Taavet Hinrikus is a disruptor. As the first employee of the internet phone service Skype, he helped spark a revolution in the way people communicate with each other. Now, Hinrikus is aiming to transform the way people move cash around the world through TransferWise, an online money transmission service.

The 34-year-old Estonian is plotting his latest revolution from the unglamorous location of Old Street in London, better known as the silicon roundabout hub where like-minded digital disruptors are based.

This week he will take his mission to Davos, the Swiss ski resort where business leaders, politicians and celebrities chew over the hot topics facing the world. He symbolises the new-look Davos man: knowledgeable about “the fourth industrial revolution” – the impact of new technology and robots – that the organisers of the World Economic Forum have selected as this year’s theme.

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Hinrikus, who is more accustomed to skiing in Davos than holding a hot ticket to the forum, said digital disruptors such as himself are “harnessing technology to create change, to create better services, to create a better world Disruption has been around for a long time. The car disrupted the horse, the micro-computer disrupted the mainframe.”

The speed and amount of disruption has changed as a result of the internet. Skype, created in 2003 in Estonia, disrupted an industry in which making a call once required the intervention of an operator. Those industries feeling the impact off digital disruption also include the music industry – “instead of going to HMV and buying a piece of plastic you sign up to Spotify” – and transport, in which Uber and Hailo are causing shockwaves.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Silicon roundabout in Old Street, London. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty

Finance is now on the radar of the digital disruptors. Peer-to-peer lenders are challenging one part of banking’s traditional business while startups are aiming to chip away at the banks’ core current account market by creating mobile-only banks. The industry is no longer protected by bricks and mortar, says Hinrikus.

“Back in the days you would build the biggest building in the city and say: ‘You can trust us’,” he says. The financial crisis changed that as “people realised these institutions called banks are really about generating profit and fuelling the greed of the bankers”.

The UK government wants to turn London into the world’s capital for financial innovation, so-called fintech. The aim is not only to attract financiers to the UK but also foster competition in a domestic market dominated by the big four banks.

Hinrikus views London as the ideal place to run the business, even though 300 of the 450 staff are based in Estonia. “From here I can be in Singapore or San Francisco in 12 hours … It is a unique place where finance meets tech. New York has lots of finance and not so much tech and San Francisco has lots of tech and not so much finance.”

He credits Estonia with fostering a spirit of self-reliance, as the communist regime, which fell in 1991, forced individuals to do things for themselves. “Everyone knew how to fix [their] car engine,” he said.

TransferWise, launched in 2011, is said to have been valued at $1bn a year ago when the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, backed a fundraising. Marc Andreessen is credited with inventing web browers. Sir Richard Branson and the former chief executive of the US bank Citigroup, Vikram Pandit, are among the other big-name backers. As a so-called unicorn – a tech startup with a $1bn valuation – there are concerns that TransferWise could be just hype.

The operation is still filing abbreviated accounts, which show a loss for the financial year to March 2014 of £14m.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A worker counts US dollars at a money transfer office in Mogadishu, Somalia. The country has since been locked out of the remittance system. Photograph: Feisal Omar/Reuters/Corbis

Its website tells the story of how it was created by Hinrikus and his friend Kristo Käärmann: “Taavet had worked for Skype in Estonia, so was paid in euros, but lived in London. Kristo worked in London, but had a mortgage in euros back in Estonia. They devised a simple scheme. Each month the pair checked that day’s mid-market rate on Reuters to find a fair exchange rate. Kristo put pounds into Taavet’s UK bank account, and Taavet topped up his friend’s euro account with euros. Both got the currency they needed, and neither paid a cent in hidden bank charges.”

TransferWise matches customers wanting to move money across borders. Hinrikus said it had 450 “payment corridors”. Its most popular route involves exchanges out of the UK to Spain, Germany and India. Regulated by the city regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, it is subject to the “know your customer” rules intended to prevent money laundering. Africa, where countries such as Somalia have been locked out of the so-called remittance system, is proving a harder nut to crack, although Nigeria is one country on the continent for which it does offer an exchange rate.