Lenny's PodcastHow to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise)
CHAPTERS
- 0:00 – 3:33
Wise’s word-of-mouth mindset: “blow users’ socks off”
The episode opens with Nilan’s core philosophy: word of mouth doesn’t come from slick conversion tweaks, but from delivering an experience users didn’t think was possible. This sets the bar for the rest of the conversation: 10x improvements, not incremental polish.
- •Conversion optimization can help growth, but rarely creates true advocacy
- •Recommendation requires a surprisingly high “wow” threshold
- •The goal is to deliver something users didn’t know could exist
- •This framing becomes Wise’s north star for product and growth
- 3:33 – 6:06
What Wise does, key products, and the scale they’ve reached
Nilan explains Wise’s mission—solving cross-border money movement—and breaks down the three core products: transfers, the Wise account, and enterprise infrastructure. He shares concrete scale metrics and the standout growth fact: ~70% of new user discovery comes from word of mouth.
- •Three products: transfers, multi-currency account (consumer + business), and Wise Platform (enterprise)
- •Scale: ~$12B moved per month, 30–40% YoY growth
- •Pricing: ~0.65% average take rate; profitable with strong margins
- •Customer base: ~16M customers, ~10M active; ~1M added per quarter
- •~70% of new users learned about Wise through friends/word of mouth
- 6:06 – 7:53
How Wise measures word of mouth (and why ‘just ask’ works)
Wise combines traditional attribution (referrers/cookies) with direct customer survey questions embedded in the product flow. This hybrid method helps them estimate how much “direct” traffic is actually driven by recommendation and offline sharing.
- •Use an attribution model plus customer-reported survey data
- •Overlay survey results onto web analytics (especially ‘direct’ traffic)
- •Asking is integrated into the user flow—not a random pop-up
- •Simple measurement beats over-engineering: customers reliably report how they heard
- 7:53 – 9:48
Why Wise leaned into WOM: low distribution cost + trust shortcut
Nilan describes why word of mouth is structurally attractive for Wise: money is a commodity, margins are limited, and paid channels can be constrained. Beyond cost, WOM is also a trust accelerator in a category where credibility is hard to earn with ads alone.
- •Money movement is a low-margin, commodity-like business—paid growth is harder to sustain
- •Distribution cost matters: WOM is scalable with low marginal cost
- •Being cheaper than incumbents reduces available marketing budget (relative to competitors’ spreads)
- •Trust is central in fintech; friends are a stronger trust signal than landing pages
- 9:48 – 12:33
Using NPS as the operating system for recommendation growth
Wise used NPS not as a vanity metric but as a proxy for the underlying referral engine. They found referral behavior compounds sharply as users move from detractors to promoters—doubling at each step—making NPS improvements dramatically higher ROI than many typical growth optimizations.
- •Overlaying NPS with referral data revealed a step-function in invite behavior
- •Moving users from 6→7/8 doubled invites; 8→9 doubled again; 9→10 doubled again
- •Optimizing NPS can raise the ‘viral coefficient’ of the whole customer base
- •NPS comments provide directional clarity on what to fix
- 12:33 – 16:47
The pillars that drive advocacy: price, speed, and ease of use
By analyzing NPS feedback and customer conversations, Wise repeatedly saw the same drivers of delight: make it cheaper, faster, and easier. Crucially, Nilan notes that slight improvements don’t trigger sharing—Wise saw real advocacy only when the product was dramatically better (e.g., 8–10x cheaper).
- •Customer feedback clustered into three recurring themes: price, speed, convenience
- •Advocacy happens when improvement is unmistakable—not marginal
- •In new markets, being slightly cheaper led to usage but not sharing
- •Word of mouth accelerated when Wise reached “8–10x cheaper” territory
- 16:47 – 19:06
Trust problems in fintech—and how WOM bypasses them
Nilan explains why trust is hard to manufacture through conventional marketing in financial services. The most effective shortcut is delivering such a good experience that customers recommend it—turning trust from something you claim into something customers transfer to their friends.
- •Ads alone struggle to establish safety/reputation for a new money company
- •Trust must be decomposed into specific concerns, not treated as a single concept
- •Friend recommendations are a stronger signal than typical on-page trust widgets
- •Great product experience → advocacy → trust flywheel
- 19:06 – 25:15
Getting to a 9–10 NPS: the 10x bar and working backward from ‘ideal’
Nilan argues that teams often stop once the product “works,” then chase conversion gains—missing what it takes to earn a 9 or 10. The leap to recommendation requires breakthroughs: instant movement, radically lower costs, and hard infrastructure work that can take years.
- •High NPS requires delivering something users didn’t think was possible
- •10x improvements come from solving systemic infrastructure constraints
- •Avoid ‘shortcut’ launches that don’t change the fundamental experience
- •Adopt a ‘work backward from theoretical best’ approach instead of incremental iteration
- 25:15 – 29:25
How Wise got drastically cheaper: allocating costs and engineering them away
Nilan walks through the mechanics behind Wise’s low fees: allocate every bill back to the transaction/customer that caused it, price accordingly, and systematically reduce underlying costs. He breaks costs into three buckets—people, risk, and partner fees—and frames operational costs as ‘cost of poor quality.’
- •Wise is profitable per transaction—low pricing isn’t a loss leader
- •Cost attribution: map expenses to routes/transactions, then add margin to set price
- •Use cost visibility to charge expensive segments appropriately and drop prices broadly
- •Three transaction-level cost drivers: people costs, realized risk, partner fees
- •Engineering focus: automate operations/support and reduce risk exposure
- 29:25 – 31:40
10x execution in the real world: Singapore eKYC and customer-powered change
A vivid example of “doing hard things”: Singapore required face-to-face verification for every customer, forcing an unscalable launch. Wise used the pain to mobilize customers and regulators, ultimately helping secure a first-of-its-kind eKYC license—turning regulatory friction into product advantage and WOM fuel.
- •Regulatory constraint: mandatory in-person verification to get licensed
- •Unscalable workaround: a local office and face-to-face verification process
- •Customers hated it—but that dissatisfaction became leverage for change
- •Outcome: secured an eKYC/selfie+ID verification approach after sustained effort
- •Breakthrough improvements become advocacy moments and reinforce the flywheel
- 31:40 – 35:08
Rational vs. emotional recommendation: mission as a WOM amplifier
Beyond functional benefits, Wise found that mission and authenticity can be share-worthy. Nilan shares how a rebrand email communicating the mission—without a typical CTA—was heavily forwarded and drove acquisition, showing that emotional resonance can materially boost WOM.
- •Recommendations come from both rational value and emotional connection
- •Wise’s mission resonated with a subset of customers who became amplifiers
- •A mission email ‘broke marketing rules’ (no CTA) yet spread widely via forwarding
- •Authenticity matters: founders’ genuine frustration with fees made the message credible
- •Mission + product value reinforce each other into a growth flywheel
- 35:08 – 48:40
Customer-led prioritization and Wise’s stance on experimentation
Wise aims to avoid the common split between ‘things for customers’ and ‘things for revenue’ by treating customer impact as the path to shareholder value. Nilan describes a conviction-based approach: use qualitative insights and data to pick big bets, validate safety/impact, but don’t rely on endless A/B testing to find meaning.
- •One prioritized list: customer happiness work that also drives business outcomes
- •Conviction-building over time replaces constant micro-optimization
- •“You can’t split test your way to love” as a product principle
- •Use analysis methods (pre-post, holdouts, tests) but avoid analysis that slows action
- •Encourage teams to pursue ideas leadership initially doubts—if grounded in insight
- 48:40 – 1:03:35
Wise’s international banking wedge: accounts, onboarding, and global-local teams
Nilan explains why Wise expanded beyond transfers into accounts and infrastructure: international banking is fundamentally broken for people and businesses. He then dives into org design for global products under local regulation—one global codebase, global KPIs, and regional teams contributing directly to solve market-specific requirements.
- •Insight: for small/one-off transfers, users default to their bank—accounts deepen engagement
- •Businesses need local receiving accounts (e.g., AUD account without flying to Australia)
- •Wise provides multi-country local bank details and balances to reduce cross-border friction
- •Macro market map: local-stack international banks vs global-stack fintechs; Wise aims for both global stack + deep local infra
- •Team model: global product teams + regional teams contributing to a shared codebase to handle regulatory variability
- 1:03:35 – 1:08:01
The referral breakthrough: making savings believable (and shareable) with a graph
After years of testing referral variants, a small product change produced a 3x lift: making value explicit at the moment of success. By visualizing hidden bank fees vs Wise’s transparent pricing and pairing it with an invite CTA, Wise closed the gap between value delivered and value perceived—what Nilan calls ‘product marketing in the product.’
- •Referral programs were heavily iterated over ~12 years; big lifts became rare
- •Key insight: users believed they saved money, but not the exact amount
- •Solution: a simple visual comparison graph showing bank hidden FX fees vs Wise
- •Placed on the transfer success page alongside a share/invite button → 3x sharing rate
- •Broader lesson: make users perceive the ‘remarkable’ value you delivered (product marketing inside UX)
- 1:08:01 – 1:16:33
Philanthropy, lightning round, and closing advice
Nilan shares his investing/charity focus on ‘market failures’ like homelessness and financial access, then moves into a lightning round covering books, products, interview questions, and Wise culture. The episode closes with where to reach him and what kinds of feedback he welcomes.
- •Philanthropic/angel focus: mission-led founders and market-failure problems (e.g., homelessness, underserved banking)
- •Lightning round highlights: favorite books, Arc browser, interview question on frustrations, resilience motto
- •Wise culture ritual: company gatherings in Estonia; Nilan DJs as a side hobby
- •How listeners can help: product feedback and connecting him to people solving hard problems
- •Where to find him: Twitter/X (@NilanP)
