How Wise Rallied People against Hidden Fees to Change the Way People Move Money and Build a $11B Company
A Pitch Perfect Challenger Brand Playbook for Founder-Led Companies on a Mission to Grow
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Wise is a pitch perfect challenger brand, making a villain out of the hidden fees banks charge on international transfers and rallying customers around a mission to capture 5% market share of a $22T industry
Who will love this
Anyone who’s ever gotten steamed about making money moves across borders
Mission-driven founders
Challenger brand stans
People longing for the return of the 2010 era flash mob
Today
Hello!
Today’s brand is Wise, a founder-led, bankless currency exchange dedicated to eliminating the bloated fees charged by banks on international money transfers.
Shoutout to Troy and Ben who both suggested this brand! 🙏
Never had to transfer money internationally? Count yourself #blessed.
Wise’s founders, two Estonian blokes, weren’t down with the hidden fees incurred by banks and money transfer services and built a product that slashed the hidden fees in order to let people keep more of their money. But how do you fundamentally change a category for the better, while making people aware of a problem they don’t even know they have? Wise’s highlights reel includes:
🪧Lodging a petition to activate the UK government to crack down on hidden fees
📈 Grew from 0 to 10M active customers across 170 countries and 40 currencies in just 13 years
👯 In 2023, 3M of Wise’s 4.5M new customers this year came from word of mouth recommendations
💸 Captured 5% of a $22T industry with no signs of slowing down
💼 Went public at a valuation of $11B after just 10 years
Turns out, not ripping people off is good business!
Wise is a masterclass in building a customer centric culture, a 10x product and mission driven brand marketing: a cocktail for success, but not for the faint of heart!
Let’s follow the money 💰
Three Things Wise Did to Ignite a Movement Against Hidden Fees
1️⃣ Declared a common enemy - hidden fees - and built a 10X product
Wise is bullish on what’s wrong with the world: hidden fees.
So bullish that they built a product that was 10X faster and cheaper than anything on the market.
Founder-led companies are legendary at making products that are category defining. Bain & Company research shows that disproportionately, founder led businesses are most successful at maintaining profitable growth over the long term.
Brands that successfully reimagine the way the world works most often start with an extraordinarily clear purpose. Unlike fonts, colors, or even CEOs, which all come and go, purpose is a powerful driver for behavior change from the inside out.
Wise’s written manifesto is a stellar example of clear purpose👇 But Wise didn’t even have their mission written down until 5 years in.
What they did was create an environment where a mission could take root: a customer centric environment.
And what Wise heard from customers in the early days? They didn’t even know there was a problem!
That gave Wise clear direction for their marketing. They needed to make people aware of the problem, reflect what customers actually care about while delivering a meaningfully better product. And that is the recipe for advocacy.
The simple, written manifesto below was a growth driver for Wise, thanks to customers forwarding it to their friends. Not just a clever bit of copy, it’s the tip of the iceberg of a customer centric culture.
Remember: Stories people want to tell spread faster than anything on the planet.
Phoar, right?! Three cheers for * *checks notes* * money transfer services?
You betcha. But having a worthy mission alone isn’t enough: Wise needed to scale the mission from the few to the many.
2️⃣ Found more customers through existing customers
Wise’s wisest move: using existing customers to get more customers.
Too many early stage start ups over complicate looking for their customers and writing set in stone plans rather than following the early energy of where your best and most enthusiastic customers are coming from.
This of course is the hard part: far too many companies have no idea who their real customer is.
3️⃣ Marketed the mission - not just the product
The third move Wise made was marketing their mission, not just their product.
The holy grail of marketing is word of mouth advertising. The problem is that few businesses do anything that’s actually worth talking about.
People buy on emotional reasons, but justify purchases with logic. Wise has both:
Rational - Faster & cheaper product than the competition
Emotional - Mission
Wise’s marketing mix includes PR, paid social, SEO, affiliate and partnership marketing, but while optimizing channels will grow Wise’s user base, it won’t step change growth. Marketing their mission does.
How Wise markets their mission
Wise creates high visibility stunts that look more like community organizing than marketing: but here’s the most important part. Wise actually invites their customers to help be part of the change.
They have:
🪦 1) Staged a funeral procession for hidden fees
How do you get people to pay attention to what money is doing? Don’t behave like a financial services company.
✍️ 2) Collected 45,000 petition signatures to take to the government to #stophiddenfees
Wise ran a petition to collect signatures from customers to expose hidden banking fees and get the government to crack down on hidden fees. They launched a ‘Stop the Exchange Rate Ripoff Report’, commissioned research on the hidden fees, and publicized the hidden fees to great effect to users, even banding together with Monzo and Revolut to call for reform collectively on hidden fees.
✍️ 3) Got 100 people to strip down to their skivvies to ‘expose’ hidden fees
Finally, because what was 2010 without a flashmob, Wise got 100 people to ‘expose’ hidden fees by stripping down in front of major London landmarks, staging similar stunts in Paris, Barcelona, New York and Toronto.
Community organizing 101: share a big mission, then enlist people with small asks to help you achieve it.
In summary…
Wanna be like Wise?
No brand strategy is one-size fits all or copy paste, but what you will never go wrong with is listening to your customers. Here’s 3 takeaways any company can benefit from:
Talk 👏 to 👏 your 👏 customer. When was the last time you spoke to a customer? If it’s been more than a month, it’s been too long. Take calls, make them, open source NPS reviews and feed them into an open Slack channel. Make your customers visible within your organization.
Distill what you hear and identify a common enemy. Gather a few folks who talk to customers regularly. Pool reviews, feedback, complaints. Distill it into your mission - and common enemy.
Send up marketing test balloons. Post 3-5 different ideas across organic social media. Pick the one that gets the most signal and then double down on it. Bonus points if you can find ways to allow people to participate in the campaign.
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✌️Thanks so much for reading - I appreciate your attention!
Amanda