Wise’s Organic Growth Strategy: 10 Years of Lessons From Fabrizio Ballarini

Most businesses treat Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as a traffic game, but not Wise.

Fabrizio Ballarini, Head of Organic Growth at Wise, treats it as a customer acquisition engine backed by data, engineering, and a decade of compounding decisions. The results speak for themselves: one page, one month, one million clicks.

Fabrizio joined Charlie Marchant, CEO of Exposure Ninja, on The Growth Leaders Series podcast to talk about what it actually takes to build a global organic growth strategy that holds up under pressure, including the rise of AI Search, shifting attribution models, and the constant tension between building new and improving what you have.

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Go Broad First, Then Double Down on What Works

When Wise first started building its content and product acquisition strategy, the instinct from inside the business was to stay focused and narrow. Fabrizio Ballarini ignored that advice, and it paid off.

“At the beginning, the approach was to literally go as broad as possible and to carpet bomb as much as possible a lot of different avenues, because we thought we knew through search tools and all sorts of data points where there was traffic and where we could find distribution. But we didn’t know how well that traffic was going to convert.”

In the first few quarters, Wise launched roughly 60% of the content infrastructure that still underpins its acquisition today. That foundation was then refined over the years, based on what actually performed.

As Fabrizio Ballarini puts it: “Any kind of product or series of content that started to perform, we went more aggressive on those, and we continued to invest to the point that these days some of these are an actual team.”

The lesson here is not to scatter investment with no plan. It is to front-load exploration early, gather real performance data, and then concentrate resources where the evidence points. Businesses that skip the exploration phase and bet too narrowly from the start often miss the pockets of traffic that end up driving the most commercial value.

Build for Acquisition Before You Need It

One of the most commercially interesting aspects of Wise’s organic growth strategy is how far ahead it builds. Fabrizio Ballarini described a situation where the Wise product team would launch in a new country, and the acquisition infrastructure was already waiting for them.

Charlie Marchant pressed him on how that kind of pre-emptive investment gets justified internally. Fabrizio was candid:

“We got really good at betting, if that makes sense. We started to become quite agnostic on what we could serve as a customer, but we started to build acquisition beyond that, so that if tomorrow someone was launching something new, we had acquisition ready.”

“When you are pitching that expenditure to the business, most of the time people would be like, why are you spending money and time and people on something that we don’t even have? But our investment in organic growth was such a good investment from a payback perspective compared to maybe other initiatives, that we had pretty much a bonus with our finance team that was basically allowing us to be way more ambitious.”

Building acquisition ahead of product launches only becomes defensible once you have the track record to prove the ROI. But the principle is transferable: if your business model is expanding, your content and search presence should be expanding with it, not catching up behind it.

As Fabrizio Ballarini puts it: “When we launched India in terms of product, it was already years and years that they were receiving traffic from India on a lot of categories that we knew we were going to care about.”

The Currency Converter: A Masterclass in Programmatic SEO

No conversation about Wise’s organic growth strategy is complete without the currency converter. It has been one of the most commercially effective SEO assets in fintech, built not on luck but on a clear insight about where customer intent actually lives.

Charlie Marchant, who heard Fabrizio Ballarini present the story at the Spotlight conference, asked him to walk through the philosophy behind it. Fabrizio explained:

“The argument for going into that vertical was as simple as: there’s a lot of traffic in this area. But the most important insight was that we’re better off owning that experience for the customer than delegating that experience to simply finding a two-digit decimal rate on Google, or going to a website like Yahoo Finance that was probably sitting in the finance section together with all the stock tickers.”

The business case was not just traffic volume. It was education. Wise’s growth problem was that most people did not realise they were being charged a hidden margin by their bank. The currency converter was a way to show them the gap.

As Fabrizio Ballarini puts it: “There was an opportunity to educate the customers. The biggest problem that Wise is solving is that people don’t know they’re being charged by their provider.”

From there, Wise scaled it using what Ballarini calls classic programmatic SEO: a combination of API data, engineering, design, and a product-minded SEO owner who could govern the experience end to end.

AI Search Is Not the Apocalypse, But Conversion Matters More Now

The conversation inevitably turned to AI Search and whether traffic was under pressure and what the plan was. Fabrizio acknowledged the shift without catastrophising:

“Despite all the hype on social media, our traffic is all-time high. We continue to grow. But there are some pockets of traffic where the user experience will shift more towards getting recommendations maybe from some LLMs. In those pockets of traffic, if you put a clock and say, what if we have one year left of this type of traffic, you find out that you can do better on those visits and those customers.”

This is the critical reframe. AI Search disruption is not primarily a visibility problem for established brands with strong direct intent. It is a conversion opportunity problem. Wise has been sitting on traffic it was not fully converting. The shift in the search landscape has accelerated the push to fix that.

As Fabrizio Ballarini puts it: “Because we kept growing traffic and getting more and more visits to the website, we were a bit discounting the fact that not all of them were becoming a Wise customer. Now the plans with the teams are a bit different, with more initiatives gearing towards that front.”

The Attribution Problem Nobody Is Talking About

Charlie Marchant raised the question of whether businesses should be tracking what LLMs are saying about them. Fabrizio was direct about the commercial gap:

“What everyone is not talking about is the fact that a 10,000% increase on AI visibility means zero revenue when you look at attribution models. You can be as hyped as you like about your increased AI visibility, but no one is ever publishing the other half of the chart that shows how this is impacting the actual revenue attributed by growth channel.”

For teams being asked by leadership to show what they are doing about AI, this is an important corrective. Investing in AI visibility tools that cannot be connected to pipeline or revenue is difficult to scale. Fabrizio’s view is that this will change as platforms like OpenAI develop ad products that bring tracking infrastructure with them. But right now, the attribution gap is real.

What This Means for Your Organic Growth Strategy

Fabrizio Ballarini’s decade at Wise is a case study in compounding organic investment. The core principles are transferable regardless of sector or scale:

• Go broad early, then concentrate. Do not over-optimise before you have real performance data. Launch wide, measure what converts, and allocate more to what works.
• Build acquisition ahead of demand. If you know where your business is going, your content and search presence should already be there. Catching up is expensive.
• Own the customer experience end-to-end. The businesses most exposed to AI Search disruption are those that treat search as a referral channel rather than a relationship-building tool. The more you own the experience beyond the click, the more resilient your acquisition becomes.
• Prioritise conversion on your best traffic. If AI Search is taking some of your informational traffic, the question is not just how to defend that traffic but whether you were converting it well in the first place.

If you want to build an organic growth strategy that delivers qualified leads and measurable revenue, not just rankings and traffic, we can help. Book a consultation call with our team, and we’ll provide recommendations based on a review of your marketing, website, and goals.

About The Growth Leaders Series

The Growth Leaders Series is a mini podcast series from Exposure Ninja. In each episode, Charlie Marchant sits down with a growth leader from one of the world’s most innovative brands to explore how marketing leaders are adapting to changes in search, AI, demand generation, and brand growth.