Customer Spotlight

How Wise scaled its employee communications into a company-wide “Mission”

Founded in 2011, Wise (formerly TransferWise) is a financial technology focused on multi-currency banking through transparent and low-cost fees. With 5,000+ employees spread across 17 countries on 4 continents, Wise is a publicly traded company on the London Stock Exchange (LSE: WISE) with £560M in annual revenue.

89+

collaborative workspaces

4,900

employees

66

annual live streams

Challenge

There are three pillars that guide Wisers’ mission to make money without borders for its 13M customers: convenience (to quickly switch between currencies), speed (to do so instantly), and transparency (through clear and candid fees). With a workforce as global as the currencies it supports, these same values also apply to its company communications.

“We’re a rapidly scaling, feedback-friendly organization,” says Sarah-Louise Carter, Internal Communications Manager. “We want to make sure that everyone feels connected and has equal access to the right way for their voice to be heard.” With this growing distributed team, Wise needed a better way to organize, share, and distribute content with its employees.

At first, they leaned on a combination of YouTube and Zoom to wrangle their video comms, but it was cumbersome to manage and provided a less-than-stellar viewing experience. “Whenever we had an event, we just uploaded the recording to Google Drive and then posted that link to Confluence or in Slack,” says Rainar Aasrand, AV Engineer. “There wasn’t much thought about how it looked, or how we should organize it. We wanted to unify that experience for Wisers, and create a library that would look and feel like Netflix for our employees so that they could access all of our content from the same place.”

“Our teams are spread across multiple offices, borders, and time zones, so there is a lot of cross-office communication,” adds Rainar. “The expectations are high, and so our standards for video are high, too.” As such, Wise needed a solution that was easy to use, scalable, secure, beautiful to stream (both live and on-demand), and reliable — no small feat.

“We wanted to unify that [video] experience for Wisers, and create a library that would look and feel like Netflix for our employees, so that they could access all of our content from the same place.”
Rainar AasrandAV Engineer at Wise

Solution

Wise initially planned to solely leverage Vimeo’s organization and distribution tools. “At first we used Showcases, which worked well, but we were so happy when Video Library launched — it really took our content management to a new level,” says Rainar, noting Video Library’s ability to securely scale users and ownership of content across the company.

Since kicking off a partnership with Vimeo, the Wise team has seamlessly scaled their content library. “We love the auto archiving on Vimeo. We create folders for every single event that we have recorded, and we label them exactly when it was,” adds Sarah-Louise. “Over time, we’ve created this amazing archive of footage.”

Beyond streamlining internal work by wrangling hundreds of videos, the Wise team found Vimeo’s live streaming tools to be a perfect solution to further connect its teams. Today, Wise live streams company town halls every two to three weeks to connect offices in real time. “Live streaming our town halls ensures everybody at the company is connected and on the same page,” Rainar adds, regardless of where or when they work.

As Wise scaled their internal events, they unearthed ways to make their communications more accessible to every employee. “Inclusivity is paramount to us at Wise — we want to make sure that everyone who comes to work feels supported in the way that they learn and process information,” says Sarah-Louise. “We recently added closed captions to our live and on-demand events, which is a really important addition to how we produce content.”

In fact, Wise’s live event strategy has expanded beyond traditional executive communications. “We started doing internal conferences, called Mission Days, twice a year. Live streaming through Vimeo makes sure everybody can get on board, whether they’re watching at home or in one of our venues in Tallinn, Tampa, SIngapore or Budapest,” says Rainar.

Outcome

Since joining Vimeo in 2019, Wise has seen its team through a pandemic and immense product growth, developing its fastest transfer speeds and expanding its footprint into new markets. Through it all, video has served as a core medium to help the company grow and thrive together.

“When we signed up with Vimeo, our idea was to have a central video library for all content — we never imagined it would become so focused on live streaming,” says Rainar. “Even before the pandemic, we quickly realized there’s a much bigger need for live events to connect our employees.”


“People appreciate being able to see and interact with one another — that's a big part of what it is to build great organizations. Video is going to continue to evolve to do that in a more genuine way.”

Sarah-Louis Carter Internal Communications Manager

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