Going 'borderless' pays off for TransferWise

The popularity of technology-driven international transactions are making their way to TransferWise's balance sheet.

For fiscal 2018, which ended on March 31, the London-based TransferWise reported about $152.4 million in revenue, up 75% from about $86 million in fiscal 2017. The company also reported profits of about $8.1 million, the company's second straight year in the black. In 2017 the company had profit of about $8.1 million after receiving a tax credit of approximately $9.1 million.

TransferWise has been targeting international transactions, including remittances, with a “borderless” account. TransferWise reports that product serves 4 million customers worldwide, both individual consumers and businesses.

Aidan Crawley/Bloomberg

The company launched its “borderless” account starting with a pilot in January and then proceeded to a full consumer roll out in March. The “borderless” account provides consumers with multi-country banking, a service previously available only to businesses according to TransferWise. The bank account is coupled with a debit card provided by Wirecard.

That's allowed TransferWise to benefit in an increasingly automated, competitive cross-border payments market for remittances, online merchant payments.

“You’re now collectively saving [about $1.3 billion] every year by using TransferWise. Yet we’re just in the beginning, as banks around the world still rake in a handsome [$208 billion] from the cross-border fees hidden in the exchange rate,” said Kristo Kaarman, co-founder and CEO of TransferWise, in a blog post aimed at consumers.

It hasn't been all good news. Earlier this year, TransferWise had suffered an outage of service which left its customers unable to use its website, app and payment card for 11 hours. This was fresh off the heels of Visa Europe’s outage in June which affected 1.7 million cards and causing over 2 million Visa transactions to fail.