Aspire has the SMBs, now they can go global with Wise

Reinventing banking for 78M SMEs in Southeast Asia

“We started Aspire with one thing in mind - serve small business owners with speed and simplicity. No long waits, paperwork, or hidden fees like other financial institutions - so business owners could concentrate on growing their businesses.” shares Andrea Baronchelli, Aspire CEO.

Aspire is reinventing banking for 78M SMEs - small & medium enterprises in Southeast Asia. We are currently operating across Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam, and are building a digital business banking platform for its SME customers.

Taking Singapore SMEs global

“With the Wise partnership, our users can now get cheaper, and faster international transfers without leaving Aspire. Wise enables us to offer one of the best FX experiences out there.”

As a Singapore born company, we are well-connected with our users here, and understand their financial goals and business needs.

Thousands of SMEs have moved to us for our speed, transparency, support, and capital availability. They also can manage their liquidity and day-to-day cash management with features like account insights.

Our goal is to provide these business owners with the financial tools to solve their cash flow management and working capital needs is our mission.

Focus on digital experience and lower cost

Opening an account with Aspire is easy, fast, and simple. It can be done 100% online within 5 minutes. No branch visits, no paperwork, no long waits. Wise shares this same vision when it comes to moving money internationally, making this partnership an obvious choice for us.

The integration with Wise makes us the first neobank in Singapore to provide international money transfers with no exchange rate markups or other hidden fees. Our customers will know upfront exactly how much they’ll pay in fees and the corresponding amount in the foreign currency. According to data provided by independent comparison website, Monito.com, this could be around 4 times cheaper on average, compared to bank providers like HSBC, OCBC, Maybank and UOB.

We chose Wise because of it’s fast go to market, dynamic team, and complete API based integration.

With just a few weeks of development effort using the Wise API, we’ve instantly topped the comparison table on price — not to mention transparency and speed — against banks who’ve been at this for decades.

Overnight, Aspire has become 4x cheaper than its next bank competitor for sending money abroad.

We saw Transferwise for Banks partnerships around the world - Monzo in the UK, N26 in Germany, Stanford Federal Credit Union in the US, and EQ in Canada. And, just like them, we wanted to lower the FX costs and give our users a better way to move money around the world. We are excited to be the first to partner with Wise in Asia.

This Wise and Aspire partnership helps our shared vision to simplify and bring greater transparency in the traditional banking sector to this part of the world.

Say hello to their team at banks@wise.com

Price comparison data for Singaporean banks' international telegraphic transfer service (TT) are based on data obtained online on the respective bank's website, on tariff brochures and by calling customer support on 16/07/2020. Monito then compared the fees and exchange rates with XE's mid-market rate at the time of collection (or publication of the rates, when available) to calculate the total costs (S$ or %).