While dozens of fintechs cut staff, Wise is among a handful of payments companies gobbling up the wealth of talented workers who are suddenly available.
"There are a lot of people who want to work in this space," said Harsh Sinha, the chief technology officer at Wise. "And when there is a shock in the economy it leads to people losing jobs."
More than 90,000 technology workers have been fired in 2022 as the economy has cooled,
But London-based Wise, whose earnings have risen this year, plans to hire 250 people in 2023 in New York, Tampa, Florida, and Austin, Texas, who can help accelerate its North American expansion plans. Wise has 4,300 employees in 18 global offices, up from about 3,000 at the start of 2020.
"It's a good time now for us to invest in our business, and luckily it's gotten easier to hire," Sinha said.
Wise will double its headcount in Austin in 2023 to more than 200 employees and is recruiting people with expertise in engineering, product development, operations and sales. Additional hires will go to Wise's other North American offices.
In the quarter ended Sept. 30, Wise reported profits of about $63 million, up 173% from the prior year. The company also said active customers had risen 30% over the same time period to 5.5 million.
"When we were doing our roadshow ahead of the [initial public offering], investors were already starting to value fintechs based on profitability," Sinha said.
The new staff will be necessary to support the company's geographic and product expansion. That includes developing a debit card linked to an account that offers banking in multiple countries. An August partnership with the
Wise also recently partnered with AvidXchange, which sells accounts payable software for middle-market businesses and their suppliers. AvidXchange and Wise are managing a cross-border payment gateway that combines Wise's international payments system and AvidXchange's billing automation.
The combination enables businesses to pay domestic and international suppliers through a single user experience, eliminating the need to navigate to other sites to complete payment and reducing paperwork.
Other updates include auto conversions — which allow businesses to automatically convert currencies when a desired exchange rate is met — as well as improvements in how businesses view unpaid bills in Quickbooks and pay directly from a Wise account.
Wise competes with banks that offer international business payments, cross-border payment technology firms like Ripple, and small-business payment companies such as Stripe. It also competes with
"AvidXchange already knows who you want to pay and what the payment is for, so that makes it easier for a company to manage their finances while paying their bills," said Steve Naude, a product lead for the Wise platform.
Payments technology executives say the industry's layoffs are part of a cyclical pattern and set the stage for a movement of programmers, engineers and other experts who can drive innovation at other companies.
"A large portion of the innovations we have in financial services, and specifically payments, are a result of the economic uncertainty and layoffs that took place in the 2000s," said Charles Rosenblatt, president of PayQuicker, a payments technology company, adding his firm also plans to add staff. "This current wave will spawn a new era of innovation for the companies that have the ability to hire."
Wise also faces competition for that talent.
Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover have also reported strong earnings and have asserted that payments volume and revenue have held up well. The card companies are
"Those firms that hire specialized talent will gain the advantage of developers that can advise and help implement new and existing payment methods," said John Lunn, CEO of Gr4vy, a cloud-technology firm that serves the payments industry. "They'll gain on-staff experts who understand coming regulations, can lay out strategic plans of action, and look ahead at what regions to target and scale business in the face of economic woes."
