Building Community Around Life Moments: A Student Ambassador Strategy for Wise

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.