When Wise went public in 2021 at an £8.75 billion valuation, it already had more than 10 million customers, was processing more than £5 billion in cross-border transactions per month, and scaling quickly. But organic growth comes from unexpected places, so when Wise noticed an uptick in sign-ups from a bank in Hungary, they knew they had identified their next area of growth. The Hungarian bank was referring its customers to Wise because it couldn’t offer clients the same international payments services in-house. Wise decided to create a solution that the bank could embed in its own product. This model blossomed into the Wise Platform.

Wise Platform extends Wise’s core payments infrastructure to support the international money movement needs of banks and global businesses. In other words, Wise is expanding beyond its niche of cross-border payments to create a platform that bundles other financial services to support business clients. I sat down with Steve Naudé, Head of Wise Platform for  his insights on the Wise Platform and the growing trend towards re-bundling of financial services within fintech.

D2C fintechs pivoting to offer embedded infrastructure to other businesses has been one of the biggest drivers behind the wave of re-bundling in the industry, which seemingly is only set to continue accelerating this year. 2022 signaled a rapid increase in re-bundling, evidenced by grand statements such as Elon Musk’s intention to create a super app similar to China’s WePay or AliPay after he bought Twitter for $44 billion.