The FinTech 50 2014 Mar. 2014 | Page 30

FinTech50 TRANSFERWISE TAAVET HINRIKUS, FOUNDER & EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN I THUNDERHEAD.COM GLEN MANCHESTER, CEO A recognized technology pioneer, innovator and entrepreneur with more than 20 years of global experience, Glen is the founder and CEO of Thunderhead renamed since May 17th, 2012 as Thunderhead.com, a global provider of cloud-based customer experience and enterprise engagement solutions. Today, Thunderhead.com employs more than 300 people globally, has 180 enterprise customers predominantly in financial services, investment banking (including 14 of the G15 global investment banks) and insurance, with a growing footprint in public sector with US Federal Government and Australian Commonwealth. About Thunderhead.com is a global provider of customer experience and enterprise engagement solutions. Thunderhead. com provides a powerful suite of SaaS solutions that gives businesses the ability to communicate, collaborate and have real-time conversations with their customers and partners across all touchpoints throughout their journey. The result is that businesses have more power to drive revenue, brand strength, and differentiation by delivering far beyond isolated interactions and experiences but by creating the rich relationships that great businesses are built on. THIRTY f you have a better way of doing something, think about how it could be applied to help others. My friend Kristo Käärmann and I came up with the idea for TransferWise when we first became expats in London and were confronted by the high fees banks charge to transfer money abroad. I was paid in euros, but lived in London. Kristo worked in London, but had a mortgage to pay in Estonia. We devised a simple plan: every month Kristo put pounds in my bank account and I put euros in Kristo’s account, avoiding bank fees. Within a few months we’d saved thousands of pounds and realised there were probably millions of others that needed a system like ours. About TransferWise is a peer-to-peer international money transfer platform that uses technology developed by the people who built Skype and PayPal to remove all the fees the banking and FX broking industry have kept hidden for decades. Its new model is up to 10 times cheaper than using a bank. @TransferWise @taavet