Wise plc has appointed Barak Eilam to its board as a non-executive director and chair designate, lining up the former chief executive of enterprise software group NICE Ltd to take over the chair of the London-listed cross-border payments company.
The appointment was announced on 13 October 2026. Eilam has joined the board immediately and will succeed David Wells as chair, with the handover set for April of next year. He will also lead the nominating and corporate governance committee once he takes the chair.
Eilam spent twenty five years at NICE Ltd, joining as an engineer in 1999 and working through its executive ranks before becoming chief executive in 2014. He held that post for a decade, during which the company moved the bulk of its business to cloud delivery and became one of the larger enterprise software groups listed in the United States and Israel. He left the chief executive role in 2024.
He brings an unusually operational profile to a chair's seat. Wise plc has spent the past two years arguing that its advantage is infrastructure rather than interface, and it has been building out direct connections to domestic payment systems in several markets while pursuing a primary listing in the United States. A chair whose working life was spent scaling a software platform rather than in banking or in financial regulation is a deliberate signal about how the board sees the next phase.
Eilam also sits on the boards of FactSet, CCC Intelligent Solutions and Similarweb, and chairs Cvent. That spread of enterprise software and data businesses is close in character to the systems side of Wise plc, and some way from the retail financial services experience that chairs of listed payments companies have more often carried.
The transition is being handled over an extended period rather than at a single meeting. David Wells joined Wise plc as a non-executive director in 2019 and became chair in 2021, taking the company through its direct listing in London and the period of rapid customer growth that followed. He will overlap with Eilam across several board cycles before stepping back, and remains a director until the handover.
The arrangement gives the incoming chair time inside the business before he holds the gavel, which matters at a company whose regulatory footprint now spans several jurisdictions and whose listing arrangements are themselves in transition. It also gives the board continuity through a period in which Wise plc is asking shareholders to judge it on infrastructure economics rather than on headline customer numbers.
Wise plc did not disclose the terms of the appointment.
