 2020, and since 2022, has been leading Wise in Australia and New Zealand as country manager. Before joining Wise, Tristan worked in the financial services industry, including Lombard Securities in the UK. 
He is skilled in FX, Banking, Management, Financial Markets, Trading, Structured Products and Derivatives, and Financial Risk.

Key Takeways

  • Wise aims to build the best way for people to move money globally.
  • The company focuses on transparency in fees and payment processes.
  • Instant payments are achieved through advanced technology and infrastructure.
  • Wise’s growth has been significant, with millions of active customers.
  • The complexity of regulatory compliance is a major challenge for fintechs.
  • Tristan’s background in financial services shaped his approach at Wise.
  • The culture at Wise emphasizes autonomy and problem-solving.
  • Australia’s fintech landscape is evolving, with increasing competition.
  • Regulatory changes could enhance transparency in the financial sector.
  • Wise is committed to empowering customers and improving financial services.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Fintech Chatter and Wise

01:15 Wise’s Mission and Products

03:27 Challenges of Cross-Border Payments

07:09 The Complexity of Instant Payments

09:10 Wise’s Growth and Market Presence

10:54 Wise’s Centralised Infrastructure and Competitive Advantage

12:32 Australia’s Unique Remittance Landscape

13:18 Tristan’s Background and Attraction to Wise

16:25 The Role of Country Manager at Wise

17:55 Inspiration and Motivation in Fintech

19:43 Cohesion and Culture at WISE

26:51 Navigating the FinTech Landscape in Australia

30:18 The Future of FinTech: Trends and Innovations

38:36 Download the Wise App

Links & Resources:

Links from this episode.

Wise on Fintech Chatter.

More on payments.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
Fintech Chatter Podcast, brought to you by Tier One People, the leaders in executive search for fintech ventures.

Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the podcast where I chat with fintech leaders about their secrets to success. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search firm dedicated to connecting high-growth fintech companies with exceptional leadership talent. With a proven track record in placing top executives in mission-critical roles, Tier One People is the trusted partner for many of the world’s most recognisable fintech brands. Today’s guest is Tristan Dakin from Wise. Tristan, welcome to the show.

Tristan Dakin
Thanks for having me, Dex.

Dexter Cousins
This is your debut. It’s been in the making for some time, and I think, true to the spirit of Wise, you’ve quietly gone about doing your business and said, let’s wait until we’ve got some significant things to talk about. And there’s a lot to talk about. But before we go into that, could you share with our listeners who don’t know Wise a little bit about you, and the big problem that you solve?

Tristan Dakin
Yeah, absolutely. So Wise is a payments technology business. I think that’s the best way to describe us. We are striving to build the best way for people and businesses to move money around the world. So people that live internationally, businesses that operate on a global scale or want to expand internationally: we build products, and we’ve built products, that enable them to do that really cheaply, conveniently and transparently. We have a remittance product, Wise Transfer, and we have a multi-currency account, which allows people to send, spend and receive in different currencies wherever they are, and use a debit card to make payments as well.

I guess the problems we’re trying to solve are probably twofold, to basket them into two groups. Listeners have probably heard of SWIFT. For a long time, SWIFT was really the only mechanism for sending a payment cross-border, internationally. Essentially what SWIFT is, is a payment messaging system, and it relies on a chain of correspondent banks. So when you send a payment from A to B, it might go through five different banks along the way, and each bank will take a fee and maybe hold the payment up for a little bit. So what you’re left with is a customer experience where you don’t know how much is going to arrive at the other end, and you don’t know when it’s going to arrive. We’ve really built infrastructure to compete with that correspondent system. We want our payments to be instant and cheap and super transparent, so people know what they’re paying for, when the payment’s going to arrive, et cetera.

And I guess the other problem we’re trying to solve, which ties into that, is this problem of transparency. For a long, long time, when people were doing these things, they didn’t really know what they were paying for, and there has historically been this culture within financial services of trying to charge as much as possible, and charge fees as high as possible, to make a profit. We really want to turn that around and let people know what they’re paying for, and we want regulators and policymakers to make sure, and enforce, that banks and other financial services have to do the same. So we try and walk the walk as much as talk the talk.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. As a consumer, I’m a big fan of your product. As a business owner, I’m a big fan of your product. My feeling is, as a business owner, it’s a really underserved market, and to have something as slick as Wise is a breath of fresh air. But you’ve gone beyond just… are you B2B and B2C? And you’ve also got a white label solution, Wise Platform, as well. In terms of the complexity of the problems that you’re solving, could you give us some context around how difficult it actually is to move money around the world instantly? I think you’ve got under 20 seconds, is what you would class as instant?

Tristan Dakin
That’s right. Yeah, that’s the metric we use. There are a lot of things you have to do with a payment before you can allow it to go to another place, and so we’re trying to build technology that allows us to do that in real time, really quickly. So when we say instant, we say around 20 seconds. There’s a lot of screening and reporting and regulatory compliance requirements that we need to do, and AML things that we need to do on a payment. Look, it’s a super complex problem, and maybe that’s the reason why no one has really competed with this correspondent banking infrastructure in the past. So we’ve bitten off a lot to chew. We’re slowly working through it. But how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, I guess.

We’re trying to build a ubiquitous product experience globally. Maybe the best way to illustrate the complexity is this. Think about when you open a bank account at a local, traditional bank: it’s a really hyper-localised experience. A really important thing in financial services, and a strict requirement, is that we need to know who our customers are, and we need to verify who they are before they use our services. So if someone goes and signs up for a bank, and that bank’s only operating in that one market, it’s a really narrow path to verification, right? There’s one regulatory regime that they need to adhere to, and there’s one set of rules to meet in terms of knowing your customer and verifying who they are. We’re onboarding millions of customers across hundreds of different countries, regulatory regimes and jurisdictions, and we’re trying to create a ubiquitous product experience. There are infinite permutations a customer can go through to reach final verification, based on the different idiosyncratic requirements. So that’s a really, really tough problem to solve, right? How do you do that in a way that’s smooth, without too much friction in the process, and that means it’s the same for someone in one country as it is for someone in another, while still adhering to all the different regulatory regimes? That’s one example, but yeah, it’s a relatively complex problem.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. I think one of the interesting things that I find as well, with a problem that is this complex, and I say this with the utmost respect: two dudes in Bondi raising a couple of million dollars in seed capital aren’t going to fix this problem, right? You look at the scale of a business the size of Wise, and the amount of money and time and resources that have been invested into continuing to evolve the Wise solution, and it’s a sobering thought, I think, for anybody who has aspirations of building a startup and tackling this type of problem.

Tristan Dakin
Yep. Yeah, absolutely. I guess the way we’ve really thought about it is: why does a payment, or the messaging around a payment, have to go through five different banks along the way, and how do we cut out those middlemen? So maybe the genesis of Wise: our two founders, Kristo and Taavet, are both Estonian. We were founded in 2011, and Kristo and Taavet both lived in London. Taavet was getting paid in euros, though, from Europe. Kristo was also in London, but obviously getting paid in pounds, and Kristo had a mortgage in Estonia, which needed to be paid in euros. So rather than Kristo go to the bank and convert his pounds at a bank rate into euros and send it for his mortgage payment, he said to Taavet: well, why don’t you just pay my mortgage payment for me, in the euros you already have in Europe? It’s just a domestic payment, with no FX on it. And I’ll just pay you back in pounds here, another domestic payment in London, and we can just agree on what exchange rate we use, which is just the mid-market rate that you can Google, and we won’t have to pay any fees or exchange rate markups to banks along the way. And that was really how we started, and the genesis of the idea.

And I guess when you zoom out, it’s: how do we make sure that, as much as possible, funds don’t actually cross borders? So really what Wise does is just manage liquidity in the different markets that we operate in. An Australian customer sending a payment to the UK, for instance, is really sending a local AUD payment to an AUD account, which comes to us instantly because of the infrastructure that we’ve built in Australia, and we then instantly pay out a payment in the UK in pounds, from liquidity that we already have there, and that leg is instant as well. So when you patch those two things together, you get this instant, other-side-of-the-world transfer experience, which is pretty cool for customers.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. Now, talking about Australia: when did Wise launch in Oz?

Tristan Dakin
So we launched in 2016, and we started just with our send money, or, in our internal jargon, our remittance product, our a Tob sending money product. In 2018 we brought our multi-currency account and debit cards to Australia. We’ve grown a lot since then. I think last year we had almost 13 million active customers globally. We’re moving about 30 billion pounds in cross-border payments every quarter, so almost 60 billion Aussie, and we have a lot of money that customers are holding in Wise accounts around the world as well. I think we have almost 14 billion pounds held in Wise accounts globally. And then, as I said, speaking back to that structure of managing liquidity, as much as possible we try and plug ourselves directly into the instant payment rails in the countries that we operate in. So rather than relying on banking infrastructure, we just clear and settle it all ourselves, and we have five of those connections now. A big part of the future of Wise is building out more of those direct connections.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. I’ve certainly had a lot of conversations with founders where they’ve always acknowledged the expertise of banks and financial institutions around treasury. How has Wise made that quantum leap, from being a fintech solving a unique problem to enterprise-grade treasury, liquidity, risk and compliance? I say quantum leap, and I think it actually is.

Tristan Dakin
Yeah. I don’t know if it’s necessarily… it’s just necessitated out of… I guess we’re a bit of a victim of our own success in that regard. One interesting thing, and I guess it speaks again to the way we’re scaling the product, and also the way we’re approaching solving this problem of cross-border infrastructure, is that we’re in a unique position. The way we think about it is, rather than have fragmented systems and processes, with treasury and finance in different parts of the world catering to specific markets, we have centralised infrastructure, which is then deployed on a regional basis. So we’re managing liquidity in different parts of the world, and we have a central treasury and finance team that have a top-down view of all our payouts and pay-ins and all our liquidity all around the world. That gives us a much more comprehensive view to manage it on a global scale, and I think that’s where we really drive our competitive advantage.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Last year I must have pitched for about three or four cross-border currency businesses looking to launch here in Oz, and I couldn’t understand why. I thought, yeah, Australia is a good place for innovation, but why all this interest? Then, when I was at the Singapore Fintech Festival in November, I was invited along to a Wise Platform event, and there was a stat that stunned me, which was that Australia is, I think, number five or six in the world for outbound remittance, in terms of volume and value. I just could not get my head around that. I think it was higher than India.

Tristan Dakin
Yeah, exactly. That stat is legitimate. Australia is a very important and interesting market, if anything just due to our geographical location and proximity to Asia. We’ve run a balance of trade deficit since the… and a lot of businesses and people in Australia need to send money home, for whatever reason, whether that’s paying invoices for your business, or… we have such a large diaspora of different people and cultures that live in Australia, who want to send money home on a regular basis. So that makes the infrastructure extremely important, and it makes it really important that they can do that in a cheap and transparent way.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. What was your background prior to Wise, Tristan?

Tristan Dakin
So I’ve worked in financial services my whole career, so 15 years now. I did commerce and finance at university, but I worked for m in mainly at foreign exchange capacities, so a couple of different brokerages. I worked at a prime broker, and then eventually made my way to Wise. So I’ve seen the full spectrum of the industry, all the good stuff and some of the bad stuff as well, which I guess led me on my journey to eventually joining Wise.

Dexter Cousins
And what was it that attracted you to Wise?

Tristan Dakin
So, in my past roles… I think there are still some areas of the financial services industry that are poorly incentivised, which creates some bad behaviour, right? It’s very much an eat-what-you-catch industry in some places, and there’s really this culture, as I said before, of wanting to charge as much as possible to your clients, to make as much money as possible. When I moved to London, I heard about Wise for the first time, and Wise had a great reputation for the culture that they had there. Culture means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but one aspect of the culture I really liked was this cohesive dedication to the mission: the mission of building cheap, transparent, convenient payments for people. The other really important part of the culture at Wise is the culture of autonomy. I think what Wise really does is empower the people that work there to focus their efforts on things that they think will be impactful. And that was just a really, really big carrot for me to follow. I knew a few people who already worked there who extended those same views, and it eventually led me to join Wise.

Dexter Cousins
I think one of the hardest roles that I ever recruit for is the country manager for an international fintech business. First of all, just because the role itself literally is a blue-eyed unicorn. There are so many different facets that this person has to be across, and they have to be confident and able to execute, whether that’s sales, marketing, recruitment, operations or technology. They’ve got to be across it all. But then the other thing is just the time zone difference and the lack of proximity. You’ve got a problem, you ain’t got somebody next to you, you’ve got to wait 8 hours, and usually your meetings are at 9:00 p.m. on a Friday night, or 3:00 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, and then at 8:00 a.m. you’re back at work doing your Aussie day. What have you found have been, one, the challenges in the country manager role, but two, the things that have really given you energy, the things that get you out of bed in the morning?

Tristan Dakin
So we have the added complexity in Australia of being prudentially regulated as well.

Dexter Cousins
The last time Wise were on the show was when you got the licence.

Tristan Dakin
Yeah, yeah. So that creates an extra overhead for us, well, for the country manager, in terms of accountability and responsibility. How do I get inspiration, I guess?

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, look, I think it’s kind of a tough gig, right? You’ve got to be energised, you’ve got to be focused, and particularly with the regulatory stuff as well, dealing with regulators isn’t easy. It’s not to suggest that they’re intentionally difficult, but it’s just another layer of complexity that comes with the role. And particularly in fintech, right, you’re charting uncharted waters, where the regulators don’t have the answer and are often dependent on you to give them that guidance as well.

Tristan Dakin
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Look, I sleep pretty well at night, because I can honestly say, particularly more than a lot of the banks that we compete with, that we are genuinely trying to do right by the customer. And I think that ultimately regulators respond to that, and they’re appreciative of the fact that, no matter what, we’re trying to do right by the customer and to empower them to make good financial decisions.

I think inspiration is kind of hard to manufacture artificially, but I’m also very fortunate to work with a product that I really believe in, right? I think about the impact… I don’t want to have delusions of grandeur, it’s a financial product, but we’re not just moving money or numbers on a screen. We’re enabling families to send money home to loved ones. We’re supporting small businesses to expand globally. We’re facilitating international trade. We’re breaking down financial barriers, trying to connect people and businesses across borders. We’re empowering people in developing countries, giving them access to affordable, reliable financial services. So all these things are pretty helpful for keeping the motivation and the inspiration. I like the fact that we work with a product that has utility. It’s useful to people, and it’s helpful.

And some of the challenges that come with that, around time zones and dealing with regulators, are also kind of part of the fun. It’s really interesting to work with many different teams in different parts of the world, who can all bring context that I wouldn’t otherwise get exposure to, because they’re in a different market, working with different regulators and different people. And we are in an industry which is super outdated. Lots of the regulation that governs us was put in place 30, 40 years ago and hasn’t changed since, and we all know how fast the technology industry and the financial industry change, especially lately, with challenger banks and all these sorts of things. So that’s kind of fun, right: being a thought leader with regulators, and helping guide policy decisions and regulation, hopefully to a place which is useful to Aussie consumers and businesses.

Dexter Cousins
Now, I want to double-click on the culture at Wise. You used the word cohesion before. I think it’s a really good word, and certainly reflective of my experience of dealing with Wise as a customer, as a service provider, and just within my network, with people who have worked within the organisation. I think one of the things that Wise does exceptionally well is the mission that you have, and then how it permeates all the way through, even as far as remuneration structures, where people are incentivised for the right reasons, not the wrong reasons. What have been the things about the Wise culture that have stood out to you, that have kept you there for such a long time, and that you think are the main attractive components for anybody coming into the business?

Tristan Dakin
Yeah. So I touched on it a little bit earlier, but I think there are two aspects that are really important. One, as you said, is just cohesion around the mission: money without borders, instant, convenient, transparent and eventually free. That’s something that people who work here really live and breathe, and it’s certainly the tone that’s set from the top. Kristo, our global CEO and founder, genuinely wants it to be eventually free, and it should be as easy as sending an email to make a payment somewhere. So that’s a big component. Another is the complexity of the challenge that we work on. People join Wise because they want to solve interesting problems, and this is a very interesting and super tough problem to try and solve. That’s why I think we attract and retain a lot of talent: there’s an interesting problem to solve, and you’re empowered to go and solve it the way that you think is best. So there’s that autonomous aspect, and you have a lot of autonomy in roles at Wise to pick and choose your path.

Dexter Cousins
It’s a highly competitive space that you’re in. Fintech itself is a unique environment. Startups are tough, but fintech is even tougher, because you’ve got regulatory compliance boundaries that mean you’re limited in how you can actually approach and solve problems, and also in the corner cutting that you might see in some other types of businesses. You could see people end up in jail, right, in fintech. How do you assess for people who have the capability to work in a fast-moving, high-growth business that’s continually evolving, with the added challenge of compliance, and who also have the values and principles to say: hey, this is tough, I’m under a lot of pressure, but I’m not going to cut corners, I’m not going to cheat, and I’m not going to try and rip people off, we’ve got to do this the right way? Because, look, as an observer, the thing that I admire most about Wise has been its commitment to a methodical, structured approach to solving this problem, where it’s invested a lot of money, hasn’t cut corners, and has really set the groundwork for others to benefit as well, right? Like the licence that you got here in Australia: a perfect example, the first licence of its type. What are the qualities that you look for in people who are going to actually perform and thrive in this uniquely complex and difficult environment?

Tristan Dakin
There’s a pretty natural progression, as a fintech business, from the early, scrappier startup stages to, I guess, a more mature organisation from a risk and compliance perspective, and we’re no outlier. We’ve definitely been through that journey as well. I think it’s fair to say that in the earlier years of Wise, we were probably a little cheekier than maybe we should have been. Or not should have been… we were pretty cheeky, and pushed the envelope a little bit from a regulatory standpoint. That was kind of necessary, to shine a light on something and to advocate for change, which was really required in the industry. As we’ve grown and become more systemically important, and also given the way we’re trying to solve the problem, by plugging ourselves directly into payment rails and getting accounts with central banks around the world, you kind of have to work more within the bounds of the regulation, right? We can’t be seen to be cutting corners, and from a governance, compliance and risk perspective, we have to make sure that we thow it, because we have a seat at the table now. We’re playing with the big boys, and we need to do it properly.

And I guess that progression of the business through that journey also just organically attracts different people to work at the business. The typical profile of someone who joined Wise 10 years ago might be slightly different to the typical profile today, and that’s based on a few things. Sometimes it’s the business, and often it’s just the aspirations of the people that are joining. It’s a really, really hard thing to assess for when we’re recruiting. There are a couple of key characteristics that I think probably every business would say they look for, but certainly Wise does. We want people who are very curious: they don’t just want to accept that something is the way it is, but they want to understand why it is the way it is, and whether that’s still the best way for it to be at the time. And we really want people to be super hands-on: really take ownership of the problems that you’re working on, get your hands dirty, and be a doer. Speaking earlier about the culture of autonomy at Wise, and picking and choosing your own path, that also means you have to get your hands dirty, do the work, and be curious about the problem you’re solving and the best way to solve it.

So I guess these are all considerations when we’re hiring. Naturally, based on the stage of maturity we’re at, and the regulatory overhead we have… I think, by the way, we’re probably the most regulated business in the world. And if not today, we certainly will be at some stage. We are extremely reliant on the licences that we have in different markets. We are licensed to operate in all the markets that we’re in, and that means adhering to the regulatory environments of those specific markets, and that creates a huge, huge challenge. So I think just that knowledge, when people want to come and work at Wise: if they’re applying for a role knowing that we are extremely tightly regulated, and they’re willing to take on that challenge, that’s already a good leading indicator that they’re in the right spot.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Now, I wanted to talk a little bit about fintech in Australia as an industry. Tristan, you’ve experienced the European market, and London is recognised as maybe the birthplace of fintech. What do you think Australia does well, and what do you think we can do better, as we look to navigate what I would say is fintech 2.0? And I think Wise is a perfect example of what fintech 2.0 is. It’s not just regulatory arbitrage, or fixing a front end. It’s completely reinventing the products, the way we engage with those products, and the infrastructure behind how they’re delivered, which is way more complex than building a nice little front-end UX, or whatever that might be. What’s your sense of where Australia’s at?

Tristan Dakin
Australia has a budding fintech industry. I think there are some really, really cool and interesting solutions coming to market, and a lot of cool, different problems being solved. I think generally the environment in Australia is very enabling and supportive of those things. I think there are definitely some things that Australia doesn’t do very well. Obviously Wise is trying to compete from an infrastructure perspective with the correspondent system, as I mentioned earlier, and, as you said, that’s not something that you can do with some small seed capital and a couple of laptops. It involves a lot of investment, and it’s a long, long journey to get different licences and things like that. We might work on a licence for 2 years before we get it, so it’s a bit more of a long-term view.

For me, what does Australia not do well? Competition is by far the biggest driver of innovation, and I think the most impactful thing we could do as a nation to fan the flames of competition, specifically in our industry, in cross-border payments and international banking, is enforce fee transparency. It’s something where Australia lags behind the rest of the world. We’ve seen really great initiatives come to market in Europe and the UK in terms of forcing banks to disclose FX markups and be transparent about the fees they charge for various financial services, and that’s just not the case in Australia. Banks aren’t required to be transparent about how they charge for things. I think Australian consumers are smart, and they’ll gravitate towards the services that are best for them, and cheapest for them, when they know what they’re paying for. And if that means gravitating towards services like ours, or other innovative financial technology startups, in the short term, inevitably it’s going to mean that banks, who have the biggest human and financial capital behind them, will innovate as well, and ultimately that’ll be good for the industry and the landscape in Australia. It’s one thing that we bang the drum about a lot, but I just can’t understand why Australian policymakers and regulators haven’t done more to enforce transparency in Australia, because it would be the flick of a switch, and it would have immeasurable beneficial impacts for Australians if they did it, like, overnight. So I think that’s one area where we could be better, and there are some learnings there.

Dexter Cousins
And in terms of the future of fintech, what’s got you excited? There’s a lot of stuff going on. The noise around crypto’s back, we’ve got AI there, quantum computing around the corner. When you cut through all the noise, what is the thing that’s got you excited about this year ahead?

Tristan Dakin
I think, look, one thing that I try not to do is spread myself and our teams too thinly across areas that are not core to the problems that we’re trying to solve. We’re not trying to be a super app and a jack of all trades. Cross-border payments is obviously the area that we are interested in. It’s a huge problem to solve, we’re nowhere near fully solving it yet, and there’s a long road map ahead. I’m really excited about some of the things that we’re doing at Wise. I’m excited about some increased competition in Australia. If some of our competitors come to market, I actually think that’s a really good thing for Australia, and it’ll be interesting to see how that unfolds. Particularly because, as an industry, the more people we have collectively yelling the same things about the same structural problems in Australia, the more chance we have of pushing for change. So there are some opportunities for us to collaborate there. At Wise, I’m really excited about our platform partnerships. We’ve spent a number of years building out the infrastructure to be able to support bigger financial institutions and help them improve their cross-border and multi-currency payment offerings.

Dexter Cousins
It should be noted as well, I don’t think we touched on this, but Up Bank were one of your very first customers in the partnership space.

Tristan Dakin
Yeah, yeah, exactly. One thing that we’re observing is that Australia is a unique market, obviously dominated by a few big banks. People in Australia generally join a bank when they’re pretty young and stick with that bank for their whole life. There’s this real ingrained customer inertia with financial services. But I think more and more we’re seeing Australians be more mindful that there are other financial services that can cater for the specific things they want to do, right? And yes, you might have your bank for credit and lending, but, for instance, from a Wise perspective, if you want to send a payment to someone somewhere else in the world, there’s a much better way to do that than through your bank, and we’re seeing people be more open to that, which is really good, and a really, really positive thing. So Up Bank’s an example of where we have made our infrastructure available to a financial institution, so that they can offer their own customers the ability to send an instant payment somewhere else in the world, across our rails, but without leaving the Up app, which is really cool. There are a few of those in the pipeline, I think. And hopefully we start to gain a bit of momentum in the Aussie market, which has been pretty stubborn. The banks have been pretty stubborn in accepting that, all right, this might actually be a better experience for our customers, and we don’t have to build it all ourselves, we can build on top of yours.

Dexter Cousins
Sorry, go on.

Tristan Dakin
I was just going to say, just to quickly wrap up that thought: we mentioned Australia’s geographical location and outbound remittance. Wise is working on direct integrations in a number of different Asian markets at the moment, and when we connect up to those instant schemes, it’s going to make a really cool experience for Australian customers trying to send money to those places. So that will be pretty cool to watch unfold.

Dexter Cousins
Now, I can’t help but mention this, and I’m sure all of our listeners have seen the ads. They have been everywhere. And my own experience with Wise, whenever I’m talking to people about the business and the product, is that the response I get is almost ubiquitous, and it’s real simple: great product, use it all the time. I think there is a bit more of a groundswell of momentum behind the fees, and really pushing for this change. When do you think we might start to see some real, serious action taken, and things starting to move in favour of the consumer?

Tristan Dakin
So I think we’ve already started to see some of those changes. But in terms of policy change, and what regulators can do… how long’s a piece of string? I can’t really put a date on that one.

Dexter Cousins
How many times has the same policy submission gone in? Different title, but same subject.

Tristan Dakin
Exactly, exactly. We’ve been asking for change for many years, and even when something gets put on the agenda, it generally gets delayed or pushed back. But anyway, that’s a side note. In terms of Wise’s growth, 70% of our customer acquisition is still word of mouth, which is really cool, right? We’re a low-margin business, so we want to invest back into the product, and let people talk about it and let their friends and family know how great the product is, and hopefully that will bring them to use us. You’ve seen a bit of marketing. It’s a bit of a new experiment for us. We call it top-of-funnel marketing, and the intention of that is brand recognition, which is obviously important just for educating customers that there are other solutions out there. It’s also really important in Australia, because one of the challenges that all fintechs face, I think, is this idea of trust. We always get asked: how can we trust you? Is this fintech a scam, or something like that? So I think one of the things we’re trying to get across to customers is that we’re a big international player. We do this branding and marketing to let you know that we are here, we’re an alternative solution, and we are regulated the same as the big banks are. We’re an ad. To get that in the mindset a little bit, so people understand: all right, if they’re doing these adverts during the Test series for the cricket, then it must be a legitimate financial service.

Dexter Cousins
And I tell you what, what a series that was. You must have got way more eyeballs than you were expecting on those ads.

Tristan Dakin
Yeah, yeah, that was great. Although none of the Tests went for five days, so…

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, but you got record viewership, I think. Certainly from my perspective: when I put the Boxing Day Test on in the background this year, I couldn’t take my eyes off things. I was watching every over.

Tristan Dakin
Me too. And look, India is also a huge remittance corridor from Australia. There’s a huge Indian diaspora here in Australia sending money home, and so it was a good chance to raise some awareness with that demographic, I guess.

Dexter Cousins
Well, Tristan, it’s been fantastic to have you on. I’m really glad we got to share, in a bit of depth, the level of substance that’s gone into building this business over the last decade. I think you touched on this just before, right: it really legitimises the industry, and it shows the maturity of the industry, and how rapidly it’s evolved, particularly over these last few years, where it’s been very much heads down, get on with it, fix problems, and let’s move into the future. So it’s been fantastic to share your journey and the insights from Wise. We get some amazing talent listening to this podcast, who I’m sure would be very interested in finding out about careers at the business. Where can people go to find out about Wise careers?

Tristan Dakin
Yeah, the best place is to just look on our jobs website, jobs.wise.com. That’s where we list all the openings. So keep an eye out, and reach out if you feel you’re a good fit for something. We’d love to hear from everyone.

Dexter Cousins
We’re also listened to in over 40 countries, believe it or not, so I’m sure there’ll be many people listening to this who want to send money overseas. If they haven’t already downloaded the Wise app, where do they need to go?

Tristan Dakin
Just into the App Store or the Google Play Store. We’re in both, and you can just download the Wise app and sign up pretty quickly and seamlessly. And feel free to give any feedback if you think there are areas where we could be better. We’re always open to customer feedback on the sign-up and verification process. But yeah, it’s a quick sign-up, and you can do it all straight through the app.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant. Well, folks, thanks so much for joining me. If you’re new to the show, make sure you follow us on your favourite podcast player, or subscribe to Fintech Chatter TV on YouTube. If you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support. It really means a lot to me, and it really helps me bring on great guests like Tristan. Until the next episode, keep well.

← All episodes

More like this

Related episodes.

Looking to scale your fintech?

Talk to Tier One People ↗