TRANSFERGO

Daumantas Dvilinskas moved from Lithuania to the UK and spent his first months getting consistently overcharged on international money transfers. Not by thousands — by a few pounds each time — but it added up and felt unnecessary.

He and his co-founders, all Lithuanian, figured there had to be a cheaper way. In 2012, they launched TransferGo from London, targeting Eastern European migrants sending money home.

The insight was not original — plenty of fintechs were doing money transfers — but the execution was tight and the target audience was specific. They focused on corridors they understood personally: Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Ukraine.

They were the customers they were building for.

TransferGo makes money on foreign exchange spread and small transfer fees. For certain transfer corridors they charge nothing, relying on the FX margin alone.

The model depends on volume — low fees mean you need a lot of transfers to generate meaningful revenue. They expanded into business payments as they scaled, adding B2B international transfers as a higher-margin product.

They also offer multi-currency accounts. The revenue is recurring by nature — migrants who use the service once tend to keep using it because it works and the fees are genuinely lower than the alternatives.

The core product remains international money transfers — send money from the UK or Europe to 160+ countries, usually in minutes, sometimes instantly. Multi-currency accounts let users hold balances in multiple currencies without the traditional banking friction.

Business transfers serves SMEs with payroll and supplier payments across borders. The mobile app is consistently rated highly for speed and simplicity — which in money transfer is essentially the entire product experience.

TransferGo grew by being very specific about who it was for. While competitors tried to be global from day one, TransferGo owned the Eastern European migrant corridor.

Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian — they knew these communities, partnered with local employers and community organisations, and built word-of-mouth within tight networks. Migrant communities share good recommendations aggressively.

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered one of the largest refugee movements in European history. TransferGo was one of the first services to offer free transfers to Ukraine during the crisis — both a genuine humanitarian response and extraordinarily well-timed brand positioning.

The corridor is crowded and getting more crowded. Wise is publicly listed and throwing resources at exactly the same customers.

Remitly went public in 2021 and raised $300 million in its IPO. Western Union and MoneyGram are still there, battered but standing.

When your competitive advantage is price, someone can always undercut you. TransferGo's answer is speed and community focus.

But that is a moat that erodes as larger competitors get smarter about specific ethnic communities and micro-corridors.

TransferGo has been consistently backed by Hard Yaka, the firm run by Greg Kidd — a former Square executive who understands payments infrastructure deeply. The $50 million Series C in 2021 was the validation moment, demonstrating the business model worked at scale and the Eastern European corridor had real staying power.

The investor base skews toward payments operators who understand what it takes to make money transfer work commercially, rather than generalist tech VCs chasing valuation multiples.