[KevinBongart]

Their marketing material in NYC was incredibly douchey, like "stick it to the big banks".

I was using Xoom (https://www.xoom.com) at the time, which had a brand image of a trustworthy and cut-the-bullshit kind of financial company.

TransferWise's subway ads focused on a people's revolution: http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/Rjm3dY.BU5FmdQmId3yj1w--/Y... or http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03525/TransferWi... are two examples.

Another thing that threw me off is how needlessly technologically-heavy their website was at the time: Javascript front-end app with big animations and the unavoidable browser-incompatibility bugs it created back then (you refresh the page and it redirects to the root page for instance).

Anyway, I tried it once and had slightly better rates than Xoom, enough to convince me to go through their bullshit to save some money on large transfers, but I almost kept using Xoom because of how much I didn't like Transferwise's image.

All that to say: I'm not surprised by your interview experience, it perfectly matches what I assumed from their team.

[petra]

Is it really their fault, or is i just how marketing works in this day an age ?

Heck, they even got you, and you hated their marketing!

[Trundle]

I'm the least 'get excited about the company vision' person there is and if I was starting a service that competed against banks I'd be very tempted to play that up in marketing, both to prospective clients and employees.

There are an awful lot of people that really loath banks.

[KevinBongart]

Their marketing got my attention, and their rates were so much better than the competition that it outweighed the terrible brand image.

They could have gone straight to the point: "Better international transfer rates than your bank" and I'd have been very happy with it. The service is good!