“By the mid 2010s it was increasingly clear that the “peer-to-peer” cross-border remittance network was an unscalable model. The company recognized that the P2P label, while brilliant for early marketing and acquiring early adopters, was wholly inadequate for a global financial institution.

Although an innovative solution at inception, the original architecture was simply not scaling alongside their global ambitions.

Consequently, TransferWise evolved from a lightweight software platform into a treasury-based financial institution holding global currency liquidity pools.

When a P2P match was impossible, TransferWise began utilizing its own corporate capital to purchase currency on the open wholesale market, acting as a direct liquidity provider and absorbing the foreign exchange risk to bridge the gap.”