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.
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.