Wise Hikes Transfer Fees, Upgrades 2022 Outlook

Wise, the U.K.-based cross-border money transfer business, has increased the average cost of transactions for the first time since 2020.

As reported in the Financial Times on Tuesday (Oct. 18), the average cost per transaction increased by 2 basis points to 0.64% in the third quarter of 2022, compared with a year earlier.

Matt Briers, Wise’s chief financial officer, said in a webcast today that the fee increases reflected higher levels of foreign exchange volatility.

“We’re committed to a fair, transparent pricing structure, but also a sustainable profitable business model,” he said. “In the long run, prices will go down, but it’s not a straight line.”

Nevertheless, the payments company announced in a Tuesday trading update that customer volumes and revenues performed well in the year to July. As a result, Wise has upgraded its outlook for the year.

In the update, Kristo Käärmann, Wise CEO and co-founder said: “This quarter 5.5 million customers moved 27 billion pounds ($30.5 billion) with us, 50% more than in Q2 last year and for the second consecutive quarter more than half our payments were instant.

“The Wise Account and Wise Business products continue to see good levels of adoption and this increased engagement with our product, higher volumes and faster speeds are a result of the longer-term investments that we have been making.

“We’ve seen extreme macroeconomic conditions persist throughout the second quarter, and whilst unfortunately this meant we had to raise prices slightly for some customers, we’ve been working hard to limit these increases and are working to bring them back down again.”

The update also highlighted some of the improvements the company has made to the Wise platform recently.

Among these is the new ‘International Receive’ feature, which allows Wise Platform partners to leverage Wise’s SWIFT connection to receive funds without being connected to the SWIFT network themselves.

Read more: Wise Platform Brings SWIFT Transfers to Neobanks

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