Wise Now Facilitates Indian Rupee Transfer To 40+ Countries

Money transfer service Wise (formerly Transferwise) is now facilitating rupee (INR) transfers from India to more than 40 countries, including Australia, Canada, Singapore, the U.S., the U.K. and UAE.

Wise Senior Product Marketing Manager Chee-Xuan Tang said in a Tuesday (June 1) blog post that Wise offers transparency along with better exchange rates and lower fees than other services.

“Now, you can send money from India for up to 3.9 times cheaper with Wise, compared to leading banks,” Tang said. Wise also is three times less expensive than PayPal.

She added that through July 31, the company is donating all fees from INR transfers to India’s pandemic relief efforts.

Headquartered in London, Wise was co-founded in 2011 by Kristo Kaarmann and Taavet Hinrikus, who serve as co-CEOs. 

Wise moves about $6 billion every month for more than 10 million users, Kaarmann told the Times of India (TOI). He said the company has been moving money into India for seven years and now Indian households and businesses can transfer funds out.

“The biggest change wise has created in the world is creating transparency where the fees are not in the exchange rate. Our goal is to bring down the fees further,” Kaarmann said, per TOI on Tuesday (June 1). He added that the company is also striving to speed money transfers faster than they are now. 

The company’s goal “is to increase the percentage of customers who receive their money in 20 seconds,” Kaarmann told TOI. “Across the world, 38 percent of the transfers that happen on Wise take less than 20 seconds to arrive. … 60 percent of the time it happens in less than an hour.”

Wise changed its name from Transferwise in February to reflect the growth of its business beyond money transfers.

In an interview with PYMNTS in October 2020,  Nicholas Lembo, head of Americas growth for the company, said that the speed of transfers is dragged down by the legacy approaches used by many financial institutions.