My guest today is Kristo Käärmann, the co-Founder and CEO of Wise, the fintech £10b powerhouse that's fixing one of the most broken systems in the global economy: how money moves across borders.
Wise simply started as a personal workaround, with Kristo trying to move money between Estonia and the UK, where he soon realised that international payments weren't just slow and expensive by accident. They were structurally opaque, riddled with hidden fees, and built on systems that hadn't meaningfully changed in decades.
From that experience emerged a very simple idea, and one that became Wise's mission. Money should not have borders. Unlike most mission statements, though, this one actually constrains how Wise operates. It shapes pricing, product design, technology investment, culture, and even how the company thinks about its bottom line, with Wise consistently using its scale not to expand margins, but to collapse prices for customers.
Underneath the product, though, sits something much deeper: a global payments infrastructure built directly into domestic payment systems, sophisticated treasury and ledger technology, and long-term relationships with regulators that have become a significant competitive advantage rather than a constraint.
Today, of course, Wise moves tens of billions of pounds around the world each quarter, operates critical financial infrastructure across dozens of countries, and is increasingly becoming the underlying platform that other banks and fintechs themselves rely on. Wise is one of my favourite companies, both as a consumer in love with their product, but also as an admirer of the incredible scaling journey both Kristo and Wise have been on.
