“we fundamentally believe whoever has the best infrastructure in this space will win in the longer run” (Harsh Sinha, Wise CTO; Wise Analyst Day, 4/3/25)
it’s inevitable that the lowest price operator will win the scale needed to become the infrastructure to operate the trillions of cross-border money (Kristo Kaarmann, Wise Co-Founder and CEO; 1h25 Earnings call, 11/6/24)
There’s an inexorable logic to the way Wise rolls out products, as if each one is midwifed into existence by what came before and then goes on to both reinforce and exploit the infrastructure that gives Wise the right to win in the first place.
The infrastructure I’m referring to encompasses licenses, banking relationships and a growing number of direct connections to central banks1, which have taken more than a decade to earn, as well as Treasury management competencies running in the background. That bedrock of assets underpins a network of local liquidity pools that transforms a cross-border transfer into two synchronized domestic ones (a German sender pays euros to Wise’s bank account in Germany and Wise, in turn, pays pounds to the British recipient from its bank account in the UK), enabling Wise users to send money at a fraction of the cost and at much greater speed than they can through banks, who still rely on multi-hop transfers intermediated through SWIFT protocols.
The geographically distributed mesh of prefunded accounts also anchors Wise Account, a multi-currency wallet that can store and receive money denominated in dozens of different currencies. A German living in the UK can bank like a native, converting euros to pounds in their Wise Account and spending from it like any Brit with a local bank account would. As a repository for customer funds, Wise Account also deepens Wise’s liquidity pools, which in turn accelerates transfer speeds and minimizes time exposed to FX movements (and thus, FX hedging costs), strengthening the value prop of the cross-border transfer service that preceded it.
If consumers are going to store money in Wise Accounts, they also need a way to spend it (Wise Debit card) and earn a return on idle balances (Wise Assets)2. And with the infrastructure for transfers and Accounts already in place, well, it’s only natural to offer cross-border services to small businesses (Wise Business) and even to the very banks it competes against (Wise Platform).