Q1 2025 Mission Update: Speed
At Wise, our mission is to make cross-border payments as fast as possible, instant. We are continuously finding ways to improve payment speed and we’re very happy to share some great improvements from the first quarter of 2025.
This quarter, 64% of your transfers were instant — completed in under 20 seconds — and 95% were completed in less than 24 hours.
So, what's changed?
Sending more than 100,000 EUR? Your transfers just got much faster! In Q1 we started to use a new payment method which allows transfers to be paid out more often and arriving to the recipient much quicker. This means that 32% of transfers larger than 100,000 EUR are completed in less than 1 hour, compared to 13% in December.
We have been working hard on getting more transfers to be completed in less than 20 seconds, and have done improvements to several currencies.
30% of transfers sent to Vietnamese dong (VND) in March were instant, compared to 10% in December. We worked together with our partner VietinBank and challenged the processing speed. Similar improvements are seen on transfers sent to Pakistani rupee (PKR) - in March 50% of transfers were instant, compared to 12% in December. Additionally 49% of transfers sent to Kenyan shillings (KES) in March were instant, compared to 1% in December. All these changes have been made possible thanks to a good co-operation between Wise and our local banking partners.
Unfortunately not everything is moving in the upwards direction. Last year we shared that we were able to make good improvements on the time it takes for our internal checks and thanks to that increase the number of transfers completed instantly. Unfortunately in February we saw a drop in these numbers and we are working hard on figuring out what exactly is causing this.
On a high note, last quarter we announced that Wise now connects directly to InstaPay, the Philippines’ real-time payment network, and works directly with the country’s central bank to process payments instantly. At the end of last year, 62% of transfers sent to the Philippines peso (PHP) were instant and now we are close to 64%.
What is even more important than fast payments? Money arriving as we’ve promised. We track the accuracy of our payment's arrival time as ‘Early’, ‘On time’ or ‘Late’. In Q1 '25 the number of transfers arriving on time has stayed the same as last quarter. However, we have seen an increase in transfers arriving earlier than we promised. Early is better than late but we will work hard to make sure our estimates are accurate and trustworthy.
*Transaction speed claimed depends on individual circumstances and may not be available for all transactions.
