Wise—formerly TransferWise—is one of the great fintech success stories, with over nine million customers moving £4.5 billion across its platform every month. Its commitment to transparency and value is breaking new ground and sparking a revolution in the way people move money internationally.
Like Checkout.com, Wise is a disruptor intent on challenging the status quo. By using Checkout.com’s innovative payments technology, it’s able to continually innovate to deliver on its mission of creating a world of ‘money without borders’ and bring lower costs and greater ease to its customers.
As partners, Wise and Checkout.com share many of the same values — especially the idea that banking is broken and overdue disruption. And by working together they’re cutting through complexity and unleashing the full power of cross-border payment.
“Our business is moving money globally,” says Aleksandr Povarov, Product Manager at Wise. “It’s extremely complex, especially at scale. And the legacy platforms and technologies powering payments are cumbersome, opaque, and expensive. So we knew that if we were to create an entirely new underlying network we needed to find a payment service provider that would allow us to cut through this complexity.”
Checkout.com was a clear choice. “Checkout.com’s data-rich, modular payment technology is perfect for an agile, global business like Wise,” says Povarov. “It allows us to identify and implement the payment platform that we need in order to find the right solution for our business and bring the best possible experience to our customers. Whereas most other providers have a more rigid approach to payments regardless of requirements.”
Wise operates in an industry where even the smallest operational improvements greatly impact the customer experience and its bottom line. And with Checkout.com unlocking data-driven insights at every step of the transaction flow, Wise is getting the most revenue and value out of every transaction.
As Povarov explains: “Working with Checkout.com has allowed us to understand our payment data better and turn it into actionable insights. Checkout.com allowed us to increase our approval rates by a full percentage point. With over 9 million customers and billions in transactions a month, that extra 1% really adds up and has a significant impact on our bottom-line.”
Checkout.com’s transparent approach to data also makes it easier for Wise to understand the fees they pay and manage the way they charge customers.
“Data is key to our business,” says Povarov. “And Checkout.com allows us to see our payments data at a more granular level than ever before. Having this detailed view of the transactions flowing across our business is game-changing. It’s allowing us to spot trends that we’ve never had visibility into before and make better-informed decisions at speed to optimize our flows and ensure we’re getting full value from every transaction.”
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Checkout.com’s smart approach to reporting also allows Wise to optimize its day-to-day processes. As Povarov explains, Wise has millions of payments flowing through its platform every month. “Consolidating all our data and getting an overview of all our payments in a single report was traditionally an arduous task,” he says. “But Checkout.com has removed that pain by consolidating our data for us and automatically providing the reports we need through an API. This is a huge improvement on what came before because it allows us to get a real-time view of our payment flows when we want them. And it saves our team hours of manual effort each week because they’re not having to work through a huge CSV file, allowing them to focus on more value-adding work.”
Wise has also seen its settlement times improve since working with Checkout.com due to its global acquiring footprint. “We’re now able to manage our cash flow better and use our resources more efficiently. Cash flow is a vital metric to optimize and allow us to use our cash to innovate rather than pay for operational inefficiency.”
Wise partnered with Checkout.com to launch its global Pay to Card feature in 2020. It allows the sender to transfer money instantly to a recipient’s payment card nearly anywhere in the world.
“Our business demands that money reaches the recipient as quickly as possible,” explains Povarov. “For that, a global Pay to Card solution is unbeatable. We know that cards are the preferred way for many of our customers to receive transfers, and enabling instant payouts to cards makes it so much faster and more convenient.”
Wise previously used local providers to power its Pay to Card processes but knew that to efficiently scale it needed a global provider. And after studying the market, Wise selected Checkout.com as the global payout provider that best aligned with its ambitious growth plans.
“Checkout.com’s global footprint and transparent data were crucial for us,” says Povarov. “Sending money abroad is a high volume, low margin business. The more providers and custom connections you need to connect to local networks, the less clarity you have over data, fees and interchange costs.
“Each market also has local scheme requirements, so we needed a solution to cut through the complexities of international payment corridors. Checkout.com offered us robust cross-border capabilities and helped to accelerate the pace of our expansion. It integrates with our existing customer experience and unlocks transfers to billions of cards worldwide through a single API. It’s a game-changer not to need a different integration for every region.”
In addition to using Checkout.com’s best-in-class payment technology to optimize and scale the business, Wise also employs Checkout.com’s deep payment SaaS payment processing expertise to work on various special projects and product improvements. “We’re breaking new ground in our industry, so we value partners who are also innovators,” says Povarov. “Checkout.com’s partnership is critical in that.”
He points to the quality of communication as the key to the partnership’s success:
“We’ve worked with Checkout.com on a wide range of projects, and their team has always been proactive and keen to make payments an even bigger driver of growth in our business. Our dedicated account management team has a deep understanding of our requirements and they’re always able to unlock the expertise and information we need quickly.”
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For the most progressive financial technology companies, payments performance, customer experience, and the ability to scale faster are of paramount importance.
“The old way of thinking about payments is purely transactional, where it’s just about money coming in on the acquiring side,” says Povarov. “But if that’s all you see, you’re missing so much of the potential value.
“You have to ask yourself, how can payments improve the customer experience? What can we learn from the data? What’s the best way to move money? How can we create more value when we make payments, as well as take them?
“Those that answer these questions, and think bigger about the role of payments — like Wise and Checkout.com — will define the future of finance.”
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