Building Community Around Life Moments: A Student Ambassador Strategy for Wise
Updated: Oct 13
Brief: During my interview process for the Global Community Manager role at the FinTech company Wise, I was asked to show how I would build community. The direction, focusing on international students, was entirely my own.
At Wise, I believe community should be built around the life moments where moving money matters most. Arriving in a new country to study is one of the biggest. So I framed the challenge as a single question:
How might Wise become the money voice international students trust, while their habits are still forming?
Why Students?
1. The volume is there, and the recurring part is unclaimed. There were 685,565 international students in UK higher education in 2024/25, about a quarter of all students. India and China sent the most new entrants, and both are major remittance corridors. Living-cost money arrives in instalments all year, mostly from abroad.
2. They are already Wise’s customers, or about to be. A new international student fits three of Wise’s four customer types at once: expat, global traveller and frequent sender. Many arrive without a UK current account, so the need goes beyond remittance.
3. This audience makes its own content. #unilife #studentlife ” is already an active category on TikTok and Instagram.
How It Ties to the Business
Mission: Money without borders, at the moment it matters most.
Acquisition cost: One handpicked student with a referral link reaches the same few hundred peers for less than the paid media equivalent.
Lifetime value: Acquire in term one, then keep them through the graduate visa, the first UK salary, and the first remittance home.
Approach: Discovery Before Design
Rather than jumping to a program, I built the plan on Rosie Sherry’s Community Discovery framework, which means building relationships and researching the ecosystem before making community decisions. I combined it with a design thinking:
Research: Map the ecosystem across people, resources, values, and conversations. Listen in before asking anything of it.
Synthesise: Run continuous community interviews and capture everything in a searchable knowledge base, so insight outlives the person who gathered it.
Design: Use a Minimum Viable Community canvas to shape a student ambassador role with three parts. Ambassadors create social content, earn through referrals, and host a campus event on moving and saving money.
Test: Pilot the smallest possible version: one ambassador, at one university, for one term.
The Pilot
I mapped every touchpoint in a service blueprint, so the front-end experience and the back-end operations were designed together:
Recruit through the international student society and through students already posting “#UKstudentlife” content. Screen with a short call, not a form.
Onboard with one doc covering the brief, account setup, referral link, content cadence, and one hard boundary: no giving financial advice.
Create content on the ambassador’s own channels, not a branded account, with every post reviewed before it goes live.
Host one event mid-term, booked through the student union. Someone from Wise leads the product content, and the ambassador convenes the room.
Capture comments, DMs and questions all term in one shared log, tagged by theme.
Success meant 10 to 20 referral sign-ups, 15 to 20 event attendees, and at least five students sending their first payment home through Wise. The shared log mattered as much as the numbers: the questions students kept asking would show what the next term’s content should answer. The readout then decides: a second campus, a redesign, or stop.
The principle running through all of it: every platform choice is somewhere students or the university already operate. Nothing new gets built for the pilot.
Scaling: Operations for 100 to 200 Ambassadors
A program like this lives or dies on its back end. To scale it, I designed the operating system:
One Airtable base with linked tables for ambassadors, posts, events and speaker slots.
Automated post review: Ambassadors submit through a form, review happens in one interface, and approval or feedback emails go out automatically.
Gated payouts: An ambassador becomes eligible once they have three published posts, a held event and a verified Wisetag. Payouts then run as a single Wise batch payment. Wise pays its own community through Wise.
Automated reminders at seven days, two days and on the deadline, sent only to ambassadors who are behind. Nobody chases 200 people manually.
Growth would come in waves, London first and then other UK cities, timed to the September and January intakes. Engaged students become the next ambassadors, and ambassadors become a source for future campaigns.
Conclusion
This strategy brings together the two sides of how I work. The front end is understanding where real conversations already happen, earning trust there and meeting them where your customers are. The back end is the systems that let a small, human pilot scale without losing what made it work.
