“Ten years ago, Taavet [Hinrikus] and I set out to fix international money transfers for all of us who’d been overcharged and underserved by banks,” co-founder of TransferWise Kristo Käärmann writes in the TransferWise blog.
“We named our idea ‘TransferWise’ — because our early customers were ‘wise’ to know their banks were charging hidden fees in exchange rate markups.”
“Today our name catches up with who we’re already building for — a community of people and businesses with multi-currency lives,” he adds. “Wise is for all of us who live, work, travel, or support family around the world. It’s for those of us who want to cut out the middlemen that hold us back from being truly borderless.”
Becoming a startup unicorn in 2011, the Estonian-founded FinTech Wise is now valued at $5B+. By now there are five unicorns born in Estonia in total, Skype, Playtech, Bolt and Pipedrive being the other four. Wise processes more than €4.5 billion in cross-border transactions every month, with customers saving themselves a total of more than a billion euros a year compared to making the same transaction with their bank.
Wise is a global technology company. With a Wise account people and businesses can hold 55 currencies, move money between countries and spend money abroad. As huge companies and banks use Wise technology, the company is trying to build an entirely new cross-border payments network that they hope will one day power money without borders for everyone, everywhere.
In December 2020, the company announced a major expansion within the next six months, including 165 new jobs to be created in Tallinn.
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