TransferWise
Like a lot of good stories, this one starts with two friends.
They’re both from Estonia. Taavet was the first employee at Skype, so he got paid in euros. But he lived in London, and needed pounds to pay the bills. Kristo worked for Deloitte and lived in London. He got paid in pounds, but had a mortgage back in Estonia. He needed to pay that in euros.
Every month they moved their money the old way – which wasted their time and money. So they invented a beautifully simple workaround that became a billion-dollar business.
They found a better way. Each month, they looked up the actual exchange rate on Reuters. Taavet put his euros into Kristo’s Estonian bank account, and Kristo topped up Taavet’s UK bank account using his pounds. Both got the currency they needed almost instantly, and neither paid an extra cent on bad exchange rates or unreasonable charges. There was no waiting, no stress, and no extra costs.
‘There must be others just like us…’ they thought. The rest is TransferWise. Do you need to send money? Click here to join TransferWise.
TransferWise today. In the past 8 years, the TransferWise movement has spread far and wide. Over 5 million happy customers now trust us to move more than $4 billion dollars every month. (Saving them $4 million in bank fees every day.) And Richard Branson, and PayPal founders Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, among others, have invested in our vision.
We’ve opened 11 offices, with over 1,700 employees, across 4 continents. And we've added the borderless account, which lets you hold over 40 currencies at once and convert them whenever you like, and the TransferWise debit Mastercard. Apart from all that, not too much has changed. Click here to start sending money today.