TransferWise > Wise; more fintech!
An interview with Anhar Khanbhai
Mehdeeka covers B2B, SaaS, and startup/tech marketing. Check out the previous issue; how Fintech Australia approaches marketing. Help me grow Mehdeeka by sharing it with a friend or colleague!
We are up to the final interview special for FinTech and it’s none other than Anhar Khanbhai, Senior PR Manager at Wise (formerly TransferWise)! With a solid background in journalism and PR (e.g. named one of the top women in Australia’s innovation ecosystem by Startup Daily, was a finalist in Mumbrella and B&T best in-house PR professional of the year awards and in Momentum Media's marketing professional of the year AND worked on brands such as Slack, Red Bull, Koala, Kogan.com, Stripe, and more ), Anhar most recently worked on the TransferWise > Wise rebrand, which we dive into below.
Wise logo colourways
Kayla: So you just rebranded TransferWise to Wise, can you tell me a bit about why and how that happened?
Anhar: To truly answer this question properly, lets take a trip down memory lane for some good ol' scene setting.
Ten years ago, TransferWise founders Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus set out to fix international money transfers for all of us who’d been overcharged and underserved by banks. They named their idea ‘TransferWise’ because early customers were ‘wise’ to know their banks were charging hidden fees in exchange rate markups. The mission was simple: money without borders.
Customers started telling us that the problem wasn't just limited to sending money between two countries. Any time another currency was involved, whether it was travel money, shopping online, relocating to another country, invoicing suppliers, they faced a maze of hidden exchange rate markups, high fees, delays, and small print.
This became the genesis for the launch of the multi-currency account and debit card, and this infrastructure that we'd built also became the platform of choice for dozens of banks around the world, replacing the traditional SWIFT transfers.
TransferWise had become more than just money transfers and our name had to catch up. And so, Wise was born and along with it came a simplified and easy to understand offering:
Wise - the world's most international account. It combined the multi-currency account, international money transfers and debit card products into one.
Wise Business - the business account for going global. It has all the features of the Wise personal account plus extras to meet the banking needs of businesses today like integrations with Xero and other bookkeeping solutions, mass payouts so you can run payroll in multiple currencies and more.
Wise Platform - the magic behind Wise used by banks and companies like Up, Monzo, Sezzle, GoCardless, and Xero. This lets businesses and banks give their customers cheaper, faster payments and other international banking features.
The mission has remained the same. Yes our logo changed, and we renamed our apps, but our icon — the fast flag — remains as a symbol for money without borders.
K: What were some of the challenges or major projects within the rebrand?
A: Customer > Team > Ego is one of our company values. Everything we do is built by putting the customer's needs first and announcing that we were changing the name of the company had to be done with the utmost care. So in true Wise style, we approached this name change by putting the customer first. I'll explain how we did this in two parts:
How we communicated this to our customers
What we had to do behind the scenes to pull it all off
We set a date that we were going to make the global announcement via PR and social on February 22. However, we didn't just want our customers to wake up one day and suddenly see that the product and experience they'd been used to was now Wise. So, a couple of weeks in the lead up to launch day, we started doing some teaser posts on social media asking our customers to find something we'd hidden within the app. Essentially there was an Easter Egg where if they shake the app, they'd get a quiz asking them a question with the answer being Wise alluding to something new coming.
This started generating social media buzz, with some guessing that we were changing our name. It also created FOMO for those who couldn't quite workout how to find the easter egg.
On Feb 22, the news went live around the world and the cat was out of the bag. We were going to be called Wise. Customers who guessed the Easter Egg had an "I knew it moment", others were very excited about the name change. Media covered the news, our social pages were buzzing, we published blog posts by our founder explaining why we changed our name and what it meant for customers, customer comms went out. The key thing to note here was that on all comms, we explained the switchover to Wise wasn't happening until a week later and customers had the option to opt-in to the new Wise experience today or continue using TransferWise as they had been used to until the official changeover a week later. They didn't have to create new log-in credentials or anything and it gave the customers the opportunity to ease into it all and even learn and discover the other products in our suite which they may not have been aware of or using.
A week later, everything switched over without a hitch from transferwise.com to wise.com and it was Day 1 as Wise
Behind the scenes, this was a mammoth undertaking. Literally everything had to change. It wasn't just our name and it was not just something that had to be done in English, but in multiple languages. Domain names had to be bought, social media handles had to change, the legal name of entities in multiple jurisdictions had to change, we had to inform regulators about the name change in all countries we operate in, our apps had to change on web, iOS and Android, thousands of landing pages and blog pages had to be updated with every single mention of TransferWise changing to Wise ensuring we could do that without losing or damaging all the SEO that we'd built over the years, new landing pages with new copy were also created, customer FAQ pages were updated, logos and marketing assets had to be built from scratch, partners who had integrated Wise into their products also had to make updates to their products and apps, affiliate partners had to update all their content, customer comms had to go out, customer support had to be trained to explain this to existing and potential customers, and finally we had a global PR push to try tell this story around the world.
I'm sure I've forgotten to include more things here, but the sheer scale of this is dizzying and it's a true testament to the incredible team we have to pull this off with no disruption to our customers. It's not everyday that you get to be part of a team that does a rebrand, let alone at this scale, so personally this was an incredible learning opportunity.
The old TransferWise logo
K: What are some of the intricacies of working in the financial industry that impacts your day to day, and how is that different from working in a less regulated industry?
A: Prior to joining Wise, my background in comms has always been in tech, including dabbling in fintech, but for the last three and a half years, I've learned so so much about how to do comms in this industry, keeping in mind the regulatory nuances that come with it. Yes it's a regulated industry and yes there are certain nuances like disclaimers etc to keep in mind when it comes to advertising and marketing, but when you're working for a brand like Wise which is fighting for transparency, education and raising awareness about the small print and hidden fees in a sector that puts profits over people, then the storytelling becomes less about "what can we get away with" but more about "they shouldn't be able to get away with that".
No matter where in the world we're doing comms, or whichever channel or medium we use, the story is the same, albeit with a local flavour to it - we're advocating for change. Whether it's making dealing with foreign currencies more transparent, or advocating for direct access to payment systems for all fintechs, not just banks, or how to modernise payment systems, the impact and benefit of our work is bigger than us and since this is our narrative, we've definitely done some really bold and punchy campaigns over the years around the world, including here in Australia to get our message across.
K: What's it like working for a global brand with a HQ that's overseas? How do you balance working with local team members and overseas team members?
A: This one's quite funny actually. When I first joined Wise, there were only three of us in Australia, and on top of that, I was based in Sydney and my lead was in Melbourne. I'd dabbled in working from home previously, but this was next level as it was full-time remote role dealing with a manager in another city and colleagues scattered around the globe in different timezones. For many, full time working from home or remote working, Slack and Zoom only became ubiquitous once COVID hit, but it has been the way I've been working for more than three years now. I've gotten used to working like this and the added autonomy made me challenge myself and push myself even more.
Pre-COVID I used to travel very regularly between our Singapore, London and Tallinn offices to get that important face time with the teams and my colleagues, soak up the Wise culture and also do in-person cross-team planning sessions. Sadly it's now even more Zoom calls with them. I've reserved Monday and Tuesday nights of my calendar where I just have back to back calls with overseas teams just to chat and say hello. This lets me stay in the loop with what's going on around the world while we're grounded here, and at the same time allows me to have three nights of a week to myself.
It's important to set boundaries on availability otherwise it can be easy to get trapped into losing all your evenings to work.
As an APAC team, we have regular catchups over Zoom every week so it's pretty collaborative and we also have a monthly global PR team huddle which means sometimes it can be a very late late night call to cater for Australia, Brazil, US, UK, EU and Singapore timezones. I try to join these monthly huddles because of FOMO but given they're always recorded, I catchup on them the following day.
I moved to Melbourne a couple of years ago and just recently, we hired a Press Officer in Sydney who I lead. I've only managed to meet him once in person so, like many, our interactions are virtual. I hope to change this soon!
K: You also cover PR for Japan which is interesting because Japan really is its own world with its own marketing systems - what's some of the bits about working with Japan that are unique?
A: Japan is a thoroughly fascinating market. In a way, to me this has felt like starting my career from scratch as I've had to learn everything about the media market, ways of working, regulatory landscape, culture and customs. The first challenge for me was to launch our debit card in this market which we did in January this year. In preparation, we onboarded an agency in Tokyo to help as I don't speak the language and to understand the cultural nuances to working in this market. We also have a pretty big team and office in Tokyo so having an agency on the ground serves as an extension of the comms team to help train, brief and support our spokespeople with press opportunities.
For our debit card launch, we had to create a completely localised experience. It's the first market where we've launched this product where English is not the predominant language. So our whole marketing strategy had to follow a Japanese-first approach which meant a lot of the marketing assets, strategies we had used to launch this product in other markets, didn't apply. We created a Japanese Kaiju or mascots that you'd normally see other Japanese brands do, that was unique to Wise and our branding. Due to COVID we also couldn't do the traditional stunts or activations we tend to do with such launches so this was a purely online-only launch which also was done completely remotely by marketing teams in Australia, Singapore, London and Tokyo.
Having a Japanese speaking spokesperson is super key here of course as most media prefer to interview in Japanese. As a result of this, it's important to make sure the agency you're working with really understands your brand, tone of voice and goals because not everything translates well from English to Japanese and so they're leading in creating briefing notes and press releases in language. The fact that I can't sit in on the press interviews either to get a better understanding of the types of questions being asked and to then give the right kind of feedback to our spokespeople, again means that I'm heavily reliant on our agency. We're lucky to have a great working relationship with them and they've onboarded to the Wise way of comms.
Again, I've never met them in person and all our comms are through Zoom so it's been pretty incredible to be able to do what we've been able to do with such limitations and restrictions. Japan was always somewhere where I've wanted to travel, but it's now jumped straight to the top of the list after working in this market.
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Why am I putting this here? It’s part of my year of being selfish when it comes to my work. Read more about that here, and I encourage you to start being more selfish as well!
Links to things
I have such a mixed bag of links this week, but I really recommend all of them! I’m also going to challenge myself to segue seamlessly from one to the next, so enjoy reading me grasp for straws.
First up, please let me let out my frustration that this was announced literally two hours after last week’s issue, but Commbank has officially entered the buy-now-pay-later ring. I never promised that this newsletter would be breaking news, but I will take the timing of this FinTech theme and the many bits of news coming out right now as proof that I can spot a trend.
And in more FinTech (marketing!) news, Up Bank has launched a game on TikTok. I myself am not on TikTok, I watch reposts of toks on Instagram (which in itself is a subgenre on TikTok), but I think this is a really clever way to integrate branding into the platform.
From new games to old games, Monopoly is re-writing the community chest cards. It’s a smart move, and their campaign about it called themselves out for the cards being outdated, but what is actually even more cool about it is that they’re crowd sourcing what the new cards will be. They built a microsite with a ‘this or that’ mechanic that will (I assume) determine what the final cards will be.
Board games have become a huge hobby industry and Sydnee Washington has turned “being Sydnee Washington” into a hobby too. This one is not particularly marketing related but it was fascinating to me because a few years ago I decided if I was ever going to run away with the circus (AKA become a YouTuber) my concept was trying out different hobbies, interviewing people who are into them, and then rating the hobby on a scale of how easy/expensive it is to get started.
You could say rating hobbies is a type of “comparing things”, and I’d like to compare the new PC ads with Justin Long with the Peloton girl who switched over to Aviation Gin after the Peloton ad was criticised. Are there other famous spokespeople who ended up advertising the competitor?
Speaking of famous people (bad segue but this is my favourite link of this email so if you only read one, make it this one!) this article made me re-evaluate the media I’ve consumed over the past decade+ and it’s so true! The title is Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny and yeah it’s not really a B2B SaaS topic, but it’s very thought provoking AND is marketing, if nothing else, not a reflection of society? Does sexiness still sell? Or is it just PG13 Disney heroes with perfect bodies?
*Side note to the above article, after I sent it to Gina she made a very good point that the 80s was a very sex-centric decade for films and nothing was off limits, with the great example of Marty’s mum trying to sleep with him in Back to the Future.
Final segue! The human body isn’t just capable of being good looking, it’s also capable of showing up in really weird places (and in pieces) that stumps investigators for decades! This Nat Geo article reveals the solution to a Canadian mystery of a particular waterway becoming infamous for human-feet-still-in-shoes washing up on shore… way more often than they should, and without any other body parts.
THAT is all from me this week, hope you learned something from Anhar and you were entertained by at least one of these links!
P.S if you wanna chat RE: the no one is horny article, please reach out. It’s SO fascinating!