TransferWise: Using the Real Exchange Rate and Changing the Way We Use Money – Lawyer Monthly | Legal News Magazine

TransferWise: Using the Real Exchange Rate and Changing the Way We Use Money

In this edition, we speak with Jenifer Swallow about her role as General Counsel at TransferWise. She passionately expresses the joys of her role and how she sees the FinTech sector advancing in the near future. We speak with her about how TransferWise is close to transforming the world of international money transfers, how she works towards the best outcome for her customers and the company and the challenge behind competing with banks. In this insightful interview, Jenifer reveals many key outlooks for lawyers to bookmark, as well as touching on the ever-present threat of cyberbullying and cyberattacks.

 

Can you share with Lawyer Monthly what is the most challenging aspect of your role and how you overcome the challenges you face?

There are loads of fun challenges. When I joined TransferWise in 2015, I was the first in-house General Counsel. Handling a huge workload at speed was something I was used to, but this was something else, particularly as I stepped straight into our Series D funding round and took on responsibility for the HR function.

Part of the challenge of handling the work volume has been figuring out the role of legal in the company. This is still very much work in progress, but it’s been a fascinating process.

TransferWise had done very nicely before I joined, so imposing a playbook from my experience elsewhere, or ‘how other people do it’ simply wasn’t going to cut it. Learning how the company thinks, how it gets things done, what is important to it and most of all, what will best serve our customers, have been key to understanding where to lean in, where to support from behind and what to come back to later.

The other massive challenge has been recruiting the right people. How do you hire for an environment that’s fast paced, ambitious, with a culture of autonomy and questioning everything, as well as being belief-driven that everything we could must serve our customers? One of our mantras is ‘it’s not a job, it’s a revolution’. So, I’m hiring for people with a different perspective than the norm. It feels like a unicorn hunt, but the legal team is now five people strong and growing, so it’s possible.

 

What do you think is key to becoming a successful legal expert?

One of my biggest learnings at TransferWise has been in seeing that with the right context, the best answers will often come from the wider team, not just from the lawyers. This kind of turns the concept of being an ‘expert’ on its head.

Of course, sometimes the lawyers have to say ‘don’t do that; do it this way’, but for our team, the value we add is in providing a different dimension of thinking – a different perspective on a problem – asking the right questions and providing the context in which the right answer can emerge.

That said, I truly appreciate having lawyers on the team who are truly knowledgeable in payments, amongst other things. Lawyers like Candy Ma in the UK and Andrea Gildea in the US, understand why the regulations say what they say and how they interact, they understand how our regulators think about risk and they understand how to apply all that to find practical solutions to the problems as they present themselves.

 

What is the most exciting aspect of working with growing companies? How do you ensure that the counsel you offer will not only comply with regulations but also be the best commercially based decision?

No two days are the same with companies scaling at this pace. When I joined, we had 300 people in just a few markets and now we have 700 across many more. It’s certainly an exciting journey.

 

One of the awesome things about TransferWise is that pretty much everyone is interested and engaged in legal and regulatory issues. The company was founded to bring fairness to finance, which means we have ethics very naturally at our core. For a lawyer, that makes your job very easy.  It feels like we are truly bringing the future of finance forward.

In many markets, we are out there on the edge of what has been done before so it’s a question of making sure we understand local regulation and interpret or evolve it where it doesn’t fully cover our business model or serve our customers. One major aspect of this is figuring out how to ensure our product(s) feel like the same product wherever you are in the world, even though the legal framework is very country-specific. Eventually, there will be a single standard and maybe even a single currency, but until that day, we have to try to make life as easy as possible for customers, though the reality under the bonnet is far from easy.

I am constantly saying ‘trust first, law second’ and I stand by that.

In the UK, we are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, which is one of the most pragmatic and forward-thinking regulators in this space. We strive for transparency with our regulators and we also have a responsibility to help them keep pace with the FinTech sector and the changing needs of customers, so it’s a two-way thing.

 

With the fluctuating nature of the financial sector, how do you ensure the best business outcome is made when acting as General Counsel for TransferWise?

For us, the best outcome is what’s right for our customers, whether they are consumers or businesses. Solving the problem of unfairness in finance, starting with international money transfer, is at the forefront of everything we do. Every General Counsel will have their equivalent of that mission.

My job is to help us navigate the industry landscape, build a solid foundation for our revolution and do the right thing for our customers. The landscape may change, but those principles will carry through.

The ‘how’ is a combination of a lot of hard work and relentless collaboration. It’s all about people and relationships at the end of the day.

 

What is the biggest challenge TransferWise faces and how do you advise your team to take appropriate action?

Apart from the obvious challenges of scaling and the lag between regulation and technology, probably the biggest problem is awareness.

Most people don’t realise what they are being charged when they make payments in different currencies or move money between currencies. Charges are often opaque and there are still people out there claiming ‘0% commission’ and then making money off a bad exchange rate so the service looks cheap (or in fact free) when it is not.

We will not rest until everyone is given clear information, presented in a transparent way so each of us can make informed decisions about what we are happy being charged.

 

TransferWise competes with banks – from a legal perspective, how difficult can it be to try to ensure customers that the company offers better solutions than worldwide banks?

We are very much against the high fees many of the banks charge for providing a service that’s slow and difficult. And we don’t think it’s fair on customers that they don’t get clear information about what they will be charged. That’s not transparent. We make our fees as low as we can and we strive always to spell out the full price. Our customers tell us they are grateful for that and for opening their eyes to what is really going on. One day, TransferWise-level convenience and transparency will be market standard.

We are highly regulated, have bank-level security and we safeguard customer money at all times. We still have some way to go to make sure every person in the world knows about that so they see there is a true choice. This is something our teams work on every day of the year and the legal team is there to help them figure out how to do that in the most effective way.

 

How have you seen tech develop for the ease of business? How has this affected your role in the legal sector?

We’re a tech company so we celebrate the benefits of technology in helping us achieve our goals; for example, we work with some great tech vendors on identity checking for anti-money laundering and other regulatory processes. The tech continues to improve every year and our own teams are developing some awesome tech in-house too.

Businesses suffer the same as consumers in cross-currency payments and we feel they deserve the same convenience, speed, transparency and low price point. For that reason, we have a whole bunch of very smart people working on our business product and we have just launched a cross-currency borderless account for businesses to receive and make payments around the world more easily and cheaply.

On the legal team side, we are working with companies to help us with contract management and external counsel billing. There is a huge amount of potential for tech in what we call ‘legal ops’ and we’re also hopeful some of our engineers will build useful AI to help us over time.

We would love to see law firms evolve beyond the arcane billable hour and start to think more innovatively about billing; perhaps tech can help there too.

 

In what ways are you hoping to see the tech world advance? Do you see these changes affecting TransferWise?

It’s clear that technology will play an ever-increasing role in all aspects of our lives. Bots and AI are already changing the way we work. However, there will always be a need for people at the core – wrapping the tech in human integrity will be ever more critical.

For the finance sector, the future is online. People now carry around their bank in their pocket, on their mobiles. Data security will remain a number one priority. E-money is already the norm and face to face verification is fast becoming a thing of the past.

It’s all about convenience and TransferWise is striving to achieve the best way for customers. The law will have to keep up with that too.

 

You are a founding member of organisation that is dedicated to fighting cyber abuse – what more do you think can be done to prevent such abuse?

All Rise Say No to Cyber Abuse has found that 72% of us have witnessed cyber abuse, 50% of us have suffered it and 80% of us feel online abuse is as harmful as offline, face-to-face abuse.  And yet the problem is escalating.

Why is this and what is it showing us about how we are living and our attitudes to common decency?

Almost everyone has an experience of it of some kind. You only have to browse one of the social media platforms for five minutes and you will find inhuman comments right there plain for everyone to see. And yet we accept it.

What can be done? The first thing feels to be to say NO. Just a simple, absolute and collective no to abuse. Everything else will flow from there. There are so many smart people out there to help us with the solutions – the solutions will follow.

  1. Lawyer Monthly recently spoke with legal experts on cyberbullying, some of whom stated that awareness is needed more, rather than legislative changes; to what extent do you agree with this?

Cyber abuse is absolutely devastating for those involved and it affects adults as much as young people. The impact of this abuse can manifest in so many ways: mental health issues, anxiety, self-harm, alcohol and drug problems, even suicide. Businesses and reputations are destroyed with no recourse.

If we tune into the harm cyber abuse is causing – the true human toll – the priority it must be given becomes obvious and awareness-raising is critical to this.

I would like to see a change in the law to make it crystal clear that any form of cyber abuse is straight up a criminal offence. However, the law as it stands today is sufficient; the problem is our tolerance.

Yes, we have many important policing priorities and the volume of abuse is inconceivably huge, but that does not excuse the harm we are allowing.

It would not take much to wake us all up. A blast of prosecuted cases. A realisation that we are not in fact anonymous behind our screens. Zero tolerance by social media companies. A reset on human decency and respect.

 

Leave A Reply