Wise Voice - Your Money. Your Voice. Your Independence.

Inspiration

Imagine needing someone else's help every time you want to send money. Not because you don't understand banking, but because you can't see the screen in front of you.

Meet Maria, a fictional 58-year-old woman who is gradually losing her sight. Every month, she sends money to her elderly mother in Portugal. But navigating her banking app has become increasingly difficult, so she often waits for her son to help her complete the transfer.

Maria represents a much larger challenge. According to the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, approximately 338 million people worldwide are blind or have moderate-to-severe vision impairment.

Although screen readers make digital banking accessible to many, navigating complicated interfaces can still be challenging. We wanted to explore a different approach: What if, instead of teaching people how to navigate banking apps, we made banking apps understand people?

That's what inspired Wise Voice.

What It Does

Wise Voice is a conversational AI banking assistant designed to make everyday banking accessible through natural speech.

Instead of navigating menus and buttons, users can simply tell Wise what they want to accomplish.

For example:

User: "Hey Wise, I want to send €200 to my mother in Portugal."

Wise Voice: "Of course. Is she already saved as a recipient?"

User: "No, but I have her Wisetag."

Wise Voice: "I've found her account. I'll prepare the transfer."

User: "Actually, make it €250."

The assistant understands the correction, updates the transaction details, and guides the user through confirmation and secure authorization.

Our goal is to support everyday banking activities such as checking balances, finding transactions, adding recipients, and preparing transfers, without requiring users to navigate a visual interface.

While initially designed for visually impaired people, Wise Voice could also benefit people with limited mobility, older adults, and anyone who prefers a simpler way to manage their finances.

How We Built It

We designed Wise Voice as an AI-powered interaction layer on top of existing banking infrastructure, rather than an entirely new banking platform.

The solution is structured around three main components:

1. Conversational voice interface: Captures spoken requests, interprets natural language, supports follow-up questions, and handles interruptions or corrections.
2. Banking integration layer: Translates user intentions into structured actions, such as retrieving balances, finding recipients, and preparing transfers.
3. Security and authorization layer: Keeps authentication, payment validation, and transaction execution under the control of the banking system rather than the AI.

We focused on designing a voice-first experience where the user never needs to know which menu or button to select.

For the hackathon, we concentrated on demonstrating the core user journey: expressing a payment intention, identifying a recipient, changing payment details conversationally, and progressing through a controlled authorization flow.

The intended architecture allows the conversational interface to evolve independently while reusing Wise's existing financial infrastructure.

Challenges We Faced

1. Security and trust

Banking is different from an ordinary AI conversation. Misunderstanding a word could have serious financial consequences.

One of our biggest challenges was designing a system that could understand natural language without allowing the AI to make unauthorized financial decisions.

Our approach separates understanding a request from authorizing a transaction. The assistant can prepare a payment, but the banking system must independently validate and authorize it.

2. Making the experience genuinely accessible

We realized that simply replacing buttons with voice commands isn't enough.

A truly accessible banking experience must allow users to complete an entire task independently, including adding recipients, correcting mistakes, reviewing important information, and handling errors.

This changed how we approached the user experience. Rather than recreating an existing banking interface through speech, we designed the conversation around what the user wants to achieve.

3. Handling interruptions and misunderstandings

Real conversations aren't perfectly structured.

Someone might say, "Send €100 to Anna," then immediately correct themselves: "Actually, make that €150."

The assistant needs to maintain context, understand the change, update the transaction, and invalidate any previous authorization that no longer matches the payment.

4. Balancing convenience with privacy

Voice banking introduces challenges in public environments, where sensitive financial information could be overheard.

We explored privacy-aware interactions, including discreet spoken responses, headphone use, and avoiding unnecessary disclosure of sensitive account information.

What We Learned

The most important thing we learned is that accessibility isn't just about making an existing interface easier to use. It's about questioning whether that interface is necessary at all.

We also learned that voice AI should not replace the security systems financial institutions already trust. Instead, it should make those systems easier for people to interact with.

Finally, we discovered that solving a problem for a specific accessibility need can create something valuable for a much wider audience.

What's Next

Our vision is to make Wise Voice a fully integrated accessibility feature within Wise.

Future development could include voice-guided onboarding, accessible identity verification, multilingual banking conversations, transaction history, and secure hands-free payment authorization.

We also see a significant potential business opportunity. Our global acquisition scenario considers 840,000 additional Wise customers, which could represent approximately $150 million in potential annual net revenue, using Wise's annualized average revenue per active customer. This is an illustrative scenario, not a validated customer acquisition forecast.

But beyond the numbers, our motivation remains simple.

We want someone like Maria to be able to send money to her mother without waiting for anyone else's help.

Wise made money borderless. We want to make financial independence accessible to everyone.

Built With

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