The rebranded company Wise drops the part Transfer as a signal of moving on from the money-transfer focus of the company.
“Ten years in, TransferWise is now Wise,” claims the press release.
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With the company’s current $5 billion estimated valuation, TransferWise is one of Europe’s most valuable fintech unicorns among the likes of Klarna and Revolut. The valuation from the last year also represents an increase of 43% since May 2019.
The drop of the Transfer part of the company’s brand clearly represents a shift towards banking. (Transfer)Wise will also hire 750 new staff members in the next several months, the company announced last December.
“Our customers now need us for more than money transfers,” explains Kristo Käärmann, co-founder and CEO. “Sending, spending, and receiving money internationally is too expensive, slow, and inconvenient. We’re fixing that for people and businesses.”
The FinTech unicorn launched back in 2011 as a basic money transfer service. Since then the company has expanded to build a cross-border payments network that serves 10 million personal and business customers.
Transferwise has consistently ended up in profit since 2017. Last September the company said it processed a total of £42 billion in cross-border payments across the year, as well as an additional £25 billion in domestic payments.
“Today our name catches up with who we’re already building for — a community of people and businesses with multi-currency lives,” says Käärmann. “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.”
