Kristo Käärmann, 41, is co-founder and chief executive of Wise, the stock market-listed London fintech valued at more than £3.7 billion. The business, originally known as Transferwise, moves about £8 billion in money a month between different currencies for 13 million retail and business customers, charging a fraction of the typical fees. It employs 3,500 people, but despite its scale Estonian-born Käärmann says he makes time to arrange dinner with his retail customers and to code. Part two of the interview, appearing next week, will focus on his recruitment tips.
I have a range of tasks today — one of which is to invite a small number of customers in Brussels to dinner
I don’t do this every week, but it just happens to be a thing I need to get done today. I am going to Brussels next week where I am giving a talk at a conference. Ahead of that I’m writing to a few of our customers, individuals rather than businesses, to see if they want to have dinner in the evening. Just a simple: “Hey, I’m in town. Would you like to come?”
It isn’t a massive product development that I’m driving here. But it is still an important part of what I need to do — to meet people using our products. I normally only invite between five and ten people, and also some of my colleagues. It’s usually a very casual affair, but it gives me a very good view of what they feel and think when using our products. Usually this is a mix of joy and frustrations. And if I want customers to come out to dinner with me I might as well write the invite myself.
Other things that I put in the important ‘to do’ category
One is writing code. I get to do that maybe once, maximum twice, a year. I’d be developing a feature, something relatively small, but that would usually take a few weeks to develop. I block off some of my time each day for a couple of weeks to develop this thing, with a small team.
The one I did a couple of years ago you may have noticed. When you use a UK-issued card in Europe or the United States sometimes what happens is the ATMs say: “Hey, do you want to be charged in pounds?” Say you are in Spain, the ATM is going to give you euros and you take €100 out. It asks: “Do you want me to charge the euros to your bank and they do the conversion or would you like me, the ATM, to charge a precise amount of pounds?” The latter means you have certainty as you know exactly how many pounds are getting deducted. This usually has a massive mark-up, by 7 or 8 per cent.
Advertisement
So, the card we built — the cleverness with it is that if you pay in euros it will deduct from your euro balance. It should not have the uncertainty problem. But what we noticed, and it was sad to see, was that a lot of our customers were going to the ATM in Europe, taking the safe option and getting screwed by 8 per cent by the ATM. They could have got it free if they had just deducted euros.
Now we can’t stop the ATM from doing this. What we can see is that people in Europe are taking out pounds so we built a feature that sends a push notification immediately afterwards that says: “Hey, I am sorry but you just got screwed by your ATM. Next time, please do choose to get charged in euros.” It’s not an earth-shattering feature but it is a pretty cool thing. Once I put it live I see from the logs that thousands of messages go out every day.
Why did I need to do it?
First, I wanted us to have this feature. It wasn’t an important feature to build. So I can’t go to an engineer and say: “Stop working on the more important thing you are doing and do the feature I’d really like.” Yes, I’m the boss but I’d be a very stupid boss if I did make it happen. I would be stopping the engineer working on something more important.
Second, as a founder — and every founder will tell you this — when you start it is just you. So you do all the jobs in the company — all the jobs you love doing and the ones you don’t. And then gradually if you hire the second person, she hopefully takes 30 per cent of the jobs away. Then you hire and hire and, for me, it was hire 55 where almost all of the jobs were covered. So someone else was doing those jobs that I was doing initially, including the ones I enjoyed doing. In fact, they were the first to go.
As with meeting the customers, I want to feel what it feels like for an engineer to write code. Today it is wildly different than it was when I wrote it on my laptop at the very beginning.
Advertisement
So that’s the reason. There are 600 software engineers working with me in this team. It’s quite a big population and it’s good to know how they feel when they write code. And the same doing customer service for a bit. There are many, many people who would pick up the calls from customers. So how do they feel? What does that feel like?
Empathy is a good thing
I can’t of course do every single role, with all their nuances, but I can do a fair number of roles as a reminder, regularly, of how it is to do them.
Coding is very real because you build something and it’s there. The feature I talked about I built three years ago and it’s still there. When you get that message, think of me. That said, hopefully you won’t get that message because you make the right choice at the ATM.
Kristo Käärmann was talking to Richard Tyler, editor of Times Enterprise Network
