At Wise, we are helping a diverse demographic of people and businesses with international financial needs and building diverse products. Building that requires diversity of thought. It’s not just ethnic or gender diversity but diversity in experiences, circumstances, upbringings. So DEI is incredibly important. If we are serious about continuing to disrupt the FinTech space, we need to act with the understanding that innovation expands beyond the products we build and encompasses how we build them and who builds them.
Diversity to us means ensuring all people/Wisers have a seat at the/all table(s). In Analytics, we achieve this by ensuring representation and work towards building a strong team where everyone can see colleagues, especially in Senior positions, that they can feel inspired by.
To increase gender diversity within Wise Analytics, we’ve started out the year with the goal of achieving 50% new hires to be Female / non-binary as quickly as we can. We believe we can do so by creating at least 50% female and non-binary candidate pipelines for all roles on application stage and digging into where our main challenges currently lie. We also seek to ensure that 100% of hires have gone through a gender diverse interview process.
To ensure that we retain the incredible talent we have onboard, we’ve set up a community to allow for open discussions around the challenges female analysts face at Wise and how we can better support each other.
Women in Data partnership provides a unique opportunity for us to expand our reach to be more representative of the diverse and rich analytics community we seek to build, and invest in female analysts across all levels and experiences through coaching/mentoring and networking.
We couldn’t be more excited about our partnership with WID!
Location: London
Expertise: Product & Business Analytics, Sales Operations Management
Education: MA in Economy Policy in Global Markets
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernadettdundics/
A bit about me…
I’ve been at Wise for over 3.5 years and I work with the Wise Platform team as a Senior Product Analyst. Wise Platform works with a large variety of partners from neo-banks to software companies, allowing them to tap into the Wise network and giving them and their customers access to cheaper, faster international payments. Working with the team has given me a lot of opportunities to become familiar with various aspects of the Wise product and I also learned a lot about sales, implementation and account management processes and their data requirements.
Why did you join Wise?
I just finished my Master’s degree when I came across a job ad from Wise. During my Master’s I interned at banks and while I liked working with their large data sets I felt their mission was not very inspiring. Wise gave me the opportunity to combine the two; work with interesting data, all the while knowing that my work is helping to make international payments more transparent and affordable to people.
What do you like most about Wise?
I love the culture at Wise; everyone is approachable for questions and is keen to help if you run into a problem. It creates a very supportive environment that allows each of us to perform at our best since we know we can rely on support from colleagues in our own offices and in any other Wise office across the world. Our diverse backgrounds and experiences also create a wonderful atmosphere when we spend time together socially; it’s always so interesting to hear people’s journeys!
Location: Tallinn
Expertise: Product Analytics and User Research
Education: MSc in Chemistry and Biotechnology
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ann-lakspere-948374100/
A bit about me…
I am an Estonian living in the Baltics and working on an international product and scale. I’ve been with Wise for close to 4 years, 1.5 years as an analyst. I love challenges and puzzles which also brought me to analytics as it provides freedom to work with complex problems and figure out solutions to current problems we face daily while keeping the dynamic mindset. In my free time I love water sports, painting and hiking but will never say no to an adventure abroad.
Why did you join Wise?
Wise captivated me from the beginning because of its culture (you can grow into anyone if you just show initiative and work hard for it), the unique approach to a worldwide problem and it being a new challenge for me as I didn’t know much about the world of Finance. I feel lucky to have had the experience and opportunity to work alongside many talented and kind people and see the company from different perspectives and take on new challenges daily.
What do you like most about Wise?
The people I am working with who help me grow and explore new things but also have empathy and flexibility in everyday work. The working mentality makes a big difference and in Wise we truly care about our employees and their mental and physical wellbeing.
I can say for sure that joining Wise has been the best decision in my career so far.
Location: Tallinn
Expertise: Marketing Analytics, Public Relations & Performance Marketing measurement
Education: MA in Communications, MA in Political Science
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ekaterina-bogdanova-531436172/
A bit about me…
My name is Ekaterina but I prefer the short version Katja. I’ve been at Wise for almost 4 years now, starting as a verification operations intern in summer 2018 and moving to marketing analytics full-time in January, 2020. I’m mostly taking care of helping PR (Public Relations) and Audio teams to measure their impact on company growth, as well as I contribute to core marketing projects like forecast or attribution model.
Why did you join Wise?
Honestly speaking, I’ve never considered working for a fintech company before. I have a background in Social Sciences and after graduation I dreamed of working for a think tank. I joined Wise for a summer internship as a Verification agent to pay my bills, but after a couple of weeks it became more than just a job for me. I saw so many ways to develop and to deliver impact, so I stayed to help with an ambitious but so inspiring mission – money without borders.
What do you like most about Wise?
It will sound so cliche and what someone from a cult would say, but I enjoy our ambitious goals, our revolutionary and in a way punk approach to the traditional financial system, our initiatives to do good for society. I adore people (and dogs) at work and love learning something new from my colleagues every day, starting from new Python libraries and ending with mind blowing movies and TV shows suggestions.
Location: Singapore
Expertise: Product Analytics
Education: MSS Applied Economics
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhya-sriram/
A bit about me…
I have been with Wise for 10 months now. I have been playing with numbers since I can remember. The most fun part of my current job is brainstorming a model or piece of analysis with my Lead & rest of my Analytics Team. Most of Analytics is joining the dots to create the big picture and It gives so much joy to create this piece by piece.
One of my personal goals (as I continue my journey through Wise) is to train more people who are interested to get into the field of analytics and help them fall in love with the domain that is now my lifeline.
Why did you join Wise?
In the venn diagram of what I value & what the company values, there are 3 things that intersect. Customer-focussed, Autonomous working style & Smart peers. To capture all three in one example – today I can speak to a customer, plan out how we could solve their pain-point, take feedback from my ready-to-help peers & prepare a MVP. There’s nothing more fulfilling than waking up to this thought.
What do you like most about Wise?
Curiosity is met with more curiosity. When you have an idea and you start pitching it, one of two things happen – either “why?” , which helps you challenge your idea and go back and create a better version of it or a “how?”, which most likely means they want in 🙂
Location: New York
Expertise: Product & Business Analytics
Education: BBA in Finance & Mathematics
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelaminhuang/
A bit about me…
I’ve been at Wise for nearly 2 years, and I’m the product analyst covering the North America region. I’m from Texas, have lived in Luxembourg (where I first discovered TransferWise) and California, and now live in New York. Outside of work, I enjoy climbing, hiking, travelling, and trying out new hobbies – the most recent one was sailing!
Why did you join Wise?
I’d had an eye on Wise since I first used the product, and I had heard about their amazing analyst team and was drawn to their autonomous way of working. I also appreciate that Wise operates in a sustainable manner and genuinely cares about the mission of money without borders.
What do you like most about Wise?
The people! Everyone I meet at Wise is smart, caring, and humble. As the world has reopened since the pandemic, I’ve also enjoyed the opportunity to travel to other offices and meet Zoom colleagues in real life, as well as the ability to work remotely through our Mobile Wiser benefit.
Location: London
Expertise: Product Analytics
Education: MA – Innovation and Technology Management; MBA – International Business.
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salome-kapanadze-31199058/
A bit about me….
I spent my childhood and adolescence mainly in Georgia (the country) and moved to the UK almost 1.5 years back from the office branch in Estonia. During my 4 years in Wise I have worked with multiple different product teams with different functionalities such as product security, business convenience and receiving to Wise accounts. Currently I work with the Receive squad to understand the customers behaviour, define growth opportunities and improve the adoption funnel.
Why did I join Wise?
I’d heard about Wise while studying at University of Tartu multiple times. At the end of my first year of Masters I applied to the hackathon organised by TransferWise, got accepted and immediately decided I wanted to work at Wise. I was beyond happy to join the company’s Customer Support team. As a side project I worked with the Product Security team to understand customer problems and to build a bridge between the Customer Support and the Product team. Eventually I moved to the product team and an analyst and since then I’ve been working with different teams to make data driven decisions.
What do I like most about Wise?
Enormous support from the people I work with and the feedback culture are the two most important things that have kept me with Wise for more than 4 years.
There are always people out there that will guide you in the right direction. Constructive feedback that is very much appreciated and asked from each other helps you to look at your skills and work from different angles and always strive to progress in your role.
Over the last decade, the UK has become a bedrock of innovation, especially in the FinTech space. The investments into FinTech companies has climbed year after year, bringing cutting edge, intuitive, diverse, convenient products to consumers and businesses, completely transforming the way financial services are experienced and integrated into our day to day.
In such a competitive market, a company’s ability to solve the problem or solve it better than any
other solution out there and thus get to product & market fit is critical to its survival.
Today we use data to:
This means data lies at the heart of how to observe the success of a product, adds depth to the way it is being used by constantly evolving and increasingly complex needs of its customers, and helps us keep a pulse on the changing landscape of the problem our products are solving.
In the next 5 years, we expect the role data plays in product innovation to become even more vital and a necessity. Through investments in AI and Machine Learning, we’d hope to see our companies moving from retroactive reporting to further into predictive modelling, allowing us to make better and faster decisions with higher confidence.
We’re 3,300 people, from 100 nationalities, working in 17 offices around the world.
Our mission: money without borders
In the words of our founder, ‘people don’t join a company. They join a mission.’ And ours is big. Current banking systems don’t let us send, spend or receive money across borders easily. Or quickly. Or cheaply.
So we’re building a new one.
Our mission is to make money without borders the new normal. For everyone. Getting there isn’t easy and we haven’t figured it all out yet. But together, we can do it.
