Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus did not start with a business plan. They started with a workaround. Kristo was working in London, paid in pounds, with a mortgage to service back in Estonia. Taavet was in London too, paid in euros. Every month they looked up the real exchange rate, Taavet put his money into Kristo's Estonian account, and Kristo topped up Taavet's UK account with pounds. No fees, no marked up rate. Writing about it ten years later in a founder letter on the Wise blog, Kristo said it felt like they had outsmarted a system that was built to fleece them.

The first public version of the idea was not software either. A post on the TransferWise blog dated 17 January 2011, a week before launch, described a small informal club of friends in London who trusted each other with sizeable amounts of money. One paid the other's rent in pounds, the other sent the matching euros at the Bank of England day rate. On a single sheet of paper they worked out that this handful of people was already trading about half a dozen grand a month between them. The same post mentions the unglamorous part of turning that into a company: months of work and money spent on FSA licensing before anything could go live.

A note on the timeline used here. TransferWise went live on Monday 24 January 2011, the date on the founders' own launch post, signed "Taavet, Kristo and the team at TransferWise". That launch date is day zero for this record. The pricing was published in the same post: currency exchange at the mid market rate with a flat fee of one pound or one euro per transfer.

Seven days later, on 31 January 2011, the team posted a recap of the first week. Customers had already used the service. They reported seeing people exchange money inside the UK and transfer between the UK and France, Italy, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland and Belgium, with an average transaction of almost 1,000. That is the milestone recorded here: paying customers inside the launch week, seven days from go live, with both ends of the count fixed by the founders' own dated posts.

What drove that first week was one article. The founders wrote that the biggest part of their launch was a post by Steve O'Hear at TechCrunch Europe, which called them the Skype of currency exchange. No marketing budget, no waitlist. One piece of coverage plus a service simple enough that strangers were willing to try it with four figure sums.

Year one stayed small. On 28 February 2012 the founders published a post titled "One Year and 10 Million Euros Later". Almost 5,500 payments had gone through, adding up to more than 10 million euros moved and more than half a million euros saved for customers compared with bank charges. The team had grown to ten people. Set that against the flat fee of about one pound or one euro per transfer they had announced a year earlier and the shape of the early business is clear: this was proof that people would hand real money to a new website, not yet a company with meaningful income.

Kristo's own writing about cost is the most useful part of the middle years. In a June 2018 post on his personal blog he opened up the fee structure: direct costs of moving money, the servicing cost of the people handling more than 150,000 customer contacts a month, and product investment, which took nearly half of the fee on the most efficient routes. He also gave the number that explains the strategy. When they started in the UK, the best price he could negotiate with a commercial bank was 1.50 pounds per payment. By connecting directly to the Bank of England and the payment network, that cost fell fifty times. He noted 27 price drops in the previous nine months.

Profit arrived in year six, and Kristo reported it himself. His annual report post of 18 September 2019 says the financial year just ended was the third in which the company posted a profit, on revenue up 53 percent to 179 million pounds. Six million customers were moving 4 billion pounds a month, against three million people and 2 billion pounds a month in the summer of 2018. Average price had come down from 0.73 percent of the transfer amount in 2016 to 0.67 percent in 2018. Three profitable years counted back from the year ending March 2019 is what backs the widely repeated claim that Wise has been profitable since 2017, and it comes from the founder rather than from a press release.

The quarterly mission updates he wrote are the odd artifact in this story. The Q4 2019 update, published in January 2020, reports 6 million customers and well over 4 billion pounds a month, then says that instant transfers slipped from 24 percent to 23 percent because payouts to India got slower, and that the average price went up again, to 0.75 percent from 0.74 percent, because card and ACH funding costs rose. A chief executive publishing the quarter in which two headline numbers moved the wrong way, with the reasons attached, is rare enough to be a strategy in itself.

Wise listed on the London Stock Exchange in July 2021, by which point Kristo's founder letter put the community at more than 10 million people and businesses moving over 5 billion pounds a month. In the financial year to 31 March 2025 the company reported revenue of 1.2 billion pounds, underlying income of 1.36 billion pounds, and 145.2 billion pounds moved across borders for 15.6 million customers.