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The cofounders of cross-border payments startup Wise have become Europe’s latest tech billionaires after its debut on the London Stock Exchange Wednesday.

With prices set at $11 (GBP8) per share through a direct listing auction process, Kristo Kaarmann’s 18.78% stake in Wise gives him an estimated net worth of $2 billion, making him the first Estonian to reach the billion dollar threshold on the Forbes list.

Founded in 2011, the startup formerly known as Transferwise offers low cost money transfers across 56 different currencies. Kaarmann and his Estonian cofounder Taavet Hinrikus, who has a 10.85% stake worth $1.1 billion, started Wise after having become “sick of losing money to our banks” in the fees they paid to send money between London–where they were working–and their native Estonia.

Today Wise processes $6 billion in cross-border payments every month for 10 million customers, claiming to save users around $1.5 billion a year in bank fees. In a direct comparison with Western Union’s international money transfer service for example, Wise claims that sending GBP1,000 (GBP) to the U.S. is $18 (USD) cheaper using their service.

The rise of Wise to a payments company with a market capitalization of $11 billion, comes on the heels of rising revenues and valuations for a spate of fintech and payment companies during the global pandemic lockdown.

In Europe alone investors have driven the value of online payment startup Checkout.com from $5.5 billion in June 2020 to $15 billion in January 2021, while pay-by-installment fintech Klarna tripled its valuation in just six months from $11 billion to $31 billion in March. Wise has similarly benefitted. In 2019, the company posted revenues of GBP177.9 million, a year later revenues were GBP302.6 million and in 2021 Wise posted GBP421 million, a 136% increase in just two years. In July 2020, Wise hit a $5 billion investor-led valuation–making it one of Europe’s top fintechs.

The story of how Wise began is a parable on the value of small-scale personal financial problem solving.

According to an interview with Forbes in 2016, Wise grew out of a money-saving arrangement between the two London-based Estonian founders Kaarmann and Hinrikus. While Kaarmann worked at Deloitte and Hinrikus worked at Skype, the pair devised a system to avoid paying fees of anywhere between 10% and 12% on basic monthly transactions where one person needed Estonian kroon, and the other needed British pound sterling. “We realized there is actually no need to move the money. No need to make an international transfer because the money already exists where it needs to,” Hinrikus said in 2016.

The idea spread to other Estonian expats who saw big savings in exchanging money this way. The Skype-linked money exchange forum morphed into TransferWise in 2011. The pair quit their jobs and self-funded for a year before landing a seed funding round of $1.3 million.

The startup gained global attention a year later, when billionaire Peter Thiel led Wise’s $6 million series C funding round. In 2014, billionaire Richard Branson invested in a $26 million round for an undisclosed stake.

Jeppe Rindom, founder of Danish expense fintech Pleo told Forbes that Wise was born during a “black swan event” during the financial crisis, adding, “it feels fitting that it would IPO following a second.” On their success, he says: “[Wise] challenged boundaries without making enemies, worked with the media without spinning into hype, and invested in their culture, not just their product.”

The listing also comes as good news to Wise’s 2,400 employees worldwide who will benefit from an employee option share pool of 9.8% of total shares.

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