Steve Naudé – How Wise Cope With Increased Volume And Speed

Steve Naudé, Head of Wise Platform, articulates the strategies employed by Wise to effectively manage the escalating volume and velocity of cross-border payments, highlighting their ability to ensure seamless transactions while maintaining efficiency and accuracy.

Wise offer a digital platform for international money transfers and currency exchange, providing customers with transparent, low-cost, and fast cross-border payment solutions.

“Although half of our payments are instant, some of them are not. That’s limited by the infrastructure available in certain markets that maybe don’t yet have instant payment schemes. The very cool thing we’ve done is reverse engineer all the payment schemes around the world to understand what cut-offs they have, both at a payment scheme level and an individual bank level … All of this, we put together in this model that spits out the number you see on Wise which is ‘Your money should arrive here’.”

“Also, to get this upfront as much as possible, we can do some really cool things like sanction screening the recipient name in the flow in real time as the customer is typing it. So if we think there might be a potential here, we can surface additional fields to say we need a little bit more information … That means, even before we’ve sent the payment out, we’ve collected this information.”