How Wirex Hires Without Borders

Wirex is a fast-growing fintech platform trusted by over 7 million users worldwide, offering a unified suite of stablecoin and crypto products including wallets, debit cards, savings, exchange, and global payments backed by Visa and Mastercard principal memberships. Headquartered in the UK with a workforce of approximately 250 people across 26 countries, Wirex’s ambitions quickly outpaced the geographic boundaries of its founding offices, and its hiring needs followed suit.

Location

United Kingdom

Industry

Fintech (Payments & Crypto)

Company size

250+

With RemotePeople since

2022

Content

5 minutes read

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At a Glance

Metric	Detail
Countries covered via EOR	9 across EMEA, APAC, and North America
Employees managed	14 across 9 countries
Partnership length	4+ years
Key outcome	Compliant global workforce built and retained without establishing local entities in those markets
Use cases	New territory hiring + global mobility (employee relocations)

The Challenge

Wirex needed to move fast. The company had identified strong talent in Malaysia, but its existing infrastructure didn’t yet extend to that market. For a fintech scaling at speed, the question wasn’t whether to hire internationally but how to do it compliantly and quickly, without the overhead of entity setup slowing everything down.

How It Started

Wirex identified a need to explore new territories both in terms of talent availability and local employment practices. Establishing a local legal entity in each new market would have been slow, expensive, and operationally complex: exactly the kind of friction that stalls momentum in a competitive industry.

RemotePeople helped us test the water in regions like Malaysia, allowing us to build our knowledge of local markets and gain confidence in whether a region was right for our business before committing to our own entity. It’s a great halfway house when assessing the case for a new regional hub.

Tracey Knowles Chief People Officer, Wirex

The Solution

RemotePeople onboarded Wirex’s first Malaysian hire in early 2022, handling all local compliance, employment contracts, payroll, and statutory contributions with no delays and no major onboarding blockers.

Wirex has its own in-house Talent Acquisition team, leading on advertising, interviewing, and identifying the right candidates. RemotePeople is brought in to manage onboarding and compliance — all done remotely through a dedicated client portal. In a matter of weeks, Wirex could have a new hire starting in a brand-new territory, confident they’d been hired compliantly.

Over the following four years, what began as a single-country engagement evolved into a genuinely global workforce solution. The early success in Malaysia gave Wirex the foundation for a longer-term regional hiring strategy, and as headcount needs surfaced in new markets, RemotePeople was ready, expanding coverage to Portugal, Estonia, Cyprus, Armenia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, and Canada, all without Wirex needing to establish a local entity in any of those markets.

Global Mobility

As a scaling fintech and remote-first employer, one of Wirex’s primary goals is to identify, secure, and retain top talent. A growing challenge has been global mobility within the existing workforce — employees increasingly wanting to relocate to jurisdictions where Wirex doesn’t have its own entity.

RemotePeople has enabled Wirex to retain valuable employees through these moves rather than lose them due to a lack of compliant infrastructure, turning what would have been forced departures into straightforward transfers.

On Choosing RemotePeople

Wirex didn’t arrive at RemotePeople by default. As a company that takes its partnerships seriously, the People team actively trialled other EOR providers. Four years on, RemotePeople is the only one that remained.

As Global Chief People Officer, part of my role is to continually review the effectiveness of the partnerships we rely on. We trialled other EOR providers alongside RemotePeople, and four years on, we’re still working with RemotePeople, and only RemotePeople.

The reasons come down to customer service and technology. There are always teething problems when establishing a new partnership, but RemotePeople has genuinely listened to our feedback and shaped their service around our team’s needs.

Tracey Knowles Global Chief People Officer, Wirex

A Relationship Built to Last

Four years in, the relationship between Wirex and RemotePeople looks nothing like a typical vendor contract. Regular quarterly business reviews keep both teams aligned on Wirex’s evolving workforce needs and RemotePeople’s product roadmap.

That continuity of service, and the trust it generates, is why Tracey Knowles agreed to join RemotePeople’s inaugural Customer Advisory Board in 2026 – a small, invitation-only group of senior leaders shaping how the product evolves.

Results

9 countries covered via EOR, from 1 at the start of the engagement
14 employees actively managed across those markets today
4+ years of continuous service and structured quarterly business reviews
Global mobility – enabling the retention of key personnel relocating to new jurisdictions, without entity setup
Chief People Officer participating in RemotePeople’s inaugural Customer Advisory Board

As a remote-first business, one of our biggest challenges is hiring and retaining great people in places where we don’t have our own entity. RemotePeople gave us a way to test the water in new territories like Malaysia without going all in, and that early confidence has since shaped our longer-term hiring and people strategy in the region. It’s also helped us hold onto people we’d otherwise have lost when they wanted to relocate.

We’ve trialled other providers over the years, but four years on, RemotePeople is still the one we trust — their customer service and technology have consistently outpaced the alternatives, and they’ve genuinely listened and adapted as our needs have grown.

Tracey Knowles Chief People Officer, Wirex