Nilan Peiris on Wise: Product Value, Word of Mouth and Disciplined Growth

Wise chief product officer Nilan Peiris tells Harry Stebbings that product marketing should close the gap between the value customers perceive and the value they actually receive. In his experience, word of mouth requires an improvement large enough to give customers an experience they did not know was possible.

Peiris studied mathematics, where he learned to look for unfamiliar ways to solve a problem. He says playbooks can work when a process is truly repeatable, but global expansion rarely repeats perfectly: regulation, financial infrastructure and culture vary by country.

Stebbings suggests that playbooks can be more useful in individual marketing channels, such as short-form video. Peiris agrees but argues that creative departures from a familiar formula can produce unusually large results before everyone begins to copy them.

After consulting, Peiris helped retailers build online shops and then ran revenue operations. He enjoyed the combination of psychology, marketing, mathematics and technology required to attract users. He eventually met Wise founders Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus when the business was still called TransferWise.

An angel investor introduced him to the founders, describing a good product with few customers. Peiris initially worked part-time on marketing and product, then joined full-time and built a team. He describes Wise’s focus as making cross-border money movement cheaper, faster and more transparent.

Peiris recalls an early TechCrunch article bringing in the first customer the founders did not already know. The team sought communities of people sending money internationally and systematically tried a wide range of channels while working to encourage word of mouth.

He says that, in the quarter before the interview, Wise acquired about 1.5 million customers: approximately 30% came through paid marketing and 70% through word of mouth. He recalls a similar split in the early years. These are company figures for the period, not a current guarantee.

Social advertising worked best when it amplified existing word of mouth. People with international connections often know others with similar needs, such as French students in London or businesses exporting goods. Wise targeted audiences resembling its customers, first on Facebook and increasingly on YouTube.

Peiris divides useful content into two categories. On-topic content helps with the company’s core problem: for example, a page explaining how to send money to India, or a better explanation of how a bank’s international transfer works, including fees and exchange rates.

Wise also built pages and calculators for BIC and IBAN codes, which people need to make international payments. Adjacent content reaches related audiences more broadly, such as students living in London, and can translate naturally into YouTube videos or audience-specific sub-brands.

Brand advertising, including television, has been harder to make work than performance marketing, Peiris says. Wise does not serve every person in a given country, so mass reach can be inefficient. Competitors’ ability to earn more from a customer can also let them bid more for the same attention.

Asked about rivals with broader product ranges, he explains Wise’s strategy as continually reducing the cost of cross-border transfers and adding a margin to set the price. He believes the lowest-cost, highest-quality product can ultimately win the market, while acknowledging that rivals might subsidize transfers using other revenue.

In a general discussion of banks rather than a claim about one competitor, Peiris says deposit interest and lending can fund other services. He argues that cross-border transactions still have substantial underlying costs, making free transfers expensive to subsidize at scale.

He also argues that customers gaining access to higher returns on their balances may reduce banks’ ability to use interest margins for cross-subsidies. He describes Wise’s then-available account option involving government bonds and rates of roughly 3–5%. Those rates and product terms were specific to the interview period and may change.

Even when a channel has disappointed, Peiris keeps testing because conditions and creative approaches change. On customer acquisition costs, he says both forces can coexist: stronger brand and word of mouth may help, while competition and reaching beyond a core audience can increase costs.

Peiris says a small portion of customers search for the cheapest transfer before sending money. He claims Western Union was seven to eight times more expensive than Wise in the comparison he had in mind, allowing it more advertising headroom. The interview does not establish a universal fee comparison.

Unable to win every search-ad auction on those economics, Wise pushed harder on word of mouth. The question became how to make the product so useful that people would talk about it, measure the customer experience and organize teams to keep improving it.

Wise measured price, speed and ease of use. Peiris says being only slightly cheaper than an incumbent did not produce the desired growth in some launches. His lesson is that a product must be dramatically better on a meaningful dimension for people to recommend it, rather than merely a little better.

Stebbings notes that customers may miss a benefit unless it is clearly communicated. Peiris learned this from his father, who compared visible fees but missed a hidden exchange-rate charge. Wise iterated on a visual comparison showing the total cost and savings relative to a bank.

When Wise placed that comparison on the successful-transfer screen, customers could understand and share the savings. Peiris recalls recommendation rates increasing by roughly three to four times. He says the underlying saving had not changed; customers could now perceive the value already delivered.

He defines product marketing as narrowing the gap between perceived and actual value. In Wise’s case, he says, helping customers recognize the benefit increased their willingness to recommend it. Stebbings suggests further ways to make the saving easy to share.

Speed presented a similar problem. Peiris says about 60% of transfers were instant under Wise’s then definition of arriving within 20 seconds, but some customers did not believe the money had reached the recipient. An animation showing the transfer land helped make that experience understandable.

Peiris says strong new products can show rapid uptake. He cites the Wise account in Brazil and its ability to help people move money internationally, particularly for travel. He also describes a partnership with Nubank offering co-branded cards to some of its customers; Wise has a commercial interest in the arrangement.

Deciding when to stop a product is harder. Peiris looks at whether it pays for itself, but accepts Stebbings’s point that some promising projects take a long time. A low-cost experiment can continue longer; a costly one requires funding that might otherwise improve another customer proposition.

The largest constraint may be people’s time rather than cash. Some Wise teams persisted until a product took off; others stopped work when a more promising opportunity emerged. Peiris weighs the potential scale of the outcome against both operating costs and the opportunity cost of the team.

Wise has a minimum scale threshold for its projects, though Peiris does not disclose the number. He says the company generally looks for payback within 12–24 months while remaining willing to pursue large opportunities. A project that can never become meaningful may not justify the effort.

Stebbings asks whether public markets make long-term bets harder. Peiris says Wise has continued to lower prices despite the lack of an immediate one-for-one increase in customers. He frames the policy as a three-to-five-year bet on lower costs and prices, supported by investors who understand that strategy.

Stebbings points out that major products can emerge from small side projects rather than ambitious plans. Peiris agrees and describes Wise’s history of autonomous cross-functional teams, each focused on a customer problem such as onboarding, identity checks or cheaper, faster payouts.

Teams had the engineering, design and product capabilities needed to move their own metrics, while functional leaders remained part of a reporting structure. They presented quarterly plans, received feedback and reported results. Successful teams could ask for more resources.

The original system stopped working when the number of teams grew from around six to 30 or 40. Wise grouped teams into squads, then larger tribes, with leaders accountable for outcomes. Peiris says strategy still comes from the teams and is synthesized upward into a company-wide plan.

Marketing many products is difficult, he admits, and remains a work in progress. Wise delegates marketing to product groups while retaining a central brand function. Its infrastructure business, Wise Platform, has its own enterprise marketing and runs Wise Connect events for banks and other potential partners.

The brand must accommodate both consumers and banks. Peiris expects a larger share of users to access Wise infrastructure through other institutions over five to ten years, an expectation rather than an established outcome. He says the company needs a business-to-business brand even if customers do not use its own app.

He argues that the consumer business also supports partnerships: by showing customers that transfers can be cheaper and easier, it changes expectations for banks. This is Wise’s executive perspective on its own commercial strategy, not an independent assessment of every bank partnership.

Trust was a central problem for a new financial service. An advertisement promising cheap transfers may not persuade someone accustomed to a familiar bank. Wise still communicates safety through product marketing, but Peiris says recommendations from friends have been a major source of trust.

Stebbings describes Revolut’s group-payment features as an example of social pressure encouraging adoption. Peiris calls that clever and mentions other fintech features that make switching attractive. For Wise, he considers showing customers their actual savings one of its strongest growth changes.

Within the word-of-mouth share, Peiris says roughly 20–30 percentage points came from refer-a-friend programs, with the rest from organic recommendations. Wise tested chocolates and various cash incentives. Large incentives can create a spike in users without producing an equivalent rise in profitable customers.

To set acquisition budgets, performance marketers need to understand cost and lifetime value at the campaign level, grouping campaigns enough to get a useful reading. Peiris treats each acquisition as a bet: spend money now in the hope that future customer revenue pays it back.

Teams should track the accumulated cost of those bets and decide how much loss they can tolerate. Customer behavior is not fully under the company’s control; if users do not return as expected, projected lifetime value may never materialize. Excessive acquisition spending can therefore threaten the business.

Before profitability, Wise repeatedly raised money while expecting the latest round to be its last, Peiris recalls. Each year brought new engineering or marketing ideas and another funding requirement. Eventually, the company decided that profitability would give it more control over its own future.

He says Wise became profitable in roughly six to nine months by changing one major cost: marketing. In that historical exercise, it halved marketing spend, saw customer numbers fall about 10%, and revenue fall about 1%. These are his retrospective figures, not a general prediction for other companies.

A later exercise revealed a similar pattern of diminishing returns. Peiris says spending can begin efficiently but accumulate waste as teams add marginal campaigns. Periodically asking what happens if the budget is cut can reveal how little revenue the least efficient spending actually generates.

On hiring, Peiris estimates he is wrong about 20–30% of the time when assessing whether a candidate will work out. He tells team leaders they can override his rejection, provided they agree on what the person should achieve and take responsibility if the hire does not work.

Interviews cannot substitute for the real job, he says. He recommends hiring, supporting people and accepting that some decisions will not work out. Stebbings suggests a short working trial where practical, especially for roles such as video editing with a fast feedback loop.

Peiris asks candidates for an example of personally building something, whether by coding, designing or writing copy. Even for senior product roles, he wants to understand where they chose to go deeper and whether they attend to detail.

He also asks what frustrates candidates about their current workplace and why they could not resolve it. The discussion can reveal self-awareness, empathy for leadership’s constraints and the limits they encountered. He considers how often similar obstacles might arise at Wise.

Peiris has learned not to overtrust a quick judgment: people he rejected have later done exceptionally well. He says interviewers can mistake a different problem-solving style for an inability to succeed. The outcome matters more than whether someone works exactly as he would.

The most dangerous growth myth, in his view, is that a marketer can unlock product-market fit with a magical channel tactic. He advises founders to invest their early years in understanding customers and building a genuinely strong product. Stebbings adds that teams should make a channel work before diversifying prematurely.

For Wise, Peiris sees AI through the questions of faster and cheaper payments. He says the company already uses language models to augment operational teams and automate some tasks, while experimenting with content tools. Creative ideas can still produce very different results from otherwise similar campaigns.

He has become more persuaded of language models’ practical value, especially when they assist a person who remains in control. He acknowledges hallucinations and engineering challenges, while speculating that more human involvement may eventually become unnecessary in some tasks.

Asked which other companies impress him, Peiris names Nubank for its customer-led approach, word of mouth and culture, and JPMorgan for investing in payment infrastructure at scale. Wise partners with Nubank, so his praise also sits alongside a commercial relationship.

Stebbings thanks Peiris for discussing Wise’s growth, product and hiring lessons; Peiris thanks him for the conversation.