The foreign payments service TransferWise is moving more than £500m a month globally for the first time since it was founded five years ago by a former Skype staffer.

Operating out of Shoreditch in London, the service facilitates peer-to-peer transfers in a bid to bypass fees normally charged by banks and other financial groups.

Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of TransferWise and previously of Skype, said: "Exceeding the £500m a month milestone is important as it shows a fundamental shift in people’s awareness of how banks, brokers and others take advantage of customers by hiding the real cost of international transactions.

"We transfer tens of millions of customer money every day and we have approximately 2% UK market share of the international money transfer business.

"This figure is only going to grow as customers become fed up with the traditional banking sector and look for fairer alternatives like TransferWise."

The milestone follows a $58m (£38m) funding round earlier this January involving venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, TransferWise having previous collected funds from British entrepreneur Richard Branson and Index Ventures.

This year the company has been targeting international expansion, opening offices in the US and Germany as well as adding Ben Horowitz of the venture capital firm to its board.

Whilst the headline figure remains small relative to the market, the progress of TransferWise is likely to confirm the finance’s suspicions that it is facing threats from an insurgent technology sector, a trend CBR highlighted earlier this year.