Hi, my name is XX. I will briefly introduce myself, and tell you a story about Wise & me, and another story about Wise & Payu. Then I will try my best to tell you why I want to join your company.
I grew up in xx, a very beautiful country (I know you have an office there). I came to Japan(I also know you have an office here) at 20 years old to study engineering. After I graduated I decided to pursue my career in Tokyo as a software engineer. When I start working and making my own money in 2016, I decided to send money back to my family monthly to support my sister's education in college. Known options around that time were Western Union and Japan Post Banks but to support my sister, I have to fill in some papers and pay the high remittance fee every month. Then in 2017 one of my friends introduce TransferWise to me. I gave it a try because I don’t have to fill in any paper and the remittance fee is low. Things went well but I have to wait around one week for my money to arrive. The process was anxious. Most probably because I didn’t trust TransferWise enough. Fast forward a few years, I remember one day I received a call from my sister telling me that she needed extra money for an emergency. Without hesitation, I opened up TransferWise to send her the money with an expectation of a week of waiting time. But guess what happened? The money arrived in 3 days! My sister and I were happy because the money arrived quicker than expected. From that day I started to recommend TransferWise to friends around me. It’s always not easy to convince people to start the first step because of the anxiousness/trust that I also felt at first. Also, some of them are not willing to pay the bank charge for a small amount of money to transfer so they decided not to send any money. However, I managed to make 3 of my friends TRANSFER money and earn 11000 JPY WISEly. You are more than welcome!
During the beginning of the pandemic, I visited Hokkaido, Japan. While I was having dinner I met an Indonesian waiter. He was super friendly and we were connected because of the very nice fried rice (another story!) at the restaurant. Back in the day, he was working in Bali and he joined a short-term exchange program in his hotel group to come to Hokkaido. Unfortunately, COVID-19 happened, borders are closed and he is stuck in Hokkaido. His family in Bali lost their jobs and all of them(7 people) depend on him to send money back every month to live. I was curious about how he sent money so we talked about that. Turned out he was using an app that I have no idea which cost high remittance fees. My friend suggested that I should introduce him TransferWise but I was shy at first. Then I thought that for people who are working hard to support their families, the remittance fees might mean a lot. So I decided to tell him how cheap it is to use Wise compared to others. He knew the app but he said: “I was trying to use this”. Then he was called by his manager to serve other customers and our conversation ends. Apparently, he knows Wise but due to some reason, he is not using it. The reason might be he doesn’t know how to start it, or he doesn’t have a legal bank account in Japan to send money to, or he simply didn’t trust. While the young generation like me and my friends could easily figure out how to use TransferWise easily but for old generation people like Payu (oh his name is Payu), it might be the opposite. And I do believe there are a lot of Payus out there, who needed Wise more than I. That means by working at Wise, I could change a lot of people's life. It’s not only Payu but more importantly his 7 people's family.
Recently, Wise was able to deliver my money within a few hours! Before this, it took a few days. My family got my money happily, but how about Payu? I wanted to help people like Payu so I decided to open up your career page and start to write this “cover letter”. “We’re people without borders. Building money without borders.” but Payu and his family's borders are still closed. I wanted to join this mission because I believe in it. However, if you look at my resume you might think that I am not skilful enough to join your engineering team because I do not have solid Java 8+ knowledge. That’s ok because while I am writing this cover letter I had the same thought. But that doesn’t change my mind to spend my time writing this to tell you some stories as a happy user.