Wise is furthering its expansion into the Latin American region with the launch of its cross-border payment services in Mexico.
The London-listed fintech said Thursday that clients in Mexico will be able to use its online platform to move their money to 160 countries and into 40 different currencies.
“Mexico presents a strategic opportunity for Wise where support for low-cost international money services is more critical than ever,” said Diana Avila Gonzalez, Wise’s chief banking and expansion officer.
Mexican consumers are expected to send more than $27.9 billion in cross-border remittances this year, according to Edgar, Dunn & Company, a San Francisco-based research firm.
Wise said that sending U.S. dollars to Mexican pesos is currently the third-largest currency route for its customers in the U.S., and the volume of transfers on this route has doubled in the last two years.
EDC also estimates that clients in Mexico lost $446 million in hidden fees when sending money overseas last year. The fees can be obscured by hiding them in the fine print, adding them last minute or through exchange rate mark-ups, Wise pointed out.
Wise first ventured into the Latin American market in 2016, when it expanded into Brazil. The fintech said Thursday that it recently reached the milestone of issuing 2 million international multi-currency cards in the South American nation.
Last year, Wise established a partnership with Nubank that enables the Sao Paolo-based digital bank to issue multicurrency accounts and debit cards to its clients by using Wise’s payments infrastructure.
Wise was founded by the Estonian entrepreneurs Kristo Kaarmann and Taavet Hinrikus in 2011 with the aim of offering faster and cheaper cross-border transfers. A decade later, their firm became the biggest technology listing in the history of the London Stock Exchange, based on market value, and turned its founders into billionaires.
Although some rival banks have sought to protect their share of the lucrative cross-border payments market, others have instead opted to partner with Wise.
Last month, Morgan Stanley became the first major investment bank to offer foreign exchange settlements to its corporate customers through Wise’s platform. Standard Chartered said in November that it was planning to begin using Wise’s platform to offer multi-currency money transfers in Asia and the Middle East.
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