Dan Richards and the phone call that became Wise

Dan Richards answered the phone. On the other end was Simon Hills, who wanted an app. Hills had been working with logistics businesses and kept encountering the same difficulties: onboarding that consumed time, payment administration that consumed more, and compliance questions that refused to disappear. Richards was working at a technology agency. A prospective customer had brought him a problem. Before long, he would be helping to build a company around it.

There is a pleasing lack of ceremony in that beginning. The telephone did its usual job. Someone described what was going wrong; someone listened. Richards and his agency colleague James Orton subsequently left to join Hills. The three became Wise's founders. The business began in 2019, in a corner of the economy where a document can matter almost as much as a delivery van.

A commercial education, with colleagues attached

Before the deputy chief executive title, Richards worked at stickee, the technology agency where Orton also worked. A 2019 account of a team charity challenge identifies Richards as business development director and Orton as digital director. Their working relationship predates the company they would establish together. That is a useful detail in a founding story: the partnership already had some mileage on it.

There was competition, too. The six-person stickee team finished among the top ten of 714 teams in a fundraising steps challenge. Orton's introduction included his enjoyment of winding up Dan. The tone was affectionate and unceremonious. An agency job could produce clients, colleagues and, apparently, an opponent who would remain available for years.

Richards's public LinkedIn profile also records a Marketing Week Mini MBA with Mark Ritson in 2020, alongside earlier search marketing certifications. His professional trail runs through business development and marketing. The practical question in those jobs is how to make a product useful enough that someone chooses it. Wise gave that question a particular audience: businesses managing self-employed drivers.

The machinery behind the parcels

By July 2021, Richards was speaking publicly as Wise's chief commercial officer. The company had agreed a partnership with Solihull Moors Football Club, putting its logo on the sleeves of the men's and women's home and away shirts. He talked about the club's role in the area and the people who followed it. The local connection was quite literal: the club was nearby.

That September, a post under his name described Wise's move into Radcliffe House in Solihull. Product, development, design, marketing, project management and operations would work under one roof. The ribbon was cut on 15 September. Bringing departments together gave the move a practical purpose; gathering the team gave it an occasion.

A commercial founder has several kinds of introduction to make. Customers need to understand the product. Colleagues need to understand one another. A local football partnership puts the company into a community that already exists. An office brings its own growing community into the same building. In Richards's early Wise record, those activities sit alongside the work of selling software.

December brought another kind of partner

In December 2021, Inflexion announced its investment in Wise through Enterprise Fund V. At that point, the platform served more than 250 UK logistics firms and 14,000 self-employed drivers. It helped with onboarding, document storage and compliance. The operators in that network worked with carriers including Amazon, DPD and Hermes.

Those figures describe the business at the investment announcement, rather than its size today. They also give some substance to the opportunity the founders had chosen. A delivery network contains many separate businesses, each with its own people and paperwork. Software could serve the repeated administrative work across those companies.

Inflexion's later account of the partnership describes help with the product roadmap, technology development and product bundling. These are fairly sober subjects for a growth story. They are also the work that follows a successful sales conversation: organising what gets built, deciding how it is offered, and making sure the technology can support the promise. Richards's commercial responsibilities belonged within that wider effort.

The award comes back to the work

In 2024, Wise received the UK Best Onboarding Software Solutions Company award at the MarTech Awards, organised by Innovation in Business. Richards's response centred on the team's effort and the task of streamlining how users joined and were managed. An award gives a company an opportunity to talk about itself. He used the occasion to talk about the work.

Onboarding is an unusually revealing specialism. It happens before the activity everyone can see. Getting a person ready to work involves information, evidence and decisions; the delivery comes later. A company building for that stage has to persuade buyers that preparation deserves attention. Richards's remit put him in the position of explaining why this apparently preliminary business was a business in its own right.

A supplier list becomes a product

Wise Advantage extended that commercial work. Announced in October 2025, it brought a supplier marketplace to Wise's logistics customers. Richards's introduction focused on the recurring difficulty of finding reliable providers. Hamilton Robertson Insurance Brokers and Vanaways were among the partnerships he singled out. The proposition covered services and products that operators needed to keep their businesses running.

The marketplace also allowed customers with secondary businesses, such as maintenance or bodywork services, to participate as suppliers. That detail makes the network more interesting. A customer might have something to buy and something to offer. Existing relationships could lead to a different kind of transaction.

In March 2026, Richards joined Evie, Trevor and Joseph for a Talking Wise discussion about how Advantage had been made and how it was developing. There was now a product with a backstory, colleagues with particular responsibilities, and customers whose operating costs gave the conversation its purpose. The commercial idea had become something concrete enough to take apart on air.

“It’s been a great experience talking with so many individuals and businesses whose passion really shines through.”Dan Richards, on the Wise Advantage launch

A deputy CEO with a microphone

By 2026, Wise's leadership and interview pages identified Richards as deputy CEO. Talking Wise gave him a public setting for discussing the matters his customers faced. With Gary Jacobs, founder of Gigzzee and Eazitax, he explored self-employment in private hire, including tax administration, regulatory challenges and financial discipline. The conversation moved beyond delivery fleets while keeping self-employment at its centre.

In another episode, host Chloe Tierney-Martin put Richards in the guest seat to discuss common misconceptions in logistics businesses. Contracts, governance and checks formed the agenda. At IntraLogisteX in March 2025, he had already taken a related subject to the stage with a session on the future of tax and compliance in logistics.

The later automated-checks episode brings him together with Darryl Oung, Wise's head of compliance, and Kate Harrison, head of product management. The combination is instructive: the commercial conversation sits beside specialist knowledge and product decisions. A founder may introduce the problem; the explanation benefits from the people responsible for different parts of the answer.

An anniversary with the arithmetic showing

The sixth-anniversary conversation put Richards beside Orton again, with Tierney-Martin hosting. His invitation to watch included thanks to former colleagues at stickee and to his old boss at Voice Mobile. The career story had names in it. People from earlier jobs still belonged in the account of what came next.

He also explained the episode's curious five-plus-one framing: the anniversary had initially been counted as five years. The correction became part of the joke. He directed viewers to the later portion of the video for a Mr and Mrs-style game with Orton. The colleague once introduced as enjoying winding him up still had a microphone within reach.

Corporate anniversary material often arrives polished until the people disappear. Here, the miscount survived. So did the teasing. It gives Richards's professional story a recognisable social texture: a company remembered through colleagues who can still interrupt the official version.

The next conversation

In recent LinkedIn updates, Richards has discussed meeting the Chex.AI founders and work towards embedding AI vehicle checks in Wise's system and mobile app. He has also marked customers reaching five years with the business. He describes them as partners, a preference that fits his repeated interest in the relationships around the software.

Those updates leave him engaged with two quite different measures of progress: what the product might do next, and how long people have chosen to stay. Both matter to the commercial work he has carried from the agency into Wise. One brings another capability into view; the other records a relationship that has continued.

The phone call remains a good place to begin because it contains the shape of that work. Someone has a business to run and a recurring difficulty to explain. Richards is part of the conversation about what could make it easier. Years later, with a deputy CEO title and a podcast microphone, the question still has plenty of people attached.