UK FinTech giant TransferWise has renamed itself to Wise as the company is preparing to go public.
While not mentioning the proceedings in the blog post announcing the rebrand, Wise reportedly picked Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as joint global co-ordinators for its initial public offering back in January.
Kristo Käärmann, CEO and co-founder of Wise, said that the rebrand comes on the back of the venture having outgrown its initial goal of making international payments and transfers easier and cheaper.
“Our customers now need us for more than money transfers,” he said. “Sending, spending, and receiving money internationally is too expensive, slow, and inconvenient. We’re fixing that for people and businesses.”
Recounting the journey so far, Käärmann said he and Taavet Hinrikus launched the business back in 2010 “to fix interactional money transfers for all of us who’d been overcharged and underserved by banks.”
A decade, ten million users and a $5bn valuation later, the company has outgrown its initial goal.
Now it is setting out to transform international banking. To reflect the change in focus, TransferWise will from now on be known as Wise.
“Today our name catches up with who we’re already building for – a community of people and businesses with multi-currency lives,” said Käärmann. “Wise is for all of us who live, work, travel, or support family around the world. It’s for those of us who want to cut out the middlemen that hold us back from being truly borderless.”
Initially, few things will change save for the branding and colour schemes. Customers will be able to use their accounts and debit cards just like before.
The company’s public listing is expected to happen some time later this year. Many experts expect that the IPO will push the company’s valuation well past the $5bn mark it reached on the back of a $319m raise in July 2020.
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