TransferWise Acquires Wise.com and Rebrands as Wise

Last November, Jamie Zoch detected a change in the Whois record for the Wise.com domain name. Wise.com had been owned by Broadcom / Symantec, and the domain name transferred from CSC to GoDaddy under Whois privacy. In a tweet, Jamie predicted that an online money transfer service called TransferWise was going to be revealed as the buyer of the domain name:

Over the weekend, TransferWise confirmed the acquisition and announced that the company would rebrand itself as Wise, and the company would continue to operate at Wise.com. The rebranding news was covered by TechCrunch yesterday evening.

Why did the company rebrand as Wise? Their brief rationale was shared on a popup on the Wise.com landing page:

“We’ve changed our name to Wise
Because we’re so much more than transfers. We’re the international account used by over 10 million people who live, work, travel, and do business around the world.”

The company expanded on this in a corporate blog post. Put simply, the company outgrew its TransferWise branding. It does more than just transfers now, so the TransferWise brand was a bit limiting for it.

When I wrote about the news on Twitter, Media Options CEO Andrew Rosener announced that his company brokered the sale of Wise.com:

I highly doubt Andrew or anyone else associated with the deal will share the purchase price, but my guess is that it was a substantial, seven figure deal.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

7 COMMENTS

  1. Ouch, Not sure if Wise Potato Chips are just a NorthEast thing but even so There goes a lost opportunity for them to own their brand.

    For me personally, I am not familiar with transferwise or what they do so I would Not be inclined to and would be likely surprised if I ended up on their site typing wise.com. What I personally would expect is some sort of wisdom i.e. advice be it financial spiritual political educational etc.

    Always one not afraid to shake the tree and stimulate debate that helps us all grow and understand I will say that I am not totally sold on one word domains. This might be one reason.

    While I can see their point that Wise is more flexible than Transfer Wise as a business person and marketing pro I could also see where consumers could misconstrue or even be confused by a one word domain

    What if they were searching for Wise (potato chips)
    What if they were searching for Wise advice from Tony Robbins or some religious leader

    These are just two examples and I am sure If I thought about it I could list more examples.

    Question for you and your readers
    I have not looked but will after I write this
    What is Heart.com Cloud.com Bean.com

    So if you want you can take a position on one word being the most valuable. For me I think that without proper branding that some might but most one word domains are no more valuable and need no less brand awareness campaign effort than some two word domains.

    • Heart.com was acquired by I Heart Media group several years ago.

      Bean.com was acquired by Michael Bean’s real estate company a few years ago.

      • its not a debate with an easy answer
        tomato tomatoe potato potatoe
        as far as personal preference as an outsider opining on the matter of one-word domain values. And of course it matters if you are the seller or buyer

        Which is better for I-Heart
        Iheart.com (which is their name, their brand and also their .come website name
        Or Heart.com which immediately gives me a thought that it might lead to
        Dr. Michael Debake the artificial heart inventor
        or a Heart institute
        or a Heart charity
        or even valentines day maybe the candy heart mfg
        but not in a million years would I associate heart with I-Heart radio

        so as I say
        “you can either pay for a great domain or pay greatly to brand the one you have in consumers minds”

        If you’re going with option two why not brand your exact match domain? Which BTW will likely (in most cases) be two even three words?

        on a lighter note I wrote this limerick today

        There once was a man who wanted the perfect domain
        Someday the prize will be mine he exclaimed
        Thinking of his dream domain made Don elated
        But one day Don
        realized his domain was bought and gone
        and now Dons business and his dreams are both deflated

  2. exactly andrew –
    one more great single word domain gone forever.
    knowing andrew – i would imagine it sold for a very good number

  3. They scammed so many users that their transfer wise name got so bad reputation, just Google transferwise scam and you see 1000’s of people losing funds, they simply block random account and steal all funds without any reason,

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