With a $223 million revenue for its last fiscal year which ended in March, TransferWise has grown by more than 50%. The company is still the most valued fintech startup in the U.K.
U.K based fund transfer service, TrasnferWise Ltd, has announced that in its last fiscal year, the company’s revenues recorded growth by more than 50%. TransferWise which is fully backed by Sir Richard Branson as well as Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, had its fiscal year-end on the 19th of March, which confirms the company’s three-year consecutive profit streak.
TransferWise successfully pulled in 179 million pounds (about $223 million) in revenue which is an increase of more than half of the revenue from the previous fiscal year which stood at 117 million pounds. Furthermore, the company’s net profit after tax jumped up to 10.3 million pounds (about $12.8 million) in the same period, an impressive jump from by 66% from the previous year’s net profit.
TransferWise was founded in 2011 by two friends from Estonia Kristo Kaarmann and Taavet Hinrikus who decided that they had had enough with the exorbitant bank transfer fees being charged whenever they had to send money back to Estonia from London. They didn’t only want to make cross-border transfers a lot more affordable but also as transparent as possible.
Speaking to CNBC on what pointer showed that the business really did become profitable, Kaarmann who is also the company’s CEO said:
“This is indeed rare, but it is very important for us internally. We really only know if the product works once the product works on its own and doesn’t need any extra cash to support it.”
Apart from the aforementioned, TransferWise is also backed by major venture capital outfit Andreessen Horowitz and after a funding round back in May pushed its valuation up to $3.5 billion, it became the most valuable fintech startup in Europe, surpassing financial lender OakNorth, whose valuation at the time was $2.8 billion.
On some of the feats it’s been able to achieve, TransferWise currently has at least 6 million customers scattered around the world and successfully processes millions of transactions worth about 4 billion pounds, every month. The firm offers its corporate/business customers a foreign exchange service and a multi-currency debit card. Currently, TransferWise’s multi-currency accounts hold more than 1 billion pounds with about 10,000 new businesses signing up monthly.
Back in June, TransferWise struck a deal with France’s Groupe BCPE in a bid to offer cheap money transfers to its customer and has also partnered with Monzo and N26, both supposed rivals, who now have TransferWise’s platform incorporated with their own services.
Last month, the firm announced that it had spread its services to Australia and New Zealand with a plan to also launch in Singapore before 2019 runs out. CEO Kaarmann spoke on the need for TransferWise in both countries. According to him:
“While there are existing multi-currency cards that exist in Australia and New Zealand, they are prohibitively expensive to use. For example in Australia, the TransferWise Platinum debit MasterCard is on average 11 times cheaper than most travel, debit, prepaid and credit cards.”
TransferWise has a staff strength of more than 1,600 people and is constantly looking to hire more talented data scientists and engineers as well, in current and new locations including London, New York, Estonia, and Budapest as well. At the moment, the company has no plans to go public.
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