Q4 2021 Mission Update: Speed

It was a bumper quarter for speed!

We hit record highs for the number of transfers that were instant, and also the number of transfers that were accurate. This improved performance was partly the result of larger projects from previous quarters paying off.

Where have improvements been made?

45% of transfers sent on Wise arrived in under 20 seconds in Q4.

Our main improvement in Q4 was outsourcing some of the checks that we run on customers so that we could complete them faster. As a result, these checks were 45% faster.

Q4 was also the first quarter where we saw the full benefits of speeding up the logic behind some of our financial crime checks - work we delivered in Q3. This was reflected in our improved speeds.

In Q3 we also reduced delays when paying out to India, and again reaped the rewards of this throughout Q4. The number of payments delayed at the payout stage reduced by more than 60% from Q3 to Q4.

However, we didn’t manage to launch instant payments to Brazil this quarter which is something that we had committed to in Q4. We're still working on it, and we hope we'll have an instant route to Brazil in Q1.

What else have we been working on?

In Q4 we've been improving the way we run financial crime checks.

Currently we have to suspend transfers while we run our checks and, unsurprisingly, we've had feedback from customers that this is a big pain point for them.

We're working on a new process for some of our checks so that we can allow you to submit your information and get approved ahead of time, to avoid having your transfer held up.

This should improve the speed of transfers and overall customer experience.

We're going to roll out the first test of this in Q1. If successful, we'll extend this flow for more of our checks.

During 2022 we'll be working on a cross-team effort to improve the logic underpinning our financial crime checks so that we can stop fewer customers without increasing our overall risk.

Accuracy

In Q4 83% of transfers arrived on time, which is our best performance yet.

This was partly due to the aforementioned work to reduce delays.

However, we've noticed a continually high rate of delays at the pay in stage. We're going to investigate what's happening here in Q1 and come up with a plan to fix them.