Wise Payments Limited v With Wise Limited & Ors

This dispute grew out of a rebrand, not a simple copycat launch. Wise Payments had built a substantial business under the TransferWise name and then moved to the shorter name Wise in 2021. With Wise had already adopted the Wise name in 2020 for software used by logistics businesses, especially for onboarding self-employed drivers.

The court was dealing with two businesses that were not the same overall. Wise Payments was known for money transfer and wider financial services. With Wise focused on onboarding, compliance and related tools for logistics contractors and drivers. The legal problem arose because the parties were both using the same core word and there was overlap in payroll and invoice services.

That distinction is important for business owners. Brand disputes do not always turn on whether two businesses sit in the same broad sector. The court looked more closely at what each side actually offered, how customers encountered those services and whether people were likely to think the businesses were connected.

Wise Payments started with peer-to-peer money transfer and foreign currency conversion. Over time it expanded into broader financial services. By about 2016 it offered business accounts, accounting software integration and mass or bulk payments. Its evidence was that this had been used as a payroll solution since at least 2019. It also launched a debit card in 2018 and later offered virtual cards.

As its services moved beyond money transfer, Wise Payments considered a rebrand. It bought wise.com in about February 2020, announced the proposed name change in February 2021 and traded as Wise from March 2021. The company then changed its name to Wise Payments Ltd in June 2021.

With Wise had a different commercial starting point. It was incorporated in December 2019 as Go Drive Trading Limited. In March 2020 it decided to rebrand as Wise, acquired withwise.com and changed its company name to With Wise Limited on 30 March 2020. Its core product was onboarding and offboarding software for logistics contractors who work with self-employed drivers.

With Wise also offered an invoicing product and an accountancy product for drivers. The judgment records that its website referred to payroll services from about April 2020. Although it said it did not itself effect financial transfers because it lacked the necessary financial accreditation, the court found that before February 2021 its offering already included payment-technology style services linked to steps preparatory to payment, such as calculating sums due to drivers.

That distinction mattered. The court did not need With Wise to be a bank or payment institution before it could have goodwill in services connected with payroll and invoicing. What mattered was the commercial reality of the services it was already offering under the Wise name.

The claim was wider than a single passing off allegation. Wise Payments said the defendants had infringed its registered marks and had also passed off their business. The defendants denied that and said they were the senior user of the Wise name in their own field.

The defendants also counterclaimed. They said that after the rebrand, Wise Payments was passing off its business as connected to With Wise. They also challenged some of the claimant's trade marks, including two 2021 WISE marks, arguing that those later registrations should not stand to the extent they conflicted with the defendants' earlier unregistered rights.

That made this more than a standard infringement claim. The court had to compare registered rights, earlier unregistered rights, the parties' actual trading activities and the practical causes of customer confusion. For ordinary businesses, the most useful part is the defendants' passing off counterclaim and the knock-on effect on the claimant's 2021 WISE marks.

For the passing off counterclaim, the court had to decide whether With Wise had built enough goodwill in the Wise name by the relevant date, whether Wise Payments' use of Wise amounted to a misrepresentation that its services were connected with With Wise, and whether likely damage followed.

The relevant date for the earlier-rights issue was treated as February 2021, being the inception of use by Wise Payments of Wise as its trading name. By then, With Wise had been using the Wise name for about 11 months. So the court had to ask what rights With Wise had already built up before the claimant's rebrand went live.

The court also had to decide how close the parties' services really were. It was not enough to say one business was in finance and the other in logistics software. The question was whether the claimant's use of Wise for payroll and invoice services overlapped closely enough with With Wise's existing Wise-branded offering to create a misleading impression of trade connection.

The judge also had to consider the role of confusion evidence. Many examples of misdirected contact did not clearly show the exact source of confusion. Even so, the court had to decide whether the overall pattern showed more than harmless mix-ups and instead pointed to a legally significant risk of customers assuming a connection.

The court found that With Wise had acquired goodwill in the Wise name by the relevant date. It had been trading for just under a year when Wise Payments rebranded, but the judge accepted evidence that it had a body of customers and significant turnover. That was enough to support a passing off claim.

The judge also found that With Wise's pre-February 2021 offering included payment-technology style services linked to preparing payments, such as calculating sums due to drivers. Even if those services later became more sophisticated through the app, they were already part of the business by the relevant date.

The court accepted that the parties' overall businesses were very different. But it identified an area of overlap. With Wise provided payroll technology enabling invoices to be generated and submitted for payment. Wise Payments provided payroll services, including arranging payroll payments, and invoice services. Because both sides were using the identical name Wise, the judge held that relevant confusion was inevitable in that overlapping area.

The operative finding was direct. Use of the name Wise by Wise Payments in relation to its payroll services, including arranging payroll payments, and its invoice services would be liable to lead a substantial number of members of the public to believe there was a connection in the course of trade with With Wise. On that basis, the defendants' passing off counterclaim succeeded for those services.

The court also rejected an over-broad description of the affected services. It said it would be too wide to describe the problem as covering Wise Payments' money transfer business generally. Foreign exchange transactions and international money transfers were very different from With Wise's services. So the successful counterclaim was narrower than a blanket ban on all use of Wise across the claimant's business.

On the trade mark side, the court held that the defendants' earlier rights should affect the claimant's two 2021 WISE marks. If the parties could not agree what terms should be excluded from those specifications, the court would need further submissions before settling the order.

One useful feature of the judgment is its treatment of confusion evidence. Both sides had examples of misdirected calls, emails and messages. No witness who was said to have been confused gave evidence, so the court had to assess the pattern from the documents and recordings.

The judge said many individual examples did not clearly show the exact source of confusion. Even so, the overall picture still mattered. Confusion started after Wise Payments rebranded to Wise. By April 2021 there were two different Wise apps available for download. The court considered that someone wanting to use payment-technology services could be confused by the parties' use of the same name.

The court also relied on the practical reality that customers of With Wise sometimes contacted Wise Payments by mistake about onboarding, setting up accounts or using the app. Even if those examples did not always reveal the precise mechanism of confusion, they supported the conclusion that Wise Payments' use of Wise amounted to a misrepresentation in the overlapping service area.

Damage was not limited to lost sales. The judgment refers to evidence that, long after Wise Payments knew With Wise was a legitimate business, its operators were telling some customers that With Wise was fraudulent, or to ignore or delete its emails. The court accepted that this could damage customer trust and reputation, disrupt drivers and indirectly affect employers. That was enough to support the damage element of passing off.

That point is commercially important. Many businesses assume a brand claim only succeeds if customers are diverted into buying from the wrong trader. This judgment shows that connection-based confusion can still be actionable where it harms trust, creates support problems or makes customers think one business is a branch of another.

The judgment contains a practical warning about how businesses manage evidence during a rebrand. Wise Payments transferred content from the TransferWise site to the Wise site and used a find-and-replace process that changed historical references in existing pages. The court said care was needed when relying on those documents because the process could create an inaccurate impression of what branding was actually used at the time.

That matters beyond litigation. If you are changing a trading name, domain or app identity, preserve a clean record of what customers saw before and after the change. Archived webpages, launch plans, screenshots, app-store listings and internal approval records can all become important if a dispute later turns on timing or scope of use.

The judgment also notes search gaps. Wise Payments made searches for other businesses using the Wise name at the outset of the rebranding process in 2019, but no further search was carried out between March 2020 and the February-March 2021 rebrand. The court said that was unfortunate because a later search might have disclosed With Wise. It also noted that With Wise did not carry out a trade mark search when choosing its name, which was also unfortunate.

The practical lesson is not to assign blame after the event. It is to build a repeatable process. Brand clearance should be refreshed before launch, before a rebrand goes live and before a business expands into nearby services that may change the overlap analysis.

Timing was central to this case. The claimant had long-standing rights in TransferWise, but the defendants had earlier unregistered rights in Wise for their own field before the claimant's rebrand. That made the rebrand date critical.

For a business owner, this is a useful reminder that a new trading name is assessed at the point you start using it, not by reference to how established your old brand was. If the market changes while your rebrand is being planned, your legal position can change with it.

This case is not a rule that any use of a shared word will fail. The court did not say that Wise Payments could not use Wise for everything. It drew a narrower line around payroll and invoice services because that was where the overlap and likely trade-connection problem sat.

That is the practical value of the judgment. It shows how courts often analyse brand disputes in the real world. They may not compare two businesses at the highest level of generality. Instead, they may isolate the service line, feature set or customer journey where confusion is most likely.

If your business is moving into adjacent functions such as payroll, invoicing, subscriptions, account tools, marketplaces or app-based workflows, do not assume your existing clearance still covers the new risk. Re-check the market and look at how customers will actually encounter the service.

It is also worth reading this case as a warning about support conduct. If your team starts receiving mistaken contacts, treat that as a legal and operational issue. Repeated confusion can become evidence. So can the way your staff respond to it.

If you are adopting a new trading name, launching an app or expanding into nearby services, use a structured process. This case shows how quickly a naming issue can become a High Court dispute once confusion starts appearing in the market.

For founders, marketing teams and product leads, the safest approach is to treat naming as a legal, technical and customer-support project, not just a branding exercise.