Meet Ankita D’Mello, one of our Product Senior Managers here at Wise.

Ankita joined Wise in March of 2020 but started out as a customer back in 2013. While she was an international student in London, Ankita was trying to send money to her sister in Singapore but couldn’t find a fast and cost efficient way to do so. One afternoon while taking the train home from a full day of classes, she saw an advertisement for Wise and thought it was crazy something like this had been invented, but never thought she’d have the opportunity to work here. Fast forward 6 years and after graduating, Ankita was starting her job search with the hopes of moving back to Asia and saw a job Wise had posted that seemed like the perfect fit! A short time later she was hired and has since helped shape the strategy for the Wise Account in the US and increase the value to our customers.

Globally, our product teams look after regional experiences or infrastructure, so here in the US, we focus on experiences that are unique to customers in Canada and North America or infrastructure that is specific to USD and CAN transfers. USD is our biggest currency at Wise so we work a lot with our internal teams both in the US and around the world as they make changes to tailor a specific experience that caters to our US customers because for whatever reason the global approach might not work here. The US makes up a large chunk of our customers & transfers so we have to get it right.

We also partner closely on projects. One thing we launched recently was the ability of customers to earn interest on their USD balance & while our NorthAm Product team spearheaded the launch, we worked closely with a lot of teams such as HOLD in London, our mobile engineers, and others to build an experience that was for US customers but required a lot of global support too.

There have been 2 things, one here in NorthAm and another in APAC. Both were tough to execute on and had a lot of challenges that came with it.

In NorthAm, we’ve been spearheading the rollout of our interest earning feature on USD balances. In APAC, the thing I was most proud of is we launched a product in India to help freelancers get paid. We had to build something really custom and find a unique solution because we couldn’t launch our multi-currency account there due to government regulations. We worked really closely with lots of freelancers in India when we launched it and the feedback we got was so great. They were really excited that we had launched something that was 7x cheaper than anyone else.