Wise Stock

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for this session with Wise. We are delighted to have the CFO, Emmanuel Thomassin, with us today. Thank you for making the trip out again, Emmanuel. Really appreciate it.

Well, thank you very much for being here.

Great. So maybe just to sort of kick off, some may be familiar with Wise, some may not. Can you take us through the kind of core offering of Wise? And I know it's kind of evolved over the last few years from being just a kind of cross-border when you provide it, you're now providing a lot of other kind of value-added services. And maybe outline the kind of the opportunity in front of you and where that sort of revenue is coming from? Who are you winning against?

Yes. So maybe I'll start with our mission basically first, right? So our mission is a mission with money without borders. And in order to provide or to fulfill this mission, we are building a global infrastructure which allow customers to manage and to move their money worldwide. So that's what we are doing. And we seek to provide the services at the minimum fees, at maximum ease and at the fastest transaction speed as possible. So that's what we are doing. And when you combine basically the infrastructure and the products that we offer. We really have like a very superior customer products compared to the legacy banks.

And how does it translate into reality? First of all, you can see us as a network, network where we connect all the payments infrastructures together in real time. And that's allowed us to transfer or 77% of the transaction in Q1 were instant, so below 20 seconds. So when you transfer money from New York to Singapore or from London to Australia, it will take less than 20 seconds to arrive on the other accounts. And not only we do this extremely fast or instantly, but also we offer the service for an average take rate of 50 basis points, which is also very attractive.

So when you look at the opportunity in front of us, this is a massive opportunity. The market on cross-border volume is estimated at USD 43 trillion. This is the money that basically customers, small businesses and also partners or banks are moving within a year. Just like to recap, I mean, last year, Wise's cross-border volume was GBP 253 billion. So you could say, a drop in the ocean or a massive opportunity in front of us. And because we offer the service like cheap, transparent, fast and reliable, last year, 19 million of customers, users, which was a growth of 21%. So overall, this is what we are. We offer cross-border volume, but also services, but also others that might be dig into.

Got it. Got it. So maybe just sort of digging a bit deeper into, I think, there's the products, but I think the infrastructure is even more important. So maybe talk about the differentiation you have from a kind of tech standpoint, versus, obviously, banks but also other digital players in the market and kind of that I know you talked about speed and the customer experience, and how does that sort of manifest itself not just to customers, but now increasingly competitors are becoming even partners you going forward?

So yes, I just mentioned like the global infrastructure -- of the global that we are providing. This infrastructure is our own infrastructure. We develop it ourselves. This is a proprietary operating infrastructure that we have been developing. And that's allowed, as I mentioned before, to transfer the money extremely fast and extremely cheap.

If you think about the infrastructure, I will highlight 4 points that I think are building this infrastructure. The first one is the domestic -- the connection to the domestic payment. And we do this in 2 ways, either a direct connection to the payment systems. As you know, we have we had 8. Now we have 9 direct connections. I know it would be the U.K., it would be the EU, it will be Hungary, Australia, the Philippines, Brazil and lately, we also connect to the Malaysian payment systems. So that's a direct connection. Where we don't have direct connections, we will work with partner banks, and we have more than 90 partner banks, so that we can connect to the domestic direct payment systems.

The second point is the licenses that we have. So we have over 80 license in different countries to provide our product domestically. To give you an example, if you want to provide asset product in Australia, you have to have a license. So we have more than 80 license across the globe.

The third one would be this for proprietary infrastructure that I mentioned or the tech that we have, this is our own and this is organic. We built it over time over the last 15 years.

Well and lastly, operations. So in order to provide this instant payment and transfers, you have to have a global service and a global treasury, a very strong treasury backbone to make sure that the liquidity is available on the other side when you transfer money from one region to the next.

So all of this is very unique. I don't think that -- we think that we're really well placed. And as you said, more and more banks, partners are now using our infrastructure. And the reason is because we are building this over time, these 9 direct connections and continue to build it. and also because we provided as a take rate that is very attractive even for them.

Yes. So yes, I was going to turn to the kind of platform business, which has been something you've talked about at the IPO, but now, we've seen over the last couple of years some really big and interesting names. But now it's being visible in the numbers as well. So maybe sort of explain to us a little bit the fact that you have a competitive advantage, the banks know they can't compete with you so they're joining with you. How is the pipeline here, what has been perhaps the early experiences from those who have signed in the ramp-up and the kind of product and services you're offering with them.

So you're right. I mean the platform is for us extremely motivating and extremely exciting. We see a bigger -- well, a big opportunity there. As a direct listing platform was about 0% of the cross-border volume that we generated. And since then, we multiplied the cross-border volume by 3x, 3x. The platform moved from 0% to 6% today of the global cross-border volume that we are generating. Today, the ramp-up that you mentioned I would say the development is twofold. There's the ramp-up of partners that we already signed. And then there's a new partners coming on the pipeline that is selling, which is very attractive.

Usually, when we sign a contract with a partner, we have a ramp-up. We start with the bank with maybe like 1 or 2 or 3 FX routes together. So we start slowly. And then over time, Usually, our contract is about 2 years or 3 years where we are -- we monitor together with the partners, the volume growth. And accordingly, we will also like to adjust the take rate.

So the ramp-up is, I would say, happening vertically. So we had a lot of FX routes over time. So like 3 FX routes, another one, another one and another one. So this is a vertical development. And horizontally, we will offer new services. So we start with the FX between currencies. And then at some point, we might, for example, develop multicurrency accounts. And yes. So that's why we are today, 6% of our cross-border volume, again, 3x from 5 years ago. And we guide the market that will be around 10% of the total cross-border volume within the next 3 years or so.

Got it. Anything you would sort of call out, I mean because I think one of the -- talk with Steve earlier in the year, now the head of platforms, that banks are used to the switch system, and that's kind of how they've been connected. But you've also built some interesting tools to help banks, older banks perhaps with some very old IT infrastructure to make this transition a bit more -- obviously, when you work with neo banks, they kind of run on more than infrastructure, so it's much easier. Maybe talk about some of the things you've done to improve that?

Yes. Clearly, we offer 2 ways to onboard a bank or a neobank. One of those is obviously the API. This is what we prefer, because with the API, we can onboard the bank very quickly. The fastest we've onboarded a neobank was 3 weeks. So within 3 weeks, we were able to onboard completely. Usually, it depends on, I would say, the resource on the partner side, the road map and also the priority that the bank will put in motion and also the technology, obviously. So from our side, we're able to onboard very quickly a partner. And then we have no -- up today, we didn't have any kind of limitation in terms of how many partners can we own but at the same time in parallel. So that's -- the API is really making a big difference for the onboarding phase.

Got it. I mean the other sort of, I guess, really since the direct listing in London, why the count was kind of the product that really has taken off, I think you have a debit card. So maybe tell us a bit about what Wise account does? And how has that sort of been beneficial in terms of both customer stickiness, but also then opening up some of these adjacencies. And maybe to the extent you can talk about the economics of that versus the traditional cross-border business.

So indeed, we're coming from the cross-border product that we offer first. And over time, customers were asking us to hold money with us, not only to transfer money from one country to the next, but they wanted to hold money with us. So we launched the Wise account. The Wise account is, in many ways, very interesting. You can hold 40 currencies today with a Wise account, different currencies, you really have an account in a different currency. So if you -- if you've been onboarded in the U.K. and you want to have a U.S. account, you will have a real U.S. account. If you want to have a euro account, you will have a euro accounts. So it's really like you can hold up to 40 currencies in your in your Wise account.

On top of that, we are -- you can earn money with us by interest that we -- that you can earn, there are some exception here in the U.K. is one of those or you can also put your money in what we call Wise assets, which will be invested with a partner of us, BlackRock, JPMorgan, and this is off balance and then you earn an interest -- well, a return on your deposits. So the customers have been using the Wise account, to the Wise account, there's also a debit card attached to it that you can use. Well, and then you benefit when you're traveling with the debit card, you benefit from the FX rates that we provide. So the low take rate that I mentioned before. So more and more, we can see that there is an adoption.

So I think today, the account adoption is by 66% of their retail customers and around 60% from business that are using us, not only for cross-border, the origin of the company, but also like for everyday account. So you can -- more and more people are getting the salary paid on Wise and use it for the every day as everyday accounts for their life and also earning money. Today, as you know, like -- the fastest-growing KPIs last year, Wise, the deposit of the customers that we've seen. At the end of the first quarter, this year, we were at USD 41 billion of deposits from the customers invested in either interest or earning interest or in assets.

Got it. So maybe just looking forward, I think this does not stop here, Wise is known for innovating. And I think you've got a -- number of initiatives on both the personal and the SMB side. What sort of excites you in terms of kind of upcoming product releases?

Yes. We developed a lot of new features, not only with the lot features, but we'll also roll out these features in different markets. As I mentioned before, for example, assets, we need some license to get a license in every single country we launch it. So assets, we launched a Wise assets in New Zealand this year where now our customers in New Zealand are able to earn money on the deposit.

We also launched a QR code payments in Malaysia with a partner called DuitNow. And we also launched from retail, the Wise bundle for travelers. So where basically you have a travel perk and also like a travel lounge that you can use with a Wise account access in lounge at the airport and so on and so forth.

From the business side, and I'm particularly excited about it. We are more and more integrating in the workflows of small businesses in the approval workflows. We are providing them with invoicing solutions where they can invoice in 23 different languages. Not only they can invoice in 23 languages, but they can also receive the currency and keep them in their Wise account as a currency. So when you work with different countries in different currencies, that's also like a big advantage for the customers.

And what I'm very excited about is that we are more and more integrating with what I call a local accounting champions. So when you -- a lot of SMEs are not working, obviously, with our SAP or Oracle because the systems are just too big for them. And in specific countries, you will have the local champions in terms of accounting and what we're developing is the integration to this accounting software so that their payments can be operated from accounting software or you can also reflect the payments that have been done directly in the solutions in real time. And that integration will increase the stickiness of the small businesses. And then we talk about the platform, so I don't want to develop too much on that because we talk about this. But this combined is driving our densification of revenues. So you see -- you saw at the end of Q1, 51% of our net revenue went up cross-border revenue, which is a reflection of the diversification of the products that we offer.

Yes. So maybe just on the cross-border business. The mission is obviously to drive down pricing. And I know that maybe 0 may not be the sort of the end journey. But it's interesting that you sort of talk about any efficiencies you get in the platform. And I'd like to know kind of what those levers are and how that flows into kind of your pricing strategy with customers. And there's often a misconception that this is a defensive move rather than offensive move. But when I look at your gross margins, they're still quite healthy. So maybe help us kind of close that loop and understand your pricing methodology? And how should we think of that going forward?

So we are constantly looking for cost efficiency within the company. So this is a culture that we have developed over the years. So we're looking for a way to be more efficient as we grow and scale. I can give you an example of the cost of sales when we work with partner banks, as I mentioned before, for the countries where we don't have a direct integration as the volume grow, we go back to the banks and negotiate better terms and better conditions. This is the same with Visa MasterCard, where we have been negotiating better terms and conditions because of the volume that you generate. And that efficiency -- and this is true for all the processes. We're looking at where we can be leaner and more efficient. And all this efficiency will drive margin and then we will consider to reinvest, reinvest in our business or in OpEx, which could be like servicing, product and tech, marketing and so on and so forth, or price adjustments because we look at -- we consider pricing as one of the area of investments when we start the year or when we budget is like how much do we want to reinvest in OpEx, how much do you want to reinvest in pricing.

Fundamentally, and we mentioned before the infrastructure, we believe that the combination of a global infrastructure where it's reliable, it's fast, combined with the low take rate is basically the key to be the winner in this industry, it's like, because at the end, the price is what matters for every single customer, the retail, the SMEs or even the larger bank.

So that's why for us, the price is definitely not a defensive move. These are -- we don't really check what the competitors are doing. We are following a philosophy of our cost plus margin. So we want to be agnostic of which rail or which products are we providing to which customers. We want to generate the same profit on all rates. And then for that, we have a very, very detailed cost analysis and cost allocation. So we look at every route, every customer profile to understand how much profit are we generating. And if we have -- if we see that we generate more profit than the 50% margin that we are targeting, then we would consider to pass it back to the consumer or to the customers. So this is a very detailed one. I should also say that we increase our price sometimes. So when we find out that the cost base is higher and we don't generate the margin, then we will also increase the take rate in a very specific customer niche or FX routes.

Got it. So you talked about investments. I mean your OpEx has been growing pretty substantially over the last couple of years. And I know your sort of objective has been to keep the margin fairly steady now. I understand you're still very -- have low penetration of your addressable market. So it makes sense to invest it. Can you give us a sort of a rough framework in terms of, a, how do you -- where are you spending this money on? B, sort of how you measure that kind of return on investment. And I think in recent quarters, we've actually seen a pretty healthy uptick in the number of kind of customers you've been adding. And how should we think of this spend framework? And at some point, there's going to be operating leverage in the model. So when does that kind of show through?

So yes, I mean, 2 years ago, we announced at Owners Day that we're going to accelerate our investments in OpEx around -- at that time, we mentioned GBP 2 billion over the next 2 years. Looking back at the time that you mentioned before, $43 trillion, while we just report GBP 253 billion of cross-border volume. So you can see that basically, there's a massive opportunity in front of us.

And what we decided to do is to invest, and I don't say spend, but invest in specific areas, one of those is second product, we know that new features will drive more demand from the customers and more interaction. We also considered very early on to invest in servicing, assuming that we will get more customers joining the platform and joining their servicing, we wanted to make sure that we serve this customer best. And that was also, in particular, the case for small businesses. So to onboard private customers, it's by far simpler than to onboard a business as we want to be part of their workflows. We have a lot of interaction with these businesses. So we created a special department for proactively reaching out to businesses to make sure that we are part of their workflows.

And then we invest in marketing. We tripled the marketing budget within 3 years. It was pretty low 3 years ago. So it's not -- it's still like it's -- we triple it, but it's still like a modest line in terms of the P&L. And how we measure our investments in marketing, we will have some very strict KPIs that you want to meet. So the payback time for private customers is 15 months for businesses. We also have like 22 months. We have our targets on [ CLTV ] and so on and so forth. So we put discipline, which is we make investments very difficult for the marketing team. So that's the kind of calculation and attitude that we have towards the investment that we're doing. And this is paying off. I mean, last year, our cross-border volume grew by 31% year-on-year. Customers are growing by, in first quarter, 21%. So we can see the traction of this investment that we have provided.

Got it. And then, is there operating leverage? And I mean, clearly, with where the gross margin is, it's a question of when, but should we assume that over the medium term, there's plenty of investment opportunities that you've identified that margin dynamics should stay.

We guide the market on midterms, right? I mean medium term. So in terms of margin because we think that we have enough room to invest and a good return. And we think that it will be probably a mistake not to do so. So the guidance that we gave in terms of margin is in terms of for the next 3 years now because we get it into 2024. Long run, we think that there would be leverage for sure. One of those is in servicing area. We have been investing a lot in servicing in headcount, while also like deploying artificial intelligence. And we think that at some point, you will have this operating leverage that you mentioned.

Got it. So maybe just on recent developments. Can you update us on your sort of U.S. strategy following the denied application from the OCC. What updated framework are you targeting? And when can we expect sort of a new application?

Yes. So maybe one step back. I mean the U.S. is, for us, the largest single market in terms of perspective. So this is why we put -- we have an office in Austin, you know, with now above 100 -- 900 employees. We have a small office in New York. We listed the company in NASDAQ to have more visibility, and we see the traction in terms of getting new customers and new businesses joining the platform.

The OCC applications happened a year ago. And since then, we've been doing a lot in terms of the business mature a lot, the compliance departments have been also like maturing. Looking back in some -- with some insight, I think like we would have reconsidered the application that we made because we were also like facing a consent order almost at the same time in the U.S. So we resolved all the remediation from the consent order, and then we're waiting for the confirmation of the state that everything have been remediated. And also like I think there -- the setup in the U.S. have been changing. And we were trying to access the payment scheme in the U.S. to a federal account. And over time, the OCC, but also the overall setup have been changing.

Now we have this denial, we will reconsider to put an application. We get the green light from the OCC that we can do so. We still have no exact time line of how we'll do this, but the new application will be under GENIUS Act or -- and that would be some consideration about -- well, for this application linked to the stablecoin's evolution.

Got it. The OCC specifically highlighted concerns regarding Wise's compliance controls within that denial. What's your perspective on those findings?

I think in general, like in a company like you're -- we're not the only one to face this kind of situation. And while we're working on investing heavily into on compliance in KYC and KYB for many, many years. The business is growing so fast that, it's by nature, I think it's clear that the regulators will have more and more scrutiny as we grow. So for us, the remediation that we are facing, for example, in Belgium, the way the press is something that we will deliver by the end of the year and then the regulators will come back to us after observing the remediation. I mean, we can see that other fintech companies in Europe are facing the same kind of wall as they grow. I mean, like -- and remediation is part of, I would say, almost as the industry.

Got it. Got it. So maybe before we open to the audience just wanted to -- there was a sort of stablecoin debate has been ranging, perhaps diminished a little bit into the recent months. What's your kind of response to how stablecoins can impact Wise's business model? And how do you think about also potentially working in this space with some of the stablecoin providers, given some of the infrastructure advantages you have, particularly on-ramp off-ramp?

Well, I think the first thing is like our target again is to build the best infrastructure in the world to move money as fast as possible. If a technology will help us to achieve this and continue on the mission, we will onboard this technology. Today, I think that stablecoin is solving a problem that we solved already for the last 15 years. I mentioned before, 77% of the transaction are instant. So it's not going to be faster than instant payment, and it's not going to be cheaper than the 50 basis point. So that's why like when you look at this -- from this point of view, from this angle, we think that the problem that stablecoin is solving, we already solved it. Then we look at our customers and this retail SMEs or even partners and there is no demand today from stablecoins from their side.

So we mentioned like how do we -- the cost efficiency and the discipline, when we allocate our investments, we were looking at where should we deploy our money and where the demand for the customers. That said, you probably saw that we have digital managers that are joining the company. So we want to be ready if we see stablecoin getting more traction by our customers. Yes, that's probably where we said we're agnostic, right? So we onboard last year the Japanese payment systems. For that, we were using a Windows 95 in a modem. The whole documentation was in Japanese. So if you ask our CTO, onboarding stablecoin should be by far easier than what we face with the Japanese system. So from that perspective, we will follow the market. If we see this is serving our mission, then obviously, we would consider it.

Got it. We can open to the audience if there's any questions. The mic is coming.

You already mentioned that you're spending 3x the marketing you were a few years ago. Do you think you're spending enough on marketing today? And could you further accelerate consumer adoption by spending more?

This is a very good question. I think like within the constraints that we put ourselves, I think we're investing at the right level because we feel confident that we've got a return. I hope that we can be able to spend more in the future. I mean this is -- we're talking about $170 million that we're investing today compared to $66 million a few years ago. So I think in the entire P&L, it's not a massive project. So we're putting a lot of constraints to the marketing team to find ways to invest this money at the same return as before. And I really hope that we can invest more to unlock basically the market that we have.

Today, we are in a position where 70% of the new customers are coming because of other customer's recommendation. Personally, I think like there's probably room to invest a little bit more, to gain even more, to foster the acquisition of new customers at a good return.

Maybe I'll continue. So the cash reserves continue to grow pretty nicely, both on account of strong free cash flow, but also the dynamics around interest payments. What's the kind of capital allocation strategy? I know you have a buyback already underway, and that's still offsetting some of the stock option dilution. And also, you've obviously not in any M&A yet. But if you were to do it, what's the scope of that? And why would you need to do it?

So the capital allocation, we're -- I mean, first of all, we're really cash-conscious, so we generate a lot of cash every year. So cash conversion is about 100% or even higher. So we generate a lot of cash. We are conscious about how to spend this cash. First of all, we are cautious that we have to satisfy regulatory requirements from the regulators, as we grow, the requirements are growing. So we want to make sure that we can face these requirements. Secondly, we want to be opportunistic. So depending on the projects or where we want to invest, we want to have the flexibility to be able to invest.

But you mentioned like we announced the larger share buyback program. It's over $0.5 billion that we launched, and we started to execute. I mean, in August, we bought 1 million shares back ], and that we will revisit every year. again, because of the flexibility we want to have, but you could see over the years that the share buyback is growing in terms of volumes.

And then lastly, on M&A, this is not in our DNA of Wise. And I think we've done 1 M&A in the past, $2.8 million investments to us for getting a license in India. That said, we're going to build a small team and look at M&A opportunities in the market. But that's not something that we expect to do for the next 12 or 24 months that we start to build the knowledge and look at the opportunities out there.

Got it. Anymore? Maybe I'll round out on the competitive landscape. There's obviously yourselves as Currency Cloud. I think a few of the larger banks are trying to do this. If I look at the platform, you seem to have quite a successful win rate. How is that looking in other -- we do the likes of revenue, for example, use Currency Cloud. But would there be any reason why they wouldn't use Wise in the long run. Maybe just touch on kind of what you're seeing out there in the marketplace.

Well, I think like -- first I start with Revolut, I mean there is no reason in our mind that Revolut should not use us in 5 years from now. I mean, we're completely agnostic and we don't ask for exclusivity. We don't dictate the price, they can charge whatever they want. And we -- the big advantage that we have is that we continue to build this infrastructure. And I'd like to talk about the kind of equation. If you look at the problem that the competitors will have to solve, they would have to invest massively to build this infrastructure, these direct integrations.

One thing that surprised me is I started to work for Wise is that, I had the impression that shareholders were underestimating the value of these direct integrations. And the reason is like you don't see it on the balance sheet. There is no goodwill. There is no value on the balance sheet for direct integration. But a direct integration to our payment system take years. I mean, not in their connection, but to build a relationship. I mentioned Japan before, it took us 4 years to get to the point where Japanese authorities were allowing us to get access to the payment systems like the nonbank. So it takes years. That's something that you come back, it's not available on the market.

So when I look at the competitive landscape, I think more and more people realize that this equation is not to be solved unless you want to subsidize massively this market. And one bank tried like 2 years ago and give up after 1 year because basically, you have to have a lot of investment capacities over time while offering a take rate that is probably not competitive if you want to be breakeven. So that's why in terms of competitions, we don't look at Revolut as competitors because we are not focusing on the same thing. We are focusing on infrastructure that we want to offer to every bank, include fintech companies like Revolut.

Got it. Well, I think we're on time. So Emmanuel, thank you very much and thank you everyone in the audience. Thank you.

Thank you.

[Audio Gap] Wise, and welcome to our Q1 FY '27 Results Call. I'm Sarah Lewandowski, Director of Investor Relations. I'm joined by our CFO, Emmanuel Thomassin. Emmanuel is going to run through our results before giving you a chance to ask questions.

Before we start, we have a reminder that we will be making forward-looking statements today, including statements regarding Wise's future performance. These statements are not guarantees and can involve risks and uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to differ. Please refer to our SEC filings for more information on these risk factors. All forward-looking statements made in this call are based on current expectations, assumptions, estimates and beliefs and we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required by law.

And with that, I'll now hand over to Emmanuel.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our Q1 results call. Well, I'm pleased to present the financial results for the first quarter of the financial year 2027. We started the year with continued growth in customers and volumes. Today, I'm going to take you through first our financial highlights in the quarter; second, the drivers of our revenue growth; third, our approach to pricing. And lastly, I'll cover guidance for the year before handing over for Q&A.

But now starting with our financial highlights for Q1 2027. During the quarter, we continued to see significant growth in our performance metrics as our customers accelerate the usage of Wise for more and not only for cross-border transactions but also for everyday needs.

Our active customer base increased by 21% year-on-year to almost 12 million. Our cross-border volume increased by 26% year-on-year to $69 billion with especially strong growth in Wise Business of 39% year-on-year.

Customer holdings grew by 31% year-on-year to $41.2 billion, including $10 billion held through Wise Assets.

I will now take you through what this means for revenue growth in the quarter. In Q1, we generated $350 million in cross-border revenue from customers sending or converting currency. This represents a growth of 22% year-on-year. This increase is a little lower than the 26% growth in volume, reflecting a reduction of the average take rate from 52 basis points in Q1 '26 to 50 basis points in Q1 '27. We also generated $191 million in card and other revenues from customers using the Wise card abroad and at home, but also investing in our asset products and additional customer activities such as domestic transactions. This represents a year-on-year increase of 38% with the increase mainly due to card revenue, driven by the rise in business card spending in North America and growing personal card adoption in the U.S. and APAC. Taken together, transaction revenue totaled $541 million, representing a year-on-year growth of 27%. As highlighted in our full year results just 2 weeks ago, customers are also trusting Wise more and more with their money. At the end of June '26, customers held $31 billion on the Wise Account, up 24% compared to the previous year. As we invested these funds in liquid instruments, we generated $225 million in interest income during the quarter, up 15% year-on-year. Growth in customer balance didn't fully translate to interest income growth as we saw a reduction in gross yield from 3.3% in Q1 '26 to 2.9% in Q1 2027 as a consequence of the Central Bank decisions during 2026. So I covered different layers of our customer activities, including sending and converting money and growing with Wise assets, but also holding balance with us. Together with revenue from using the Wise Card and other revenue streams, including the fees from assets, this drive our net revenue growth. In Q1, we delivered $714 million in net revenue, up 25% year-on-year with an increasingly diversified revenue base with 51% of net revenue being driven by non-cross-border activities this quarter.

So moving to a reminder of our investment framework. Overall, we believe in driving growth through continuous investment. Our investment framework is a clear evidence of this. And by targeting a medium-term 15% to 20% income before tax margins, assuming we are able to pay our target interest income back to the customers, we are able to invest in our growth and into our pricing. This, in exchange, drives more scale and operational efficiencies, providing us with additional margin for capacity or for reinvestment. With our investment framework alongside our direct investments in the business, we seek to invest into sustainable reductions in our prices. We do this always in a position of strength. This remains a long-term goal, driving down prices for customers while building a sustainable profitable business. In our full year '26 results, I gave details on how we expect to reduce the take rate this year. We expect to continue sharing efficiency with customers as we generate extra capacity for investments. This quarter, the take rate reduced to 50 basis points, down from 51 basis points last quarter and down from 52 basis points a year ago. As I said a few weeks ago, for 2027 and depending on the additional capacity that we can generate, we expect this to be reflected in a reduction of 1 to 2 basis points in each of the following quarters. Our investments into pricing are a core feature of our business model, which supports the long-term sustainability of our business. Finally, looking ahead, we expect to see a continuing trend of rapid growth, and we'll continue to invest to achieve this. For this year, we continue to expect net revenue growth to be around the middle of a 15% to 20% range on a constant currency basis. Due to the phasing of our investments into pricing, we expect this growth to be more pronounced in the first half of the year. We have seen this in Q1 with growth of 25% in net revenue year-on-year. And we also expect that the scheduling of our investments will drive a comparable trend in our income before tax margins. While we expect full year margins to be around the high end of the 20%, 25% range, we expect this to be front half weighted, delivering results slightly above this target in H1. Well, now let's move to the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] And our question is from Mohammed Moawalla from Goldman Sachs.

Great. Emmanuel and Sarah, well done on the results. I had 2, if I may, Emmanuel. The first one, I know you sort of had flagged that you'd be running kind of ahead of your kind of annual guide in the first half of the year. When you look at the kind of the growth in Q1, I mean, was that sort of in line or above your expectations? And if we sort of assume this robust run in the first half, it would suggest that even for the 9 months, right, your kind of implied growth rate is kind of more to the low end of your guide for the remaining quarters. So does that suggest that maybe the landing zone is more likely kind of not at the midpoint, but more in the kind of upper half or towards the upper end? And if it isn't, what are the kind of factors that we should consider?

And then secondly, I noticed business had a pretty strong performance. Can you also give us a sense, I know you don't always give us quarterly breakdown of platform volume and kind of unpack the kind of drivers around the strength in business, please?

Yes. Thank you very much, Mo. In terms of growth that we've seen in our Q1 2027, obviously, we are very pleased with what we see. This is in line with what we saw last year and also like confirmed our strategy to invest and reinvest the efficiency in our business. So we think the growth that we saw in Q1 is in line with our expectations. And concerning the full year, as you know, we expect to continue to pass the efficiency that we get also into pricing. I mean like this quarter, in April, we lowered our take rate by 1 basis point. We announced 3 weeks ago that we will do 2 basis [indiscernible] in the second quarter, followed by probably one and one in Q3 and Q4. So the first part of the year is obviously not impacted or not so much by the price reduction, while the rest of this -- or the second half of the year will be. So on a projection, we guide you or we guide the market that we would be at the middle of the range from 15% to 20%. It's fair to say that we always take a conservative view. And we feel comfortable with this guidance as of today.

On platform, as you can imagine, we're super excited. This is always -- we leverage our infrastructure. This is the best way to acquire customers. We don't need to acquire them one by one. But then we provide this infrastructure to partners, which in reverse, opened the -- we again then indirectly their customers using us. So we are extremely bullish. We have a nice pipeline. And I'm very happy to announce that today, we're at 6%, roughly around 6% of our total cross-border volume generated by the partners. So as also Kristo mentioned, like 2 weeks ago, we have a nice pipeline. And yes, we're looking ahead with confidence.

And next, we have Aditya from Bank of America.

Thanks for taking my questions. Just a couple. So customer growth was quite strong, up 21%. Could you just comment on how that maybe looked like by region? Are you starting to see some of the benefits of the marketing spend you've been doing across some of those markets?

And second, you mentioned very strong spending on business cards in North America and growing adoption of the personal card in U.S. and APAC. Any color on that as well in terms of what's driving that and maybe is that more features or just part of the marketing of -- push as well?

Yes. Thank you for your questions. Well, in general, we have growth across the regions. We invest in all regions. As you know, because you mentioned marketing last year, we've done campaign in all segments almost. But we're very pleased with what we see the evolution in APAC, but especially in America, I mentioned businesses today, which are growing very nicely in terms of active customers and also volumes. That's fair to say that these regions is benefiting from our investments that we've done. And we will disclose a bit more in half year in terms of region development, but APAC as we mentioned before, and the North America, especially U.S., are overperforming.

In terms of APAC card revenues, this is in line with the customer activities. And I think there is -- you could expect that APAC and also Americas are performing extremely well here.

Thank you. Now we have Justin Forsythe from UBS.

Emmanuel and Sarah, a couple of questions, if I don't mind. The first one here, I just wanted to talk a little bit between the relationship between revenue growth and the IBT guidance. So both were confirmed here, and you're pointing everybody to the midpoint of the revenue guide and reiterating the high end of the IBT guide. So should we think about it as the 17.5%, let's say, the midpoint equals that, call it, 24%, 25% IBT margin, meaning if you were to overshoot and do, say, 20%, the high end of the revenue guide, how does the correlation with margins work there? Would you then invest down to the IBT margin, say, with price cuts, with additional headcount or something of that nature?

And then second question, you flagged personal card adoption in the U.S., and that's really interesting because I feel like in the past, you've flagged actually challenges to winning in card adoption in the U.S. given all of the rewards from interchange that customers can get in spend. And so I just wonder if you could elaborate a little bit more on how you're winning in the U.S. Is that expats that are spending elsewhere? Is it people that are spending in the U.S.? I assume you mean U.S. domiciled people spending elsewhere on the Wise card. So maybe if you could just elaborate on that a little bit, if you don't mind.

Yes, absolutely. So yes, I mean, within the guidance on IBT that we give today, this is assuming that we will be at the middle of the range for our net revenue guidance, so between 15% and 20%. You mentioned like if we overperform what will be our reaction or what would be the consequence on IBT, we will first look at do we have space to reinvest, add good return. We will as mentioned, invest, not spend. So for us, we will consider to accelerate these investments. But if we don't find room to invest, then the consequence would be like it could have an impact on IBT. But it's too early to say. I think like today, we feel comfortable with this guidance. And we will always first look at reinvestment because these reinvestments are paying off. We see the growth rate in all metrics. And then we will continue -- as such, we feel like do we have enough room to invest and radically to gain more market share in terms of total TAM that you know is really, really large.

In terms of card adoptions, this is correlated to our business customer growth. Clearly, in America, we see a very acceleration of these business customers. And accordingly, you have a correlation to the card spending and card revenue that we generate from this.

Got it. I thought -- Emmanuel, I thought you did also say personal card adoption in the U.S. was strong as well. But maybe, maybe I misinterpreted that. And thanks again for the questions and congrats on a great quarter. I appreciate it.

Thank you very much. I mean this is both. But like obviously, business will have larger volumes and hence, we generate more revenue per customer, if you will if you look at the business revenue on cards.

Great. Thanks, Justin. Next question is from Cris Kennedy from William Blair.

Historically, you've talked about or you've given some interesting statistics about the outcomes when you establish direct connections in certain countries. Can you provide any color on kind of the benefits that you're seeing from Japan or Brazil, some of your more recent direct connections relative to history?

Yes. Thank you, Chris. I mean in general, as you know, this is core to our value proposition. This direct integration make us so unique. This is why we know we get partners joining us that they're using our platform or direct integrations. In general, the direct integration are beneficial for our cost base. I mean we generate efficiency with us. This is true with servicing direct -- instant payments, and we had 77% of instant payment in Q1 we continue to increase this percentage from 75% to 77% have their -- not only satisfying our customers, but also reduce the number of contacts that we have with the servicing. So this is direct cost savings. With that, also direct integrations, we are avoiding to work with partner banks for certain countries because then we can provide the liquidity faster. So that have also some savings on the cost of sales. So in general, direct connection, and we see that with all direct connection, a beneficial for, for efficiency, efficiency that we can then decide to reinvest either in OpEx or in pricing.

Got it. And just to follow up, are the benefits in Brazil and Japan in line with the other direct connections that you've had? Or any observations within those 2 markets.

Sure. Absolutely. I think like I'm not able to tell you right now exactly the amplitude of the savings. I mean, like as you know, in the past, we've seen like the [ cost EBITDA ] by 9x in the U.K. It's too early to say right now for this, but we will give you more color as we go through, and then we can start with H1 results.

And now we have Sven from Barclays.

Maybe first, can you comment what revenue growth was in the quarter on a constant FX basis and if there was any change in the underlying trends from where you exited the year?

And then secondly, it's very encouraging to see that business active customer growth has accelerated again and now accelerated for a few quarters. I would be interested if you could share any color on how you see this developing from here?

Sure. Well, we don't give like constant currency revenue. But what I can give you is basically the constant currency on volume. So we were at 26% as we are defined today, and the constant currency growth rate for our cross-border volume would have been at 24%. So that gives you a bit the direction of travel, the difference between reporting currency and constant currency. I must confess, I forgot the second question, if someone can...

Maybe I can quickly check on -- and in principle, should we -- should the volume and the gap between the constant FX and reported volume growth be similar or yes, a good proxy for what net revenue was in the quarter?

Yes, absolutely. I mean it's a proxy, right? I mean like it to give you a very good direction of the difference that you will see between constant currency and reporting currency. And on the business customer growth because that was, I think, the second part of your question. I think like what you see is there are all the investments that we've done in here, if I may highlight one in particular, this is the benefit of having a dedicated team in servicing, contacting our business -- the business customers proactively and making sure that not only we react to their questions, but we also look at the business and provide services that they might be not aware of or functions that they should use in their workflows. So more and more, we see the benefits of being proactive, and this -- the reward is the customers or businesses that are -- the satisfaction of those businesses and then grow the business with us.

We now have Pavan from Citi.

Firstly, just on the elasticity of volumes, you reduced take rates slightly this quarter and plan to continue [ to see ] through the year. Could you maybe talk about the timing of when you expect to see the benefits of this? For example, have you already started seeing a benefit of the recent reductions within the quarter itself. And then secondly, volume per customer growth has slowed in Q1. I appreciate that VPC has more of an output and there's a mix effect there. But is there anything specific to kind of call out?

Okay. So on elasticity volume, I think clearly, elasticity for us is a long-term game, if I may say so. We don't expect short-term benefit from this, especially when we reduce the take rate by 1 basis point. But we know that on the long term, that is the reason why you or businesses or even partners are choosing to work with us. The combination of the infrastructure that we provide at a very low take rate will always be like the reason why people at the end choose to work with us. That's why the -- I will not expect a short-term positive impact or in terms of getting customers before -- because of their price reduction. This is a long-term game. And this is for us part of our core of the mission. We want to continue to reduce the take rate because we know that at the end, again, this is the reason why our customers use us.

In terms of VPC, I don't -- I will not read too much into that. This is not really due to the combination of retail business and partners. The VPC is less and less KPI that we use. Also because of the diversification of our revenue structure. And yes, indeed, there's also like a volatility component to that.

Next, we have Hannes from Jefferies.

Can you -- I mean, I appreciate the details around the take rate declines expected for this year? Can you just take a little bit help us how we should think of the moving parts from going from Q1 plus 25% growth to come to reach to the midpoint of the 15% to 20%. If I'm thinking you had quite a nice resilient gross yield, that was one part of it, then the take rate should decline. Should we expect card spend and other revenues to hold up and thinking about the customer growth, do you think that can remain above 20%?

Well, thank you, Hannes. In general, as you said, like the take rate reduction will take part in Q2 with 2 basis points and then 1 basis point most probably in Q3 and Q4. As I said, like your -- the vast majority still today or majority of our revenues is coming from cross-border volume. So the impact on pricing will be perceived on our revenue, on the net revenue. And that's why when we forecast for the rest of the year, we think that the pricing impact will be on the growth rate, and that's why we guide like between the 15% to 20%. Yes, that's basically the philosophy behind it.

Maybe you can comment on the other parts, like customer growth.

Oh, yes. So in terms of customer growth, I think you've seen like that we are -- still have a very high KPIs. We're very happy with the customer growth, especially in business. This is in line with what we saw last year. As we continue to invest in OpEx, in marketing and increase our quality -- the service of -- quality of our service, we expect basically this customer growth to continue. And hopefully, we're very happy with the return that we get in terms of customer growth, especially in business that we saw in Q1.

We have Craig Mcdowell now from JPMorgan.

I just want to pick up on a point Pavan made of VPC and in particular, on personal VPC. I know a year or 2 ago, you were talking about very deliberately targeting price reductions to generate higher VPC customers. It feels like that's run its course. Should we be thinking about stable VPC on the personal side of the business, going forward or even a decline, if you're moving into perhaps -- APAC regions, perhaps? And if you could comment on that, that would be helpful.

The second question, just a brief tactical one. Any kind of benefit that we should sort of discount in the Q1, maybe even Q2 performance just from World Cup, presumably quite a lot of activity happening in the U.S. that you may well be benefiting from. Anything to call out there would be helpful.

Well, in terms of -- I'll start with the benefit of the World Cup. I think like it's not that significant in our Q2 -- Q1 results. I -- we're more looking at events that happened like a more geographic political event. I mentioned briefly like the 26% cross-border volume growth compared to last year where we did have some political decisions around liberation there and so on and so forth. I don't think that we have a massive benefit from the World Cup compared to the entire business.

In terms of VPC, indeed, I mean, like the VPC per customers might be different from region to region, depending on the GDP of the countries or the region itself. That's depending on where the volume will grow, we will see VPC declining in a specific region. But overall, I think like VPC is not the metrics that we use for the reasons that I explained before. The customer mix make it very, very difficult to use this as a real KPI to measure the business. We prefer to look at the deposits of our customers, which is a very strong sign of the trust that they have in Wise and them growing their money. I think that's a very strong KPIs. This is true for retail, but this is true for businesses as well.

Now we have Alex from BNP.

Yes, just a couple of questions. One is slightly technical, but just thinking of the share buyback program that you talked about a few weeks ago, just curious if this has started already. And if you're buying back shares on the U.K. line or the U.S. line, how we should think of the cadence of a share buyback? So that would be my first question.

Second question, because you alluded to it just now Emmanuel, of customer deposit growth, which was quite healthy in the quarter. I think on the per customer basis, it's still down a little bit. How should we think about that sort of customer deposits on the per customer basis slowing down? Is it a function of say, a fiscal Q1 that might be a bit travel-heavy with people who might have lower current balances in their accounts. Just curious how to think about?

Thank you very much, Alex. In terms of buyback, we are an executive mode -- execution mode. We do have, for the full year, the approval of our regulators, so we are executing on this. Our aim is not to have any impact on the trading. So in terms of volume that we will buy per month nor on which market we will buy. So we aim to buy on both London market and New York market. We don't want to have any impact on liquidity or on the share price. That's a kind of philosophy. We will use, for example, ADTV as a metric, like we look at what is the average and we will put a threshold so that we make sure that we don't have any kind of -- we don't influence the trading. But we are in full execution mode, and that will last for the next 12 months.

In terms of customer deposit and the growth of it, I will not read too much into it at this moment. We said this is a snapshot I think I would like to wait until we have a 6-month view in the year to be -- give you more detail and to comment a little bit more.

Thanks, Alex. We don't have any more questions. So thank you, everyone, for joining us. Thank you for all your questions.

Thank you, everyone, for your support. Have a good evening.

Thank you.

Hello from Wise, and welcome to our FY'26 results call, our first time presenting financial results since the completion of our dual listing. I'm Martin Adams, Head of Owner Relations. Joining us today are our Co-Founder and CEO, Kristo Kaarmann; and our CFO, Emmanuel Thomassin.

We'll start with opening comments from the team and then we'll be happy to answer your questions. If you would like to ask a question, then please raise your hand in the Zoom webinar.

Before we begin, let me quickly cover the safe harbor. During this call, we'll be making certain forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual outcomes or results to differ materially from those indicated in these statements. These factors are detailed in our results materials and our SEC filings. All forward-looking statements are based on current assumptions, estimates and beliefs and we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Thank you.

And now I'll turn it over to Kristo.

Thanks, Martin, and hi, everyone. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm going to start with financial and customer highlights from the year, and then I'll hand over to Emmanuel who will go into the detail of the numbers.

So starting with financials. Our net revenue grew by 19% to $2.5 billion in financial year '26. After allowing for the cost to serve our customers and the investments in future growth, the income before tax margin was 26%. These numbers are in line with the medium-term guidance ranges as we set out ahead of the U.S. listing. So let's take a look into what's driving this growth. In FY '26, we helped 19 million customers to move $243 billion internationally. This was 31% more cross-border volume than the year before. And our customers are using us for more than just cross-border transfers. Last year, they spent $44 billion on their Wise cards. It's up 37% compared to the year before, and they trusted Wise to hold $3 billion on their Wise accounts. That's 40% more than the end of the year before.

So thanks to this unique and powerful financial infrastructure we're building around the world. Now 75% of transfers are completed instantly. That is in less than 20 seconds. Our direct connections into domestic payment systems, in addition to our large payments network, helped lower our unit costs over time. So that we can price each cross-border transaction profitably and yet charging customers just 0.52% or 52 basis points on average over the year. We've also seen more customers trusting us withholding their money.

Our Wise assets product lets customers earn a return that closely matches the central bank rate for the currency they hold. In U.S. dollars, for example, customers can earn 3.4 % on the dollars they hold with us. Our speed, price and convenience are all thanks to the investments we've made and continue to make into our infrastructure and products. We build on our investments in the infrastructure. Over this last year, this allowed us to launch new features and partnerships.

We went live with direct connections into the Japanese and Brazilian domestic payment systems. We also added multiple new financial services alliances, for example, in South Africa, the UAE and Thailand.

In servicing, AI automations are increasing our bandwidth. For example, 50% of support chats are now resolved without a human. On the product side, we made the Wise account more useful to people and businesses in many ways, including launching Wise assets in Brazil and making it easier for businesses to pay and get paid through new invoicing tools. More banks and financial institutions also started using our infrastructure.

We were excited to announce Raiffeisen, UniCredit, MBSP in Malaysia and Capitec in South Africa joining Wise platform in FY '26. We will expand our infrastructure and build more products on it to create even better outcomes for larger numbers of customers over time. And while we're really pleased to help 19 million customers in FY '26, there are many more people and businesses around the world. We still want to reach.

As you can see on the next slide, so looking at our share of total cross-border payments, we moved around 5% of the world's money cross borders for individuals last year. and just less than 1% of the small and medium businesses volumes. So we have a huge opportunity ahead of us in this $43 trillion mark. In just 15 years, we've grown from 0 to now moving $0.25 trillion across borders. We remain focused on this opportunity and our mission of building the network to move and manage the world's money.

And with that, Emmanuel, please take us through the numbers.

Hello, everyone, and thank you, Kristo. Well, we appreciate you joining us for our first earning call as a dual listing company. I am pleased to present our financial report for our financial year 2026. It has been a year defined by robust growth which provide the opportunity to strategically reinvest back into the business. And during my session today, I take you through, first, our growth in net revenue drivers. Second, our investment framework and how we are focused on creating investment capacity by driving efficiencies in key areas of investments. Third, our margin and outlook. And lastly, I'll provide an update on capital allocation.

We achieved significant growth in our main performance metrics as our customers are using Wise more and not only for cross border transactions but also for everyday needs. Our active customer base increased by 21% year-on-year to reach $19 million with over 7 million new active customers joining Wise in 2026. Our cross border volume increased by 31% year-on-year to $243 billion with stronger growth from Wise business and Wise platform. The latter represented around 5% of volume for the year.

Our customers spent $44 billion with a Wise card, a growth of 37% year-on-year and customer holdings grew by 40% year-on-year, totaling $39 billion, including $9 billion held through Wise assets.

I will now take you through the different drivers of our financial performance, starting with how customers' activity drives top line growth. 2026, we generated around $1.3 billion in cross border revenue from customers sending or conventing currency. This represents a growth of 17% year-on-year. This increase is lower than the 31% growth in volume, reflecting a reduction of the average take rate from 58 basis points in 2025 to 52 basis points in 2026, which I will cover in more detail later.

We also generated $392 million in card revenue from customers using their card abroad and at home. And this represents a year-on-year increase of 40%, mainly driven by strong adoption in the European Union, in Australia and in the U.K. Lastly, additional customer activity such as domestic transactions and investing in our asset products generate $245 million in other revenue, up by 26% year-on-year. And this increase was on the back of stellar growth in the full year 2025, where other revenue grew over 60% as a result of increased pricing for domestic transactions. So taking together these different streams of revenue from our customers totaled $1.9 billion in transaction revenue, representing a year-on-year growth of 22%.

The increased adoption of the Wise account has driven faster expansion in our non-core border revenue source. These now account for around 1/3 of our transaction revenue, which helps to further diversify our overall revenue profile. As I highlighted a few weeks ago at our listing presentation, customers are also trusting Wise more and more with their money. In March 2026, customers held $30 billion on the Wise account, up 36% compared to the previous year. As we invested these funds in liquid instruments, we generated $806 million in interest income during the year, up 6% year-on-year. And growth in customer balance didn't fully translate to interest income growth as we saw a reduction in gross fields -- in gross yields from 3.9% in 2025 to 3% in 2026.

I'd now like to remind you of our interest income framework under which we would seek to first use the first 1% yield to cover the cost of the Wise account; and second, to retain 20% above the first 1% yield as a profit. And third, we distribute 80% back to the customers. We've built this framework to avoid cyclic movements of the interest rates set by the central banks like the Fed whilst making the account interesting to customers.

In our financial year 2026, we were able to pay $197 million out of the year, $806 million back to customers. So roughly half of the 80% target. This is still below our target due to geographical restrictions like in the U.K. which represent over 50% of interest income unpaid to customers and where as of today, we are not able to pay interest on customer balance. Overall, I just covered a different layer of customer activity, sending and converting money, spending with a Wise card, growing with Wise assets and holding balances with us. Together, these drive our net revenue growth.

In the full year 2026, we delivered $2.5 billion in net revenue, up 19% year-on-year with an incisively diversified revenue base.

Moving to our investment framework and the key areas of investments for long-term value generation. If you've been following Wise for a while, you will have seen a similar version of this slide. Overall, we believe in driving growth through continuous investment. And our investment framework is the key evidence of this. By targeting medium-term 15% to 20% income before tax margins, assuming we are able to pay our target interest income back to the customers, we are able to invest in our growth and into our pricing. This in exchange drives more scale and operational efficiencies, providing us with additional margin capacity for the investments.

In full year '26, we proved again that we can operate efficiently while simultaneously investing in the infrastructure that powers our future growth redeploying profits into long-term capabilities and growing our teams. During the year, we increased our direct investments into the business through growth in operating expenses of 39% year-on-year to $1.9 billion. We were able to achieve this as we successfully recruit and onboard over 2,000 new Wisers. And this is the result of a combination of flow attrition, which allow us to focus on resources into filing new roles and through refining our recruitment processes.

For the coming year, we expect to continue investing back into the business applied at a slightly lower pace as we aim to combine this with investments into our pricing. I would like now to cover the different areas of investments in more details. In 2026, our transaction expenses as well as transaction and credit losses were $527 million, up 35% year-on-year. This reflect the cost of providing our services. And we are continuously seeking efficiencies in this area, making sure we get the best terms from our partners as we were in scale, while also becoming more efficient in how we deliver our products to our customers.

Transaction expenses as a percentage of net revenue increased to 21% and as mainly as a result of a one-off U.S. GAAP adjustments in relation to FX on certain government bonds of around $70 million, which increased transaction expenses and this was offset in other comprehensive income. Excluding this impact, operating expenses increased by 17%, lower than transaction revenue growth. And going forward, we have changed our investment strategy to take into account the U.S. GAAP implications.

For the year '27, till 2027 we're expecting to see further efficiencies in transaction balances during the year. This is part of our business model, which allow us to create increased capacities for investment.

Moving on to our investments to require onboard and service our growing customer base. In 2026, we increased our marketing spend by over 60% to $172 million. We are focused on new channels and increased brand marketing investments. And we have also increased the size of Wise platform and Wise business sales teams. And we are pleased with the return that we are seeing from this effort as we continue to lean into marketing investments while targeting a minimum 20% return on this and also supported by a strong 70% customer acquisition through word of mouth.

We are also investing in offering the best onboarding experience to our customers, while complying with regulatory requirements around the globe. With around 1/3 of our employees in functions related to compliance, we invest in developing robust processes to drive customer trust. And we are combining our efforts with increased automation as we still improve customers' outcomes. In the full year 2026, we increased our servicing spend by 38% to $397 million, mainly driven by amplifiers. So we believe these strategic investments are vital, especially considering the vast opportunities ahead as we focus on acquiring new customers, while we also foster deeper long-term loyalty with our existing base.

In the full year '26, more than 7 million active customers complete their first cross border transaction with wires. And this represents a growth rate of 20% year-on-year and give us confidence in the value of our investments. The increased adoption of our products is also a function of our investments in technology. In 2026, we invest $434 million, up 38% year-on-year into tech and development to launch new products and also maintaining our existing products and rolling them out in new regions. We are not just growing our tech teams to achieve this.

We are also implementing AI tools to increase their efficiency. We now have over 1,000 engineers deploying code 6,000 times per month on average. And finally, we are also investing into our core functions. In 2026, we increased our spend by 3% year-on-year to $382 million, driven by a preparation for the dual listing and introduction on NASDAQ, with a one-off expense of $45 million as well as growth in regulatory and hiring costs.

Within our investment framework, alongside our direct investments into the business, we seek to invest into a sustainable reduction of our price. These remain long term, driving down price for customers while building a sustainable profitable business. In 2026, while the average take rate reduced by 6 basis points from 58 to 52 basis points, this mostly reflect price change implemented in the full year '25. We finished the year with a take rate of 51 basis points in Q4 2026 versus 53% in Q4 2025, reflecting a 2 basis point reduction during the year.

Looking forward, we expect to continue sharing this efficiencies with customers as we generate extra capacities for investments. And for the year depending on the additional capacity we can generate, we expect this to be reflecting in a reduction of 1 to 2 basis points each quarter. Our investments into pricing are a core feature of our business model, which support the long-term sustainability of our business.

I'd like now to cover our margin in [indiscernible]. We delivered strong margins alongside the strategic investments, including pricing. In full year '26, income before tax was $660 million with a margin of 26% as we seek to deliver margins in line with our medium-term targets. This margin demonstrates that you can offer customers -- that we can offer customers the best price while investing into building a highly profitable business. And the 2 objectives are complementary not contradictory. Our investment framework is for the demonstrating our financial projections for the medium term and the upcoming fiscal year.

Looking first at the medium term. We are maintaining our target of 15% to 20% compound annual growth for net revenue using 2024 as a benchmark. We also target income before tax margin of 15% to 20%, assuming our goal of returning 80% of interest income to customers is met. Otherwise, we anticipate margins to range between 20% to 25% and 25%. And this assumes no material changes to interest rates by the Central Bank.

For 2027 specifically, we expect net revenue growth to be around the middle of our medium-term guidance of 15% to 20%. In terms of the shape of the year, due to the raising of our investments into pricing, we expect this growth to be more pronounced in the first half of the year. Similarly, we expect that the scheduling of our reinvestments to the business will drive a comparable trend in our profitability. While we aim for full year margins around the high end of the 20% to 25% range, we expect this to be front-half weighted, delivering results slightly above this target in H1.

Our full year '27 guidance reflect the latest rates published by the central banks, such as the Fed, the U.K. Central Bank and the ECB. So before we conclude, I'd like to provide an update on our capital allocation framework. This is underpinned by our business strategy, which aims to deliver strong profitable growth, which then translate to strong cash generation. Under our framework, we seek to continue making prudent financial decisions in the best financial structure to deliver our long-term mission. This starts with prudent management of our strong level of cash. We maintain a strong capital and cash position to cover regulatory requirements, but also to ensure resilience and flexibility for future plans. And as such, we seek to maintain the buffer above regulatory requirements to allow for this flexibility, for example, for future product expansion or license applications.

Well, the next step is returning capital to you, our owners. To allow for the flexibility I just mentioned, we review our product to shareholder return on a yearly basis. So in 2026, we allocated over $450 million to the repurchase of nearly 36 million shares into our employee share trust program including the purchase of around 25 million shares related to historical share options. And today, we are announcing our intention to commence a new share purchase program which we expect to be over $0.5 billion, of which around 40% will be allocated to our recurring employee share trust program, and the remaining 60% will be used to buy back shares into treasury.

Well, to conclude, we continue to execute on our strategy with discipline, and we are seeing strong results. We're growing our customer base increasing customer engagement, diversifying revenue and investing for the future and all of these while delivering on our growth and profit targets. The fundamentals of our business are very strong, and we believe that we are uniquely placed to tackle the huge opportunity in front of us that Kristo mentioned at the very start of the presentation.

And now we move to Q&A. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Emmanuel. So we'll now move to Q&A, please do raise your hand in the Zoom webinar, if you'd like to ask a question. And our first question in the list here is Cris Kennedy from William Blair. Over to you, Cris.

Great. Can you just provide an update on some of the key initiatives and areas of investment as you focus more on the U.S. market?

Thank you very much, Cris. I'll start, and we are investing strongly behind the U.S., and we've been doing this for the past few years. We are also seeing a great response from our customer base. So our growth in the U.S. has been really strong. The initiatives that we're deploying to the U.S. are similar to the ones that we're rolling out in the rest of the world. So we have a large customer base, both on personal and small business side using wise for transactional purposes, but also a growing customer base using the Wise account and the Wise account for businesses in the U.S. So the story that we're seeing in the U.S. is relatively similar to the rest of the world, but engagement has been fantastic. .

If I may add on similar to other offices in the world. We've been investing in our employees. We built our structure in the United States to support the growth that we anticipate. You've probably seen, hopefully, increase marketing campaign in the U.S. this year. We've been a little bit more visible than in the past, and we're really pleased with it. And we also have -- we invest in servicing and sales. Sales in business, we see an acceleration of the growth of our small midsized businesses. And on platform, and we think that we have a really good role to play here. We're exciting. There is more than 4,000 banks in the U.S., and we think that our platform business can offer a very great solution for them and for the customers.

Great. And then just as a follow-up, Emmanuel, you mentioned the cadence for fiscal 2027. Can you make any comment on the first quarter of this year?

So we took the take rate by 1 basis point down in the first quarter. And I think like this is the cadence you should anticipate with a slight acceleration, maybe I mentioned like 1% to 2% in the second quarter. But overall, we will do this on quarter-by-quarter. That's what we expect for this year.

Thank you very much. Next question comes from Justin Forsythe at UBS.

Good to chat to you again, Kristo, Emmanuel and team. I wanted to ask a bit about the price cut. So in a bear case, or you consider a bear case, but you'll be exiting the year nearly 40 basis points. Could you just give more detail on where you're doing the price cuts I would love, Emmanuel, if you could talk a little bit more about the -- of the ROI. So are you guys doing stuff like A/B testing to determine instances where price cuts work, where they don't work and where you're planning to lean in a bit there. And just in general, is there a point when you're going to hit diminishing marginal returns of price cuts? Is that at the longer-term 10 basis point target? Or could it be before that?

Thank you, Justin, for your questions. I think for us, price adjustments is a part of our reinvestment strategy. I highlight very like our investments that we've done this year into the business. We reduced only, if I may say, by 2 basis points in '26, the take rate. In general, we think that price is the #1 argument for customers to come to us and to users. This is how we build the moat alongside our infrastructure and the quality of the service that we built, and that's why we put so much foot in that. It's fair to say that we are -- we don't put any floor any limits, and we think that the price if you want to talk about price elasticity is a long-term game. So we don't expect immediate return of a price reduction, but we know that at the end, on the long-term price matter for every single customers that are using us. That's probably where we stop now.

Got it. No, that's really helpful. And just one minor follow-up, if I might, on the platform TPV. So you said it was 5% for the full year. I think you were maybe a bit above that in 3Q. So should we assume that the 4Q exit rate was above that 5%? Or any further updates on the progress in Wise platform that you can give? .

Well, I can tell you on the progress, we signed Capitec and Capitec went live. So we have -- with the first customer -- I mean, from the African continent, and this is the #1 bank in South Africa. So they are not part of this 5% that I mentioned before, but you can see the traction, and you can expect our pipeline to be attractive. I think the 5% is in line with what we guided at Honest Day on the midterm guidance to be at 10% midterm and long term to be at 50% of the cross-border volume.

Thank you. So our next question comes from Craig from Craig [indiscernible] Partners.

So could you talk about head count additions going forward. Hiring has been elevated for some time now. Is there any sign of this slowing down? Or is the plan to continue adding head count in the current rate?

Thank you, Craig. I think we have been very pleased with having these headcount. This is -- you can see the reflection, let's say, in our growth rate. I mean, last year, our cross-border volume grew by 31% and the revenues grew so like extent and the numbers of customers grew and so on and so forth. The combination of the investments and the head count that we're having is to serve this acceleration of customer growth that we see I mentioned today, 7 million new customers made 1 transfer, cross-border transfer last year. We end up with 19 million active customers. And to serve these customers, we're investing in servicing.

Although we invest in artificial intelligence, we think that we are -- in order to make on investments or have a good return on investment, we need to onboard customers in the best manner and to serve them in the best manner. So assuming that we continue to have this return in terms of growth, and we're monitoring our investments very, very closely. I think it's fair to say that we will also continue to invest for this year.

Thank you. And the next question comes from Mohammed Moawalla at Goldman Sachs. Over to you, Mo.

Great. A couple from me. Emmanuel, just coming back on the sort of the pace of OpEx growth. Because I know there was some sort of positive other income that helped you in the second half, which meant that the kind of OpEx run rate was quite elevated. How do we think very kind of simplistically of kind of the OpEx trajectory over the course of FY 2027.

And then secondly, on just the buyback, is this a onetime? Or is it something that you're looking to kind of perhaps to revisit on an annual basis. And then Kristo, in terms of just the pipeline and the momentum around the platform business, can you give us sort of some color around the pipeline where you are traction in the U.S.? I know you've got Wise Connect coming up next week, but just curious to kind of get your perception around how that momentum and how the ramps are going from kind of prior wins?

I'll start and take the easy one. As I will repeat Emmanuel, we're very excited about the platform pipeline. You're going to be hearing about new names that will be coming out. And as you rightly pointed out, it's a combination of new names that join Wise platform, but also the deeper embedding the expansion of the existing names. So we love the customers that we have on Wise platform, and we love the new one that are coming on board. .

I would then continue on your first question and what kind of trend can we see there in the cost? You mentioned rightly, so the one-off that we've seen due to our listing. If you exclude, if you adjust the transactional cost by this $70 million impact of the U.S. GAAP, then you will see that we were -- the transactional costs grew by 17%, which is below cross-border volume and also revenue. And the year before, we had an increase of 12%. So basically, what you can expect is us to gain further efficiencies on transactional expenses.

Other OpEx, as I mentioned before, we continue to invest. We are excited about the return that we've seen on marketing, but the same on servicing. We invest in artificial intelligence, which is improve our NPS score. So we think that we will continue on that path. On buyback, we take an annual decision, we will revisit this annually. This is the largest buyback that we've ever done. This is over $0.5 billion that we -- the decision we make this year. We want to remain opportunistic with our cash in terms of which decision we can take and any opportunity that may come up in the future. So yes, we will revisit on an annual basis of buy back but this is clearly a clear component of our capital allocation.

And now we go over to Pavan at Citi. Pavan?

Firstly, could you maybe touch on some of the exit trends in Q4 and maybe trends so far in Q1, given the FX volatility that we've seen and then secondly, on the midterm guidance, I appreciate the clarity on the net interest income assumptions for 2027. But could you outline the net interest income assumptions that are baked into your midterm growth guidance? .

I will start with our midterm guidance and interest rates. I mean we don't assume any kind of massive FX movements in our guidance and nor in interest rates, we are forecasting a stable interest rate environment. So no massive move in the year from the [ Central ] bank to be expected. That said, we reflected already the decision, I think, last week or 2 weeks ago from the European Central Bank to move from 2% to 2.25%. And I will need help on the first question. Martin, do you remember the first one?

[indiscernible] effect.

So I covered that. Okay. Sorry, apologies, Pavan.

The first is on kind of [indiscernible] the cross-border business and trends so far in kind of Q1.

Yes. So as I said, our guidance is always based on constant currency. So we don't speculate on FX movement, it's on constant currency base.

So I meant more on the operational business. So the cross-border business, the cross-border transfer business trends...

Okay. Sorry, my mistake. Sorry, I understood this. So usually FX movement is beneficial for us. I mean, any movements in FX will drive more cross-border volume because our customers obviously will take advantage of the movement. So in that case, FX is a driver for cross-border transactions...

Yes. Thank you, Martin. In 3 weeks, we're going to give maybe more color as we will publish our Q1 results.

And now we go to Craig over JPMorgan. Over to you, Craig.

Just on the first question on the Platform business. Can I ask whether money laundering allegations or newspaper headlines in Europe couple of weeks go ahead -- any impact on your existing platform partnerships, perhaps slowing with land new corridors being [indiscernible]? And similarly, if it's impacted to all the funnel of opportunities, whether that's sort of come up in conversations.

Secondly, just realizing you're not coming sort of a quite meaningful sort of deposit taker in the U.K. whether there's been any development with the U.K. regulator for us talking about sort of changing how you might or could be getting repaying interest to your customers now that you've just got to since you're getting to a material meaningful size, whether that changes the or setting with the [indiscernible]. So thank you.

Thank you, Craig. I didn't maybe fully hear your second question, but I'll start with the first one. So we don't really have any new update from the prosecutor at all in the topic that was in news. And this is in line with the infrequent nature of the interaction with us. And to your question, we don't have any detailed findings. We continue the business as usual, and we're focused on serving our direct customers and platform partners. So -- if there's anything new, we will update you. .

I'm sorry, just to clarify my second question. Just any change at all from the U.K. regulator as you become a more meaningful deposit taker maybe on your regulatory change and maybe being asked by the regulator to begin paying back some kind of interest to your deposits?

We are very much hoping that U.K. regime would also allow the returning of interest to customers that it currently doesn't. There haven't been any news on the regulatory space from that perspective as far as I'm aware.

Thanks, Kristo. So the next question will come from Hannes Jefferies. Over to you, Hannes.

I got also a couple of questions. Maybe the first 1 is around your recent acquisition of Expatica, maybe you can talk a little bit about how much money you spend, what's the contribution should be we should put in. And then maybe around the direct connections. You reached now 75% of almost instant settlement. Can you talk about the pipeline here and then also any of the recent announcements, like, for example, Japan, are they already live? And is this the reason why the transaction costs should trend down as a percentage of net revenue.

Thank you, Hannes. I'll start with the direct connections. Indeed, you're right, we generally expect to see the transaction expenses to come down. The direct connections cut out the middleman, cut out the cost from the payments and this is a very important strategy for us to keep adding the direct connections in all the countries where we operate. Indeed, we were very excited to connect to Pix in Brazil this last year. Pix is a very advanced, very new system and very well-adopted system in Brazil. So that has been a great journey.

In some ways, Japan is the opposite. Zengin is a 50-year-old system and connecting was also a fascinating experience. So we're happy that we can kind of connect the 2 worlds into our platform. And deliver this amazing experience of variance and payments at a lower and lower cost around the world. So this is definitely something you'll hear more about, hopefully, in new countries as we go into this financial year.

And then Hannes, I will cover your first question, Expatica. So maybe to set the scene, we don't have a legacy of M&A transactions. We've done only one in our history that qualifies an M&A. It was in India to get a license. And this is not really in our focus in the next few years, but we will also look at opportunities to tell it clearly. This one specifically, you might have seen the announcement is not very material, but it's part of our marketing strategy and as opposed to operational M&A transaction, if you wish. So yes, Expatica we spot, but it's more in our marketing strategy.

Thanks, Emmanuel. And our last question comes from Aditya at Bank of America. Over to you, Aditya.

A few from my side. Firstly, on oing back to the question on pricing. Could you maybe just give us a bit more color on the type of [indiscernible] you're making, maybe which specific markets or corridors? And more specifically, is it more targeted at maybe some higher-value transactions like you did, I think, in some of the previous correction cycles. Just a bit more color on exactly where that's coming.

Second, on platform, you mentioned that Capitec is not in the 5% and that actually it's already live -- in general, are you seeing that the ramp-up of new logos once they sign up that's taking place quicker than previously, are you seeing more sort of traction in getting those volumes up given you have some -- already some large banks as maybe your reference point?

And then finally, any update on the application of the U.S. banking charter, which happened previously and many implications of that comes through.

I will start with the pricing. So I mean, the pricing is in general, you can assume that we are following the same logic as in the past. This is a cost-plus exercise. So we look at every route, every service that we provide to businesses, platform or retail and targeting the same margin. We want to be agnostic. And in that sense, we will not -- I can't tell you like in 1 quarter, 2 quarters, we will target that specific route. It will be a result of the efficiency that we can gain in certain corridors. And in general, the pricing is a reflection of efficiency and cost discipline. In the past, you're right, we've done also like some efforts on the high transaction customers. I don't want to disclose too much about our decision in the future for obvious reasons, but this is a kind of reflection that we will have.

And then on the platform, if I may continue towards the second part of your question, yes, we -- the ramp-up of customers, new customers joining, you could assume that at the beginning, the ramp-up, you will have a similar reaction customers, platform partners we first test our product and test the quality and then over time have new routes. I think that's fair to say that is the expectation that you should have. We mentioned in the past that we have one exception, with one partner that we're ramping up faster. But otherwise, usually, you would expect the partners -- the new partners joining to have a slow ramp up.

And you referred to our application with the OCC for nondepository trust charter. And as you know, the OCC has a well-established process for reviewing applications and we're continuing to follow that process. But in the meantime and for a while, we've been operating in the U.S. with 48 money transmitted licenses in each of the states. So that -- and as you hear, the U.S. business is growing really well. Our being opportunistic adding more licenses around the world as we expand our product. But thank you for the questions. .

Thanks, Kristo. And that concludes our FY '26 results call. Thank you very much for joining us.

Good morning, and a warm welcome to everybody here today. I'm Martin Adams. I'm the Head of Owner Relations here at Wise. And we have a presentation that we prepared for you today. It will take about 60 minutes. That will be followed by Q&A. And there are copies of the slides on the Owner Relations website if you would like to take a look at those.

We'll be making many statements about the future this morning based on our current expectations. Actual outcomes are subject to many factors and may, therefore, differ materially as a result. Please review our comments on the slide here and the risk factors that you can find in our latest Form 20-F filed with the SEC for additional information. And so with that done, let's get started.

Please join me in welcoming to the stage the Founder and CEO of Wise, Kristo Kaarmann.

Thank you, Martin. Thanks for organizing this. Hi everyone and welcome from New York to those who are following us on the stream. Yesterday we listed our shares in NASDAQ. That was fun. It's awesome to be here -- it's awesome to be here and I am only to meet the new owners, the analyst who follow us, but also for the opportunity to grow into the largest market there is in the world for our products.

With me today I have some of -- some of my team and I am actually -- quiet aspired by our extended team, working on Wise, many of us over a decade together now. And what by this together is this -- is very clear mission that we are going to talking about today. And our irreversible impact on how money moves across bonus.

And indeed, together, we're going to remind today what Wise does, what is unique about our infrastructure, our products and how this creates value for both our customers and also for our owners. So it's great to see a lot of long-term owners here, some of the new faces as well. And for those new joiners with us, let me take you back to why did we start Wise in the first place.

For a long time, people and businesses have moved money internationally through their bank. And even if they're frustrated by the high cost, how long it takes and the hassle, they didn't really have a choice. And banks not competing with each other on those international transfers has led to decades of underinvestment in correspondence, in technology, in this infrastructure. So over the past 15 years, we built Wise from scratch to give people and businesses a better way to move and manage money across borders.

We made money work without borders for them. So we're going to soon talk through what makes Wise fundamentally different than anything else in quite a bit of detail. But before we explain that, let me explain how our customers feel about that difference. So when you ask people who do live across borders, travel frequently or run international businesses, they describe their experience with their bank describe it as expensive, slow and as a hassle.

And often, they're actually most disappointed with the lack of transparency in fees and how unpredictable it is that the money is actually going to arrive at the right person at the other end. So to fix these cross-border payments, two things needed to be done. Firstly, completely rebuild a new payment network from the ground up.

So when historically, international wires relied on chains of correspondent banks across a number of jurisdictions string together, it caused the whole process to be unpredictable in cost and in time and in the effort that you need to go through. So now we're bringing together local central banks and instant payment systems into that one network. Secondly, on top of this network, we redefine what's possible for our customers. And those customers we serve in three segments.

First of all, Wise Account for people, Wise Business for small businesses, freelancers, micro businesses and Wise Platform for banks and financial institutions who are using our infrastructure to provide these benefits to their own customers. And what does that mean for our customers? How has their experience changed after switching to Wise because of those two things. So in the last year alone, we estimate that we saved our customers or rather they saved using Wise $3.3 billion in those hidden fees on cross-border transactions compared to using their bank.

Saving money is usually the biggest reason people say when they switch to Wise. But when they experience these transfers, it is the speed and the predictability that comes with it. This is what usually makes them glued to the product. So we've completely redefined the estimations to -- the expectations to international transfers. On Wise, 75% of transactions -- international transactions from one end of the world to the other, from one bank to the other, arrive in less than 20 seconds.

So this is in contrast to the prevailing estimate of 3 to 5 business days that you still get from your bank. So given all of that, it's no wonder that 70% of our new customers who joined Wise, it's because their family, their coworkers, their friends recommended Wise to them, which in turn means that our active customer numbers have grown very fast now to 19 million at the end of last quarter -- that's for the last financial year.

And so has the volume of money that we move in cross-currency transactions. Last year, $243 billion, and this is growing fast. And as you'll hear from Nilan, it's no longer just the international wires that people use their Wise Accounts for. At the end of March, our customers held $39 billion on their Wise Accounts and use their Wise cards for $44 billion on travel, spending abroad and at home. So these are large numbers. But in the context of the enormous size of this market, we're really only starting to scratch the surface.

We moved less than 5% of the money moved by people and less than 1% moved in the small business market. So this means that overall, we're less than 1% of this enormous $43 trillion market of cross-currency transactions. And it also means that there's a huge opportunity ahead of us. We've gone from 0, 15 years ago to now moving $0.25 trillion, but we are building this network and the apps to move trillions.

We had a great start, but it's just the beginning. So how are we going to get to the first trillion? How are we going to get to the next 10 trillion? My team will take us through the investments that we're making right now, how to make the money with our borders work for people, for businesses and for banks.

In just a moment, Nilan will come on the stage and introduce you to our products and to our customers. You'll hear about how we ship new products and enhancements and how we increase the velocity to do that.

Harsh and Diana will then explain the structural advantages that Wise holds through the infrastructure and the regulatory architecture that we're developing. And finally, the numbers. Our CFO, Emmanuel, will explain how all of this translates into the financials and how the flywheel for growth works.

We know this approach will make Wise an increasingly valuable company for customers and owners alike. So let me pass the clicker to Nilan, who's going to tell us about the products and customers. Over to you. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Nilan Peiris, Chief Product Officer here at Wise. And I've been here for the last 12 years building our products here at Wise. And I'm really excited to share with you the impact those products have had on our customers' lives. One personal highlight for me was launching our payouts to Sri Lanka, which is where my parents are from a few years ago, delivering super fast, super cheap payments in Sri Lanka.

Whilst it was powerful for my family, I think it was the first time my dad really ever understood what I did at work. So on to our products. I'm going to take you through the Wise Account for people, then on to Wise Business and a little later on, I'll talk about Wise Platform towards the end of the presentation.

We build and deliver and expand our products at speed. We started with the first cross-border transaction over 15 years ago. And we learned that customers didn't want to just send money. They wanted to hold money internationally as well. And for them, we launched the Wise Account in the U.K. Once they were holding money, they wanted to spend it.

We then launched multicurrency debit cards. They wanted a return on their holdings, and we launched Wise Assets. And the rate at which we've been deploying new features has been accelerating. We recently launched Wise Assets in Australia and in Brazil. Let me take you through in a bit of detail what's inside that Wise Account today and why customers are joining us. At the heart of it is still our money transfer product, instant, transparent, low-cost and convenient payments, instant 20 seconds for money to move from a bank account on one end of the planet, say, in the U.K., all the way to Australia at the other end.

Transparent, you can see exactly how much you're getting paid and really low cost. And how much better this product is than the alternative directly correlates with the rate at which customers recommend us and our NPS and our growth. And that's why we keep investing in making our products and payments better. But it's not just sending, it's holding. Customers hold more than 40 currencies within Wise, and they use Wise Assets to earn a return.

We have two products here, Interest and Stocks. Customers can hold their balances in Interest and Stocks, earn a return and spend with their card on these balances. But this multicurrency debit card is much more than that. It's a really intelligent debit card. It uses the right balance when you're using it. If you're in Europe, it will use your euro balance, in the U.S., your U.S. balance. And if you have neither, it will use whatever is cheapest.

And the Wise Account is so much more than that. We've built scheduled payments, spending alerts, you can split bills with friends when you're out. Many banks and providers don't offer all of these features. And this is why customers keep coming back to us and spending more and more with us every day. We've taken AI and used it to create incredible experiences for customers in making payments more convenient.

For example, when paying an invoice, you get these fiddly account details that you need to enter in and make sure you've entered it correctly for the money to turn up at the other end correctly. What would be really cool is if you could maybe live demo, I've got a video of a demo here, see if this works. If you could take a picture of the invoice like this is an invoice for some garden plants that were going to designer and takes a picture of the invoice and then Wise will scan this and automatically populate the recipient details. This feature is live.

There you go with the account holder name and their account details. That's a really convenient experience and one of the reasons customers keep coming back to us. Putting this all together, our vision for the Wise Account is to be the world's best account for managing and moving your money. Who are our customers? Today, they're customers with international needs, ranging from travelers through to remote workers, digital nomads, expats and immigrants and freelancers. And as they have an increasing international need, we provide them increasing value and our most valuable customers are the ones that use us the most.

We also -- you may have seen, launched a new product for a new segment, current account in the U.K. or what's known as a checking account in the U.S. Here, we enable customers on their spending to earn a market-leading return of 3.26% through Wise Interest. They earn while they spend, they got this great international debit card and payments features. As we get to developing this product footprint in markets around the world, we'll be launching this everyday account globally.

How does our road map evolve? Well, our investments in that international account are our primary route into the market for consumer cross-border payments. And so we'll continue to invest in making this the best international account for these use cases. We'll start to invest in -- or continue to invest in building and launching current accounts globally. And as customers hold more than us -- hold more with us, we'll be giving them more opportunities to generate a return by onboarding new asset types.

All of these investments result in increased utilization of the account. And these two metrics you'll hear a lot about today, cross-border volume and holdings will grow. Moving on to Wise Business. Businesses come to Wise to pay and get paid internationally. To pay, businesses have invoices to pay. Most businesses have some international dimension, suppliers or customers overseas. With suppliers, they'll get an invoice to pay, and they start off by using Wise to pay that invoice.

But they can also use Wise to get paid internationally. One feature of the account I've not talked about so far are these local account details. These are things like a routing number in the U.S., a sort code and account number in the U.K. and IBAN in Europe. If you're a U.S. business today and you have a customer in the U.K. and you want to get paid in pounds, small businesses don't have access to international accounts. They'll need to fly out to the U.K., incorporate to MNC and then go to a bank to get a U.K. bank account.

With Wise, with a few clicks, you'll get a U.K. account number, and you can put that on your invoice to your U.K. customers who get paid in pounds and keep the pounds there instead of having to move it back to dollars all the time. But Wise Business is so much more for this. We've made it work with -- for your team with payment approvals, the ability to add your team, multicurrency invoices you can set up within Wise, batch payments, API payments, employee debit cards, accounting integrations, plus so much more.

Who are our customers for Wise Business? Today, they're predominantly small micro businesses with less than 10 employees. But as we continue to invest in the product, we expect the size of businesses using Wise to increase. This all comes together into our vision for Wise Business to become the world's best business account for moving and managing money.

Let me take you through our road map to make that happen. Historically, as I shared, businesses came to Wise to pay, get paid and hold and earn a return through our same money product, local account details and balance product. Today, they do more with control. They get employee cards, approval flows, create invoices with Wise, send them out and get told when those invoices get paid. They earn a return on their interest and can set up groups with permissions.

But in the future, businesses will be able to run their entire financial operations on Wise as we continue to invest in building out expense management workflows. We enable them to take payments online and they add more asset types. Wise Business goes from just making payments easier to enabling businesses to run their entire financial operations. Putting this all together over the Wise Account for people and for Business. It's a pretty simple story.

We invest in making the account more and more useful. This leads to consumers and businesses using us more and more every day, and this results in holdings growth, cross-border volume growth and card spend growth. And you'll hear from Emmanuel how we earn revenue on these. We've been really successful at making our product more and more useful.

We grew a send volume at 31% last year, spending at 37% and holding at 40%. And whilst we're really proud of those numbers, we're really proud of this number that Kristo shared earlier, the $3.3 billion that customers saved last year by using Wise instead of the alternatives.

And that $3.3 billion in savings wouldn't be possible without our decades-long investment in infrastructure. And I'm really excited to welcome our CTO on stage to take you through how we make that happen.

Over to you, Harsh.

Thank you, Nilan. Hello, everybody. Good morning. I am Harsh. I am the Chief Technology Officer here at Wise. And I have been at Wise for 11 years. But actually, I have a story about over 20 years ago, I moved from India to the U.S. to go to grad school. And I paid 6% in exchange rate markups when I brought my first [ sem's ] tuition to the U.S. Unfortunately, at that time, Wise did not exist. So I didn't have an option.

But over the years, I've lived a pretty international life. I've lived in India, U.S., in Europe. And I found Wise as a key tool for me to continue to live this International life basically bank with Wise or it's my primary account. And my favorite feature is the ability for me to hold GBP, euros and USD and earn a return on that everyday spending money every day. So together with -- in the next few minutes, me and Diana, who will come on later, we will share with you the details of the infrastructure we have built that powers these products that Nilan talked about.

And is -- this infrastructure that really makes Wise very unique. As Kristo shared, we are building a network and products to move trillions around the world, and we have been making outstanding progress on this. This network is all underpinned by the Wise infrastructure, which we have built over the last 15 years.

This is what enables us to send money globally, have international accounts, like Nilan just shared, and give our customers unparalleled coverage and speed and price. Almost 19 million active customers used Wise last year. And as more and more people and businesses use Wise, we get greater flows within the network. And with that greater flows, we get more economies of scale, which leads to cheaper price and faster speeds.

And these are the better outcomes that people come to use Wise. And this is the flywheel that continues to make the network even better as more people join. But this network is powered by this underlying Wise infrastructure, which we believe is the best infrastructure to move and manage your money around the world. This infrastructure has got four components. It's the technology, proprietary built from the ground up to solve this problem. It's our global operations all around the world, 24/7, and also our regulatory footprint with our licenses and the ability to operate this infrastructure around the world and the connections for us to do pay-in and payouts and move money around the world.

And we will walk you through these components in more detail. This infrastructure is pretty scaled out. We now have over 80 licenses globally to operate Wise. From a connections perspective, we use local bank partner and payment partners in over 90 local bank partners and payment partners in countries, but also we are super proud of our eight direct connections where we are directly connected to the instant payment schemes around the world and have settlement accounts with the central banks in these countries.

We have over 1,000 engineers solely focused on this cross-border payments problem. This is one of the biggest engineering teams in the world focused on this problem. And finally, we have an amazing operations team that helps our customers when they need help sometimes with moving funds or managing the funds across the globe.

And this infrastructure is what leads to these amazing outcomes. We're right now in the U.S. Sometimes when you do domestic payments in the U.S., it's amazing to me that even an ACH payment can take as much as same day to clear. What this infrastructure can do is move money between a source account in the U.S. or in the U.K. to a destination account in India or in Australia in less than 20 seconds. This is unheard of. This was unheard of 7 years ago before Wise existed.

75% of our payments are now instant. And we do this at scale, but at really low rates. We charge on a blended basis, 52 basis points for our customers. And we continue to invest to make sure this infrastructure is resilient and scalable. Going deeper on our technology. So we have built Wise on a single global technology stack. It is global by default and design. So let me give you an example if you were banking with, say, a bank in the U.K. and if you were to move, what would happen?

So you have a bank account in the U.K., you decide to move to the U.S. What would usually happen is you would have to go through full KYC or onboarding again with the new U.S. bank. You would have to give your documents, you'd have to prove you're an individual who's allowed to live here. And then you would have to be issued new account details, new debit cards, new Internet login and password, new apps to be downloaded.

That is not how Wise works. If you move from the U.K. to the U.S., you basically get the same product and the same experience. Everything works seamlessly, and that's what allows you to be much more global in using a bank account. But also, when you think about how we've built these products and this infrastructure globally, we add a lot of local flavors to it. And this is this local unique expertise that we've built by not only how our payment systems work, but also how our teams are organized.

We have teams across Asia Pacific, North America and Europe who have key insights in these local markets and how the payment systems are evolving. The example I gave to my friends who live in San Francisco and New York is you don't know how QR code-based instant payments are evolving and operating in Singapore because you've never experienced it in your life. You have to live and breathe payments locally to be able to build an amazing experience. And this is what this infrastructure allows you to do and also our team setup allows you to do.

And finally, by having all of this code and all of this infrastructure in one common stack, this allows us to have insights on all the transactions and all the data that's moving through across the globe. This allows us to build amazing machine learning models to help us manage our treasury system, building one global treasury system to manage our funds flow efficiently and predict where funds will be needed, for example, going into the weekend.

But also it allows us to fight financial crime much better because it allows us to build these models, which are global. This global local setup is what makes Wise's technology very, very unique and this infrastructure unique. We've always shipped pretty fast. As Nilan was showing, we've shipped a lot over the last few years, but this shipping speed and execution speed continues to increase with AI. I thought I'd pull up a few things.

There are three examples of how things have improved or gotten faster over the last 12 to 18 months. Now at Wise, all our engineers are using AI to ship code faster and getting more features out for our customers. We already shipped multiple thousand times a month, while most banks ship usually a few times a quarter. But that shipping speed has already gone up by 25% over the last year, and we have over 6,000 releases per month now happening.

But I'm even more happy about the other two things that we've done. We've improved our experience for our customers to help themselves by using AI. We've launched a Wise Chat Assistant, which is completely powered by LLMs. And this allows customers to come and get their questions answered in a 24/7 manner without having to talk to a human. And the resolution rate or the quality of these responses are now showing that these resolutions are better than when a human is involved.

We are getting close to 50% of chat contacts being powered by LLMs. Similarly, we're seeing amazing productivity improvements in our back-office operations. We've built tooling such that our financial crime teams and onboarding teams who have to work through documents when customers onboard are being able to use AI end-to-end. And in some cases, we are seeing 50% improvement in operational handling times and giving that time back to our teams.

These are just three things I thought I'd call out, but we have hundreds of use cases now in production being run by AI agents. Next, operations. Moving money and managing funds across borders is hard work. And sometimes things do get stuck. So when our customers need us, we are there for them 24/7, 365. And we have invested heavily into bringing down contact rates and payment defects such that customers do not need to contact us.

But when they do, we are there for them. And I already covered our push into automation and how things are moving with the investments in AI. But there will still always be cases where a user will want to talk to somebody on the phone because they are moving money. And sometimes, we have regulatory requirements where you cannot -- a human has to be in the loop before a transaction or a transaction goes through fully.

But let me give you an example. If you're a customer who is moving $500,000 or $1 million across the world, you want a better experience or a different experience than if you're moving $10 around the world. And that's where you may want to call us and get a much more white glove experience. We have an invested in that, and that experience at Wise is called total service.

Similarly, business customers increasingly want someone who knows and understands their business. So we've invested in account management experience for these businesses. This just is in support. You don't call your account manager just when you have an issue, but they actually understand your business and help you grow more volumes on Wise.

And we invest in operations because we will always anchor our experience in high NPS customer interactions. This is because we know a majority of our growth still comes from word of mouth. So if you have a good experience when you talk to Wise or when you contact Wise or when you use Wise, that leads to the word-of-mouth wheel continue to move because you will tell your friends and family that Wise is great.

But when I talk to our users, people are just amazed at how we've made things simple. What seems to usually be a very daunting task of moving and managing your finances globally, they basically said, Wise has made it very simple. And this simplicity is thanks to our infrastructure. The technology and the operations I just covered, but also how these two pillars interact and go hand-in-hand with the licensing and connections. And for that, I will give it to Diana to cover these.

Thank you so much. Hello, everyone. I'm Diana Avila. I have been with Wise for nearly 11 years, and I look after our international expansion. I first -- sorry, one second -- I heard about Wise before joining when I have moved from Colombia where I'm originally from to the United Kingdom to study Masters. And as many of us here today, I'm sure at some point, I had the need to send money back to Colombia, to my country of origin to pay for the student loan.

And I realized how expensive, how complicated, how slow and how obscure it would have been to do this using traditional banking when I was doing my research. And since then, I realized that Wise was building something unique, and I became obsessed with the idea of having these products and this solution available for more customers in more places. Today, in addition to taking Wise to more places, I get to use it as my everyday account. And by far, my favorite feature is that I get to send money back to Colombia, and this gets instantly to my mom, for example.

It takes 20 seconds for me to send money from the U.K. to my mom in Colombia. And this is powered by the infrastructure that we have been talking about, not only this transfer, but 75% of our transfers arriving instant. So to continue explaining this infrastructure, let me take another step back and go into the detail of how traditional correspondent banking works. If there's someone, for example, in Australia that is trying to send a payment to the U.S. and they decide to use their bank, this one bank in Australia likely is not going to have a relationship with every single bank around the world.

They probably have one correspondent relationship with a bank somewhere else in Singapore. And this is how this long chain gets started. The bank in Australia will send a message to their correspondent and then every correspondent in the chain will be adding their own fee, they will be adding an FX spread and their own processes, making this payment probably last 2 to 5 days to arrive all the way to an account in the U.S. and would likely cost over 3%.

So we have dramatically improved this process through our infrastructure, through our licenses and our connections. What happens is that for the past 20 years or so, most jurisdictions around the world have significantly improved how money moves domestically. If we see most jurisdictions today have instant payment systems that allow us to move money locally within seconds, free or a very low cost and very convenient.

Let's say, in the U.S. now, we have that now. But what happens is that these payment systems work really well domestically. And what we are doing at Wise is we're bringing these amazing domestic payment systems under our own network in order to move money internationally or move money cross-borders.

And this is the network that we create for the world's money. And this is how we have made something complex now be way more simplified. We have our own licenses, and we have these connections to payment systems around the world so that we can control each of these payments end-to-end. And we do this in many cases, leveraging or connecting indirectly those domestic payment systems with our more than 90 domestic payment partners.

We hold commercial relationships directly with more than 90 banks around the world, and we also connect with them. But what is even more exciting and unique is that in many cases, we don't work with domestic banks. We have a direct connection to the domestic payment system, controlling the whole transaction under our own network.

So let's say, if someone is in Australia and they need to send money to the U.K., they will instruct the bank in Australia and Wise receives this instruction and this payment directly. And we will do the same in the U.K. We will send this money and this payment directly to the recipient bank, everything happening under our own. And we have achieved this level of direct connectivity and direct participation in eight jurisdictions already.

This is huge. Back in 2018, Wise was the first nonbank financial institution to became a direct participant to the payment system in the U.K. And throughout the years, we have been adding more of those, and we are getting faster at building these direct connections. And I believe what is really impressive is the scale at which we can do this across the world. For example, last year, we completed this direct participation in Brazil and in Japan. We're talking about two completely different markets, and we went live last year with those.

And when we talk about direct connections and operating as direct participants in payment systems, this might sound simple or straightforward, but it is actually very difficult to build. Let me take the latest connection as an example to explain what it takes to become a direct participant. As I said last year, in November, we completed our connection to Zengin, the instant payment system in Japan.

In order to do this, first of all, we have to obtain a license. In Japan, we got our first license 10 years ago. And later on, we added another license. You already heard from Harsh that globally, we have more than 80 licenses. This enables us to operate in different jurisdictions and improve our product in these places, for example, allowing customers to hold more money in the Wise. And once we have this regulatory license, we need to get the approval to have the connection to have the participation to the payment system.

So first, we started with one bank, then with other more banks. But then throughout the years, we were working with the payment scheme and with the Central Bank to become a direct participant and also to have our own settlement account with the Bank of Japan, their Central Bank. And to build this connection, we need to deploy technology locally. This is a regulatory requirement. So we have built the relevant technology to have this connectivity.

And of course, we need the local operations to maintain this license, to maintain and operate this connection and to serve our customers locally based in Japan, but also customers that are globally based and want to have operation and support in Japanese, we also run local operations because we're literally moving money and operating a system that is in Japanese.

So this is the expertise that we have been building throughout the last 15 years that enable us to reach this level of connectivity to the payment systems. This starts with us engaging with regulators, with policymakers. Wise has now become an authority and well recognized amongst policymakers to think about how to improve cross-border payments and enabling access to the payment systems domestically to nonbanks that are focused on this cross-border money movement.

And once the regulation allows this, we also need to have the right type of license, and this is normally a multiyear process for Wise to obtain these regulatory licenses. And when we think about connecting and participating directly into national payment systems, as you can imagine, the payment scheme, the Central Bank would be requiring the highest level of requirements because they need to preserve the safety and the stability of the money movement in this country.

So we go through a lengthy approval process from a compliance, from an operational, from a technical resilience perspective. And at Wise, we have been doing this for 15 years. We have developed this credibility, this ability, this knowledge that is well recognized by regulators and payment systems around the world. So to sum it up, the first enabler for us to go to different markets is having our regulatory licenses.

We have more than 80 of these around the world, and our portfolio of licenses continues increasing. And in terms of connections, we're very proud that we already have eight direct connections around the world, and we expect to have more. And what is very unique because if you're a customer, you might not necessarily get excited that Wise is direct participant or not.

What you see are the outcomes of this infrastructure and this connectivity. And every time we have deployed a new direct connection, we see the clear outcomes with underlying costs significantly dropping, and this is how we are able to sustainably reduce price for our customers. We also see the dramatic increase in speed because we're connecting payment systems that already allow us to move money instantly, and this is how we achieve 75% of cross-border payments arriving in less than 20 seconds.

And we also see contact rates significantly increasing because we don't have customers having to ask where is my money because the money would have already arrived where they need. And with this, I'm going to pass it on to Harsh again to wrap up how the four components of our infrastructure come together to create this competitive advantage.

Thank you, Diana. One of the things that Diana and I talk about infrastructure too much, I think people think. Just generally, our conversations are very fascinating to me about licensing and how tech combines together to run money around the world.

But hopefully, that gives you a quick run-through on each of our pillars and what makes this infrastructure unique and actually a very big competitive advantage for us. And I want you to take away that it's not just the technology, it's not just software, but it is actually the mix of how we build the tech, the operations, the licenses we own and the connections in each of these countries and the connections to -- direct connections to payment systems, altogether that constitutes this infrastructure and the competitive advantage we have.

The other bit that Diana, when she showed those flags on the screen, one of the things that we should cover is we were the first in most of these countries to be able to get access to these payment systems as a nonbank. And that is what adds credibility. So when you're a regulator and you want to open up access for others, nonbanks to your payment infrastructure, we are usually the first one they would call and ask for learnings. But what Diana talked through on direct connections is no small feat.

Each of these domestic payment systems have highly complex rails, and they run on very unique and sometimes very obscure protocols, and they'll have APIs that are very different. So it's not just you take a wrapper or you take a published API and wrap it around and everything will start working. Each of these domestic payment systems have a very unique standard to maintain and a very unique integration to do.

So the fact that last year in itself, we added two direct connections. Hopefully, that gives you a proof point on how flexible and extendable this infrastructure is that we've built. We've built this infrastructure from the ground up such that it is very easy to integrate new payment types and technologies in a very easy way.

And every time, of course, as a technologist, when I see new technologies coming out that could help us solve the problem of cross-border payments and really help our customers, we actively look at this.

And as you can imagine, in the last 12 months, I've been asked quite a few times about our opinions on stablecoins. How will that impact cross-border payments? So what I thought I'd do is take a few minutes to talk through an example of a USD stablecoin-based transaction, like how would that impact cross-border payments.

But having spent the last decade in this space, let me give you an example. When people talk about usage of stablecoins in cross-border payments, they're basically talking about two things from a customer experience.

One, using USD stablecoins in this example, to do cross-border money movement; and two, using stable coins to manage currency volatility. So let's talk about the first. If you were to use USD stablecoins for doing cross-border payments, we've learned that the infrastructure we've built is by connecting local payment systems and -- direct connections that we've built is delivering a better price and speed than current stablecoin solutions can provide in this space. As we covered before, we charge 52 basis points on average.

And this is actually the global average. In some jurisdictions, if you were to move Swiss francs like CHF 1 million to GBP, we could get it as low as 20 basis points or even lower. And most players in this space using the stablecoin route or stablecoin sandwich would charge anywhere between 100 to 200 basis points or more.

And obviously, the question you should ask is why? So the key insight here is while moving value using stablecoin -- USD stablecoin is easy from one person to the other, the real complexity arises when you actually have to on-ramp or off-ramp these stablecoins to different currencies.

Because remember, people and businesses want to use money in their local form. They want to pay their taxes in, say, the U.K. or in Brazil. They want to buy properties. They want to pay for college tuition in their local currency. They can't pay for this in USD if -- that is not the native currency. So eventually, if you on-ramp and off-ramp this, this is where the complexity lies. This is where the complexity lies around financial crime screening.

The complexity lies around converting and the pricing you get. This is what determines how much you're being charged. And guess what, these local payment systems that Diana talked about, they're very, very large systems. They are moving trillions in the domestic economy. So they're already very efficient. Hence, the pricing is much cheaper.

But that said, that is the story today. We will continue to invest and see how this space evolves. And as it evolves and if it does solve the problems for cross-border payments for our customers in some regions or maybe globally to make it cheaper and faster, we would, of course, use this technology. And the key thing here, I want you to take away as the infrastructure we've built is extendable such that it would be easy to add this.

But the other use case we are seeing is some folks want to manage their local currency volatility. So if you take the example of Brazilian real, the Brazilian real has lost 15% against the USD in the last year. So it makes sense that some people living in Brazil would want to hold non-Brazilian real as a hedge. And for some of them, they might use stablecoins. But in a lot of these markets, there's already a very solid offering. It's a really good offering, and it's called the Wise Account.

With the Wise Account, you can already hold 40 different currencies at a click of a button, and you can hold fee at USD and you can get interest on that USD holdings. That's very powerful. But here, we could add other asset types. As Nilan said, we have added stocks. We've added money market funds. And we will continue to build this infrastructure with the same way we've built this over the last 15 years.

When our customers want new things to solve problems for them, we will add those things. And this could be in this example, a stablecoin offering. It's an asset type. The infrastructure is extendable that allows you to continue to add new payment types because we've built this from the ground up in this way. But eventually, what I see is if you take a longer view, looking forward 10 years from now, I will leave you with this. I see most roads in cross-border payments leading to the Wise infrastructure.

We have built something very unique with this infrastructure, which gives us a competitive advantage on cost and speed with the use of superior technology and also how we connect directly to payment systems and the regulatory licensing footprint we have built. No other competitor has built this kind of infrastructure at such global scale.

And given the head start we have, we will continue to invest in this over the next decade. But it's not just our customers whose expectations are changing. We are seeing expectations globally change from customers around what cross-border payments should look like. As I said before, 20-second cross-border payments did not exist about 7 or 8 years ago and definitely did not exist before Wise was created.

So these expectations now are evolving even for our customers who are not -- for people who are not our customers, but they're customers of banks. So we are having financial institutions come to us and say, how are you doing this magic? How are you doing 20-second cross-border payments? Our customers are asking for this. And this is where our Wise platform product comes in. And now let me introduce -- or let me bring back Nilan to talk through our fastest-growing product, which is Wise Platform.

Thanks, Harsh. Wise platform is our fastest-growing product. And that's a reflection from what you've heard from Harsh and Diana about how great our infrastructure is that underpins our products and our growth.

Let me tell you how. The growth we see is customers leaving their incumbent providers, their banks to come to Wise. And this turn that banks are seeing shows them explicitly how valuable The infrastructure we've built is -- and it's so valuable, they want to use it themselves. And Wise platform enables them to do that.

Banks are partnering with us because their customers are demanding just what we provide our own customers. We've reset the expectations of consumers and businesses from what they want from payments. They want low-cost payments. They want convenient payments. They want it fast. But the infrastructure we've built not only gives that to them, but it also solves the pain points that banks have in moving and managing money internationally.

Cross-border payments are really inefficient -- have really inefficient back-office operations. They're really hard to do. Providers have poor visibility of where is the money. It's really slow and it's a really manual process.

What this results in is customers turning away from their providers. And turns into a customer growth challenge. While some customers do leave their bank, we think it's unrealistic for everybody in the world to download our app. There is inertia in banking relationships, but through Wise Platform, we can reach more and more of these individuals and businesses.

Fundamentally, we believe the most convenient experience for moving money internationally is within your bank or the apps you use every day, and Wise Platform enables that to happen. Wise Platform is a global business. We have go-to-market teams around the world. And we break the market into three: neobanks such as Monzo and Nubank. These are tech-savvy companies that know about Wise and can integrate us fairly quickly.

Tech companies such as Ramp and Brex. These are complex integrations with nonregulated institutions that are normally unlicensed. And finally, we have relationships with Tier 1 banks. These are some of the largest banks in the world, and this is where around 90% of the world's money moves through today. It's early days with these banks, but these are banks such as Standard Chartered in Asia Pacific, UniCredit in Europe, Itaú in South America and Morgan Stanley here in North America.

These are multiyear relationships and multiyear journeys. We usually start with an initial launch with a subset of customers on a subset of currencies. As we prove the model, we'll expand to more corridors and more customer segments and product types. And over time, we may add more of Wise products to the relationship.

Wise Platform as our third product is what gives us a path to moving trillions. As we onboard more and more of the world's banks and products, it enables us to get greater leverage of the infrastructure that we've built. And now I'm going to hand over to Emmanuel, who's going to discuss how this growth is not only profitable it's sustainable too. Over to you.

Thanks, Nilan, and good morning, everyone. Well welcome also from me, I am from New York. I'm Emmanuel, I'm the CFO of Wise. But I'm not only the CFO, I also become a very wise everyday customer since I moved to London 2 years ago.

So I moved to London, and I'm becoming a Wise users. So while benefiting from the services that we're offering, Wise is also allowing us to enjoy the quality of our UX by when I get my salary paid on my Wise Account, when I use the card every day and also by keeping my money growing with assets.

But since I am driving -- also frankly, I'm using my Wise account when I go back to France, when I go back to Germany and also when I'm driving to the U.S. lately. So as you have heard from Kristo, but also from Nilan and Harsh and Diana, we have built infrastructure and products that give great value to our customers, allowing them to grow and also to create substantial value for both our customers and you, our owners over time.

So today, I'd like to walk you through Wise from a financial point of view. And Wise has delivering amazing financial performance. We have a track record of delivering sustainable growth at attractive returns, and we've been profitable every year for the last decade.

Since Wise was founded, we continuously had delivered volume growth as we tackle the massive opportunity ahead of us.

Over the past 10 years, not only that we have been profitable, but we've also grown our cross-border volume over 30x. So since we set our own margins based on our unit cost we are in control of our own destiny and 2026 hasn't been an exception.

As you will have seen from the press release yesterday, we continue to drive active customers' volumes and growth whilst targeting the top end of our target margin range. During our last fiscal year, around 19 million active customers transfer over USD 240 billion. And guess what, they also increased their holdings by 40% to up to nearly $40 billion. So today, I want to take a step back and take you through our financial profile, focusing on three main items of our P&L.

Well, the first one would be on net revenue and answering the questions on how we generate revenue from customers' activities, including [indiscernible] on their interest framework or the interest income. But second, operating expenses, explaining how we invest part of our margin back to supporting our existing customers, but also into driving our growth. And lastly, our income before tax or margin framework.

So let's start with our top line metric and the net revenue. So as you have heard from Nilan, our net revenue is a combination of revenue generated by -- as a result of our customers' activities but also the interest on customer deposits. And looking at 2026, our total revenue was USD 2.5 billion, of which USD 1.9 billion or 76% was related to our customer transactions and roughly $600 million of interest -- of net interest income.

So this revenue is driven by customers using our products for international needs, but also, as you have heard from my colleagues before, they are also using Wise to manage their everyday finance, just like me. So I'll take you through now each component of our net revenue. [indiscernible] and start with the first component of the cross-border revenue from customers sending and receiving money internationally.

Cross-border is at the core of what we do, supported by our best-in-class infrastructure. As I mentioned earlier, in 2026, we had nearly 19 million active customers using Wise for cross-border transactions, generating over USD 240 billion of cross-border volume. And we monetize these customer activities by charging a low transparent fee to our customer.

In 2026, this was an average 52 basis points, generating $1.3 billion of cross-border revenue. So we are able to offer these low fees by being focused on our unit cost with strong cost discipline, but also by driving efficiencies. We seek to sustainably reduce our price while maintaining a cost-plus margin framework and sharing part of our excess margins with our customers. And we do this mindfully, but also actively.

We only reduce our price when we have achieved sustainable reduction of our cost. And we finished the year with a take rate of 51 basis points, and this is a drop of around 20% if you compare this to Q1 2025. So these price adjustments are strategic, and we see the clear benefits from it. So the first one, price is very important for our customers, both personal and businesses and even more relevant for our customers moving high volumes.

Our cost plus margin logic ensures sustainability of our price reductions And as such, we can maintain a price advantage, and this is being the driver -- we've been the driver of the industry in this. And finally, our platform partners, they appreciate the benefit of partnering with us because we are focused on -- driving continuous focus on driving continued efficiency.

So as you have heard today, as we have built more products our customers love, we have seen increased adoption of the Wise Account. And that's a great example of these customers using Wise Card while spending money both at home, but also when they're traveling, just as mentioned before.

And in 2026 customers spent over $40 billion with a Wise account -- Wise Card, sorry, and this is an increase of 37% compared to last year. And we monetize also this activity through interchange and other card-related fees. And customers are using Wise more as an everyday account, just like me, leveraging other products to manage their money or making it grow. In March, from the total customer holding of nearly $40 billion, our customers held $9 billion on Wise Assets. We get a revenue from fee related to domestic currency transactions and the use of other products such as Wise assets.

So in total, these transactions related to customer activities generated $1.9 billion in transaction revenue in 2026, an increase of 22% year-on-year. And this includes our price adjustments. But that's not all. Our customers are trusting Wise more and keeping more money in their Wise account. At the end of 2026, customers held $30 billion on their Wise account. We invest these funds in liquid instruments and generate interest income from the balances.

So when we invest our customer balance, we follow our interest income framework. And on the left-hand side, you can see the components of this framework. Although this, we would seek to use the first 1% yield to cover the cost of the Wise Account and also to retain 20% above this first 1% yield as a profit and to redistribute 80% back to the customers.

So we built this framework to avoid cyclical movements of the interest rates set by the central banks just like the Fed and what's making this account interesting for our customers. On the right-hand side, you can see how it played out in 2026. So we generate $800 million of interest income, and we're able to pay around $200 million back to the customers, so roughly half of their 80% target. And this is obviously below our target due to certain geographical restrictions like in the U.K. as of today -- where as of today, we're not able to pay interest to our -- on the customer balance.

So overall, I took you through the different layers of our customer activities, sending and converting money, spending with our Wise Card and also growing with Wise Assets and holding balance with us. And this drives our net revenue generation. And again, in 2026, we delivered USD 2.5 billion in net revenue.

So as you just saw, the growth is also creating a diversified business. As customers adopt more of our product, this is -- has reduced our mix of cross-border revenue. And in 2026 (sic) [ 2023 ], this was around 50% of our net revenue. But we also have a diversified geographical footprint as we have launched new countries, but also grow and roll out products in countries where we already have a presence before.

And if you were to look at this from a volume perspective, it will be even more balanced since we are generating more net income in the U.K. due to the regulation I just mentioned before. So as you have heard today, we still have a massive opportunity ahead. And one reason we are so excited about the listing here in the U.S. is that we see the U.S. market as the biggest single market opportunity for our products, presenting a very attractive potential for growth.

So I'd like now to cover the second part of the second item of our P&L and operating expenses and how we invest in our business in a different area my colleague covered before, ensuring that we invest to build the best infrastructure, but also acquiring and onboarding more and more customers at an attractive return.

Through our operating expense, we invest to maintain and service our current customers through transaction expense and services. We also invest to drive future growth through tech and development, but also marketing. And we invest into having the right support functions. Our transaction expense and transactions and also credit loss reflects the cost of providing our services and correspond to roughly 20% of our net revenue. And this includes things like the banking and partner fees, where we work with domestic bank and other partners to provide our services to customers, for example, to access the domestic payment systems where we do not have access yet and also like banks and partner fees, are the largest components of the transaction expenses.

But this also include FX-related costs and other product costs. We are continuously seeking efficiency in this area, making sure we get the best terms from our partners as we grow in scale while also becoming more efficient in how we deliver our products to our customers. So as an example, today, transaction cost for Wise for transferring $10,000 from the U.K. to the U.S. is only a couple of basis points.

Our service expenses relate to onboarding, but also providing the great services to our growing customer base. And services -- servicing corresponds roughly today to around 15% of our net revenue. And Harsh already covered our progress in the adoption of technology and automation. We're also investing in offering the best onboarding experience to our customers, while complying with the regulatory requirements around the globe.

With around 1/3 of our employees in functions related to compliance, we invest in developing robust process to drive customer trust. And this is particularly important to some customer groups such as business customers and individuals sending high transactions. And for this, we have launched a tailored service product, and we call it Total Service. And this build on the great -- this is built on the great customer experience and also what our infrastructure are providing, having a tailored approach to serve our top customers.

Technology and development reflect the investments that we do into building up new products and as well as maintaining our existing products. And this corresponds to around 15% of our net revenue. As you also heard from Harsh today, we're investing significantly in our technology. With over 1,000 engineers launching 6,000 monthly developments, we will continue investing to grow and to improve our customer experience.

Now marketing and sales reflect our investments into building the Wise brand and also growing our customer base and [indiscernible], this has been around 5% of our net revenue. So we have been investing to scale our highly effective digital marketing to date, but also we have been targeting a minimum return of 20% as a minimum return on investment. And we also have been extending our marketing mix to new channels, specifically offline like TV and also billboards, as you might have seen with the aim to reaching our target audience where they are. And very impressively, today, still 70% of our customers come from word of mouth.

So here, I wanted to show you some examples that you've probably seen on the street, how we bring this to the U.S. with a campaign that we launched this week actually. So these increased investments in marketing are important and sustainable to us because our customers stay with us for many years. Every year, we are adding new and stronger cohorts which gives us the confidence that we can continue to lean into our marketing investments.

So finally, general and admin expenses reflect the support structure that we have set up to power our growth. And today, this is around 15% of our net revenue. This includes our corporate functions, so it's like finance and legal, but also the team that are helping us to build unique elements of our infrastructure as well as offices and as well as our external service providers. And we invest back, we are -- we're investing back into the business.

The operating expense, I just took you through, bring income before tax to around 25% of net income. And we are able to deliver this at a very high cash flow generation. So we believe that in driving growth through continuous investments, our investment framework is a clear evidence of this. By targeting a medium-term target, 15% to 20% income before tax margins considering that we were able to pay our target interest income back to customers that I mentioned before, we are able to invest in our growth.

And this, in exchange drive more scale and operational efficiencies, providing us with additional margin capacities to reinvest. But this is truly a virtuous cycle. So this is reflected in our financial targets.

In the midterm, we seek to deliver 15% to 20% net revenue CAGR and also a 15% to 20% EBITDA margin. Again, if we were to pay the 80% of interest above the 1% yield I mentioned before to our customers. So here, you can see how top line growth, combined with a stable margin drive incremental profit dollars. And this framework is expected to drive future value, driving incremental net revenue and income before tax over time.

Our business strategy aimed to deliver strong profitable growth so that we can generate strong cash flows. And our capital allocation framework has 2 main components. The first one on a strong level of cash, we maintain a strong capital and cash position to ensure resilience, but also flexibility as well for our current licenses but also for the future one.

And secondly, on return of capital, we are focusing on returning capital to shareholders, and we expect to provide an update on this approach at our full year results in June this year. So our strategy helped us to expand our moat. By driving scale, we are able to create excess margin capacities to fuel our investments. And this investment allow us to continuously stay ahead in the industry as we continue to build a unique global infrastructure, which also support our focus on driving down the unit cost and sharing these benefits with customers maintaining our price advantage.

So this then drive more new customers and customer engagement and as we continue to fuel growth and scale. So at the end, we have huge ambitions. And we believe that in the long term, it will be the player with the best infrastructure and the lowest price that will win in the industry.

And now I hand back to Kristo for the final word.

Thanks, Emmanuel, and thank you all for staying with us. So we have lots to talk about. But as proud as we are about what we've achieved so far, we're really only just getting started, and I will show you this slide again because this is an enormous market. We're growing really quickly, but we still have nearly the entire road ahead of us. And we ask ourselves, why haven't 95% of people and 99% of business owners gotten smart. Why can't they use Wise, and then every day, we wake up with my team to methodically solve for these opportunities. And we do it.

We do it by building products, products that people and businesses love and recommend. We build the plumbing, how they can access that, how can we move money around the world, and we do this financially sustainably. So this is how we make Wise an increasingly valuable company for our customers and for owners for decades to come.

Thank you for being with us onwards.

If you'd like to take your seats up on the stage, then we're more than happy to take a few questions. And we'll start in the room. And then if there are questions on the Zoom webinar, then we'll jump across to that as well. [Operator Instructions]. Anyone like to go first? We start with Sanjay in the middle here, please.

Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW. Thank you for the presentation. I was just wondering product road map. Obviously, you guys take in deposits of sorts. Have you got -- and you operate an asset-light model. Curious if you guys have thought about extending that into lending to your customers. for example, or other types of asset-heavy models? Just curious if there's anything there.

And then maybe if we just think about competition, right, understanding that the system is quite inefficient today, A lot of the incumbents are thinking about modernizing it. If you have like the networks, for example, Visa and Mastercard are working with banks to figure out how to move money quicker. You talked about stablecoin so maybe tokenized deposits are part of the future as well that can link fiat together. So I'm just curious if we could just talk about those competitive dynamics as well.

Thank you, Sanjay. Maybe I'll -- I mean, Nilan is the boss of our product road map, but I'll sneak this one away. That's a very good question. We do have a lot of customers hold money with us, and this is growing really, really fast. But they don't really come to us for borrowing.

And that, therefore, hasn't really gone -- usually doesn't get very high up on our road map. It's there. So I'm sure we will have customers who occasionally need to borrow. But I doubt that we'll be doing this from our balance sheet in the near term. So mostly people come to make -- they come to Wise to either save money or to make money, but rarely so to borrow money.

But coming to the other one, I wonder if Harsh, you have a comment -- I guess this is probably a Wise platform question on whether our customer -- where the banks as our customers going to need more than just payments. I don't know, maybe to you, maybe to you.

Yes. I can start and Harsh maybe you can go answer. I answer the question from a platform perspective. So from a competitive dynamic, how do we see competition in this space? How are banks evolving their infrastructure and what challenges do we see. So I think our infrastructure is quite differentiated, as you've heard from Diana and Harsh. These 8 direct integrations that we have enable us to move and settle the money instantly.

And when you look at that versus the alternatives provided by alternative providers in the market, there isn't really anything else that enables payments to move instantly at such low cost with a really high quality as well. And we continue to see demand in the market for Wise platform as a result. Harsh, maybe you want to talk about future technology..

Yes. One thing I'll add to what Nilan said. Sometimes people don't realize, like by building a consumer and SMB product. As I said before, operations like things do get stuck sometimes in cross-border payments. We've learned over the last 15 years, how to run this network. So if you're just a B2B provider, selling to banks, you've never run your own payments. You don't know when somebody calls you and says, there's no money, what happened to this transaction and how to operate that and make that very efficient.

Neither do the banks because if you're Bank of America, you're only operating in the U.S. and you don't know how to run cross-border payments, you're just using your correspondents, right? So that learning of those 15 years is baked into how do we operate this infrastructure. And that's what leads to 52 basis points or lower pricing. That efficiency is also what banks come to us for. So like they've learned that they can't operate this payment the same way as you can operate a domestic payment.

And then on the future, yes, I mean, I think as I said, like there's a lot of players we're talking about a lot of things. But the one thing I would go back to is, for example, in the U.S., in the U.K., FPS is a fast payment scheme in the U.K. It drives all payments in the U.K., right? Pretty much. Instantly, it's got massive limits. People are getting paid their salary. And even ACH moves $60 trillion. It's the most well-oiled machine, right?

The government's social security payments go through that. So this could kind of take a long time for a new infrastructure to come up and say it's going to be more efficient and more scaled out and more secure than these, right? So that's the thesis.

And that's why we are seeing the benefits of that, where by connecting directly to these payment systems, we automatically see the outcomes that Diana covered of like massive price drops and amazing experiences. So we'll see how this evolves. And as I said, our infrastructure is pretty extensible so we can add these connections. But I think for the foreseeable future, the domestic payment systems are very well set up for this.

Thank you. Gus.

Thanks. [ Gus Gala ] from [indiscernible]. The main question I just want to dig into, can you talk about the delta in the contribution margin between the platform business side and core consumer. It just feels there's a lot less, I don't know, surface area for intervention. There's less need for dollars to go into marketing to generate demand there than perhaps the core side. So just help us think of the delta there.

The other one, just going to Sanjay's question on the fast payment systems opportunity there. Can you help us think maybe there are geos where it makes sense to be on the front leading edge of helping build out a technology or work on a new platform where perhaps there isn't a fast payment system. And then in the U.S. specifically, can you kind of talk about what the cost opportunity is from being more domiciled here in the sense of getting access to different rails, right? That's it for me.

I'm going to snatch some of the easy ones again. So I love your question about Wise platform and our consumer business. And we were very deliberate about this when we set the Wise platform up. Is that they're financially equivalent to us. So economically, we don't have a difference on our economics, whether a customer comes through our bank clients and make a transaction or comes directly.

So that's an underlying principle that's also very helpful then because we don't have parts of Wise fighting with each other and like who gets the transaction who gets the customer. And it's very clear to our partners as well as look, a customer can come to us in the same economic terms. So if you -- it's up to you what you're going to charge them. So it lets us also very logically to compete with our clients because we do naturally compete with our clients as well.

But leaving the other questions, which were more on -- I think maybe to Diana on how the other developed economies are struggling to get to the instant payment, like the domestic...

I can answer that -- what we see is that, in general, both developed and developing economies, all of them are introducing instant payment systems and what is very unique about Wise is the level of local expertise that we have and also how we are participating in the early stage conversations of how to develop and how to set up these payment systems. Let's say, in Brazil, Pix was introduced only 4, 5 years ago, and we have been in the conversation from early days to the point that we are now directly connected. In the U.K., the U.K. was one of the first economies to introduce an instant payment system.

And right now, we're having conversations of how to modernize and how to get this payment system ready for the future. And Wise is one of the participants of this dialogue and this planning on how to introduce domestic instant payment rails for the future. So to answer your question, we see this trend happening around the world and Wise is part of these conversations.

In the U.S., for instance, FedNow is probably one of the newest instant payment systems that we see have been introduced around the world. In the U.S., we work still with bank partners. And through them, we are able to access the different payment rails that we have in the U.S. ACH, Wires, RTP and more recently, FedNow which is picking up and increasing the level of adoption.

I don't know, Martin, if that was the third question. It was around the U.S. domiciled in the U.S...

Yes, I can continue. In the U.S., I can keep answering -- in the U.S., we have been operating for more than 10 years with our 49 money transmitter licenses. So we are very well domiciled. We have also our local teams.

In Austin, we have one of our biggest hubs and we continue increasing our license portfolio and our direct relationship with local regulators and payment schemes. Right now, we have been operating as a locally domiciled money transmitter with our connections with -- through local banks.

Alex Rohr.

Alex Rohr with Emmett. Just wondering the -- sorry, I lost my train of thought. The guidance, right, the -- I'm sorry, here it is. In the old world, the guidance of 13% to 16% underlying income -- sorry, PBT margin on underlying income versus the new guidance of 20 to 25 or 15 to 20, depending on the regulatory backdrop. It's obviously wider now. It used to be 300 basis points wide and now it's 500 basis points wide. And I believe you're holding interest rates constant in this new guidance, right? So there's no volatility there. So I'm just wondering where the sort of -- what's slightly less forecastable in the new guidance methodology? Why is the range wider than the 300 basis points before?

Well, I think this is one for me, I guess. The margin of 20, 25 is reflecting how much we can pass back to their customers. I mentioned before, we have some geographical restrictions like in the U.K. So that's reflecting basically the net revenue increase that we -- from the interest that we can pass back to the customers as we did before. Our underlying income was only reflecting the first 1% yield. And that's why also the guidance of 13% to 16% underlying logic was reflecting this. In the future, we have the 20% profit that I mentioned and also like what we can pass to the customers. That's the difference.

I think I asked my question. The question is why the new range is wider?

To reflect basically how much we will pass back to the customers in the future. So if you -- if you assume that at some point in the U.K., we can pass back all the interest to the customers, then we will have a lower margin. That's reflecting this movement.

You are passing on the new rate, you are passing back [indiscernible]

Yes. But this 20% that is included in this. And then the 20% to 25% are reflecting the interest again that is not -- that we assume we will pass back to the customers at some point. These are -- we provided a slide, extra slide for this, but happy to follow up if you have any question -- further questions on that.

Over to Chris.

Great. Chris Kennedy from William Blair. Can you just talk about the journey in the business initiative? You've talked about kind of how your product set has evolved. Today, it's mostly micro businesses and you want to go upmarket. What do you need to capture that opportunity?

Thank you, Chris. That's a perfect one for Nilan, how the business market has been growing.

Great question. Thanks for it. The road map that I covered really -- and those areas that we invest in is what will enable larger and larger businesses to use us. So when we talk to larger businesses, the barriers to using Wise is being able to set up multiple users within the product, which we're now live with, enabling to give them permissions on different aspects of using the account, creating workflows within Wise for creating invoices and invoices getting paid.

And then a lot of complexity around integrating into their accounting systems. So businesses want to be able to take a picture of an invoice and then maybe assigning to a cost center, that's from an account -- pulled from their accounting system and that getting synced automatically and similarly with an invoice coming in, being able to align that with their accounting system so that the Wise product becomes very tightly integrated with their accounts.

And that is probably the single biggest driver behind it. Sorry, biggest area we'll need to invest in, in order for a larger business to use us. From a core product perspective, large businesses are using us today for large payments and beginning to use us for holding money. But to use us more and more every day and to move more of their payments to us, these are the types of areas we need to invest in.

Thank you. Alex.

Alex Markgraff, KeyBanc Capital Markets. I had a question on Wise platform. Just with respect to traditional banks and neobanks, how you think about prioritizing direct versus indirect relationships with customers. I think understanding the economic equivalence on the transfer side.

There are other sort of product opportunities in consumer. And so just thinking about owning that relationship directly versus indirectly on the consumer side as it relates to scaling Wise platform.

I think Kristo laid out the economics really of how we price and think about from a cost and margin perspective, a transaction coming from platform versus a transaction coming from the retail business. And then I'll take your question is like why should we invest on the platform side? Why should we invest on the direct side.

I touched on these when we integrate a platform partner, so some of those partners transactions were already coming to Wise, but there was a large chunk of those transactions, which weren't coming to Wise. These are generally customers that have infrequent use cases and maybe lower value transactions. And so wouldn't get over the inertia of downloading Wise. So there is economic value in doing the integration in order for this to happen.

But it's a win-win for the partner because what happens is when we go live with a partnership with Wise, their customers no longer need to use the Wise app. And those transactions, especially if they economically are the same for us, can transition back into that partner's interface and deliver a much more convenient experience.

It's David Scharf at Citizens Capital Markets. Wanted to follow up on the competition question. I mean at a high level, it seems like at the end of the day, the biggest differentiation for Wise as you bypass correspondent banks and became a nonbank member of individual payment networks.

Can you speak specifically to first, just what are some of the hurdles and challenges for a nonbank to get accepted to a local payment network like ACH, BACS, [ Zengin ]

And then secondly, since these payment networks by admitting you have sort of set the precedent for admitting a non-bank, are you aware of any kind of backlog of other remittance providers sort of seeking to ultimately embark on the same kind of integration.

That's a fantastic question. I feel like we've covered the first part quite a lot today, what are the complexities involved through licenses and et cetera. I think the second question is very fair given that we were trailblazing through the first 8. Surely, there will be people behind us who try to do the same.

I think one thing to appreciate though is that in order to build up this network, it's kind of not worthwhile doing just 2. You kind of need to invest behind doing the 30 or the 40 or the 50. So none has seriously started yet. So it's hard for me to comment how far behind they will be. But it's an enormous investment of time, efforts and the kind of expertise that you need to build up. That's what Diana was covering.

Yes. And worth covering again that even though the regulation can change to enable on nonbank financial institutions in order to become direct participants, this also comes with really high requirements around, first of all, we will still require the right type of license to access this payment system.

And then as I was sharing, we go through a lengthy process of approval from the payment scheme from the central bank that would look into the compliance framework, operational framework, technical resilience, so it means, yes, it opens up for the -- to enable more competition, not only on cross-border, but in general, to move payments domestically with other competitors coming and joining the payment system. All of them with these high requirements.

And as Kristo was explaining, what makes our network for the world's money is our ability to deploy this level of connection not only in 1 or 2 places, but to do this sustainably and at scale across the world.

Thank you. So how many more questions have we got in the room, if you could just raise your hand. Okay, it looks like we have 2 more. So take 2 more from the room, and then we'll jump over to zoom. So if we could just start with the lady here, then we'll go to James.

[indiscernible] Ventures. In the summer of 2025, you guys applied for your nondepository trust license in the U.S. I'm wondering, is that an end game here? Or are you using that as a stepping stone to get a full bank charter? Do you think that offers any sort of competitive advantage in the U.S., especially now given the openness of the administration to give out new bank charters.

That's a great question for our expansion team?

Yes. That's a good question. Thank you. You're right. We applied for this license. And as we were saying, we already have more than 80 licenses around the world. This means that our portfolio of licenses keeps on expanding and growing throughout the years, in particular, with these national trust licenses, I was saying in the U.S., we already have our money transmitter licenses. And as you heard from Nilan, our different products are fully live in the U.S. for our customers. With this new license, we expect to deepen our level of connectivity to the payment systems in the U.S. That's the main driver.

Over to James. Thank you.

James [indiscernible]. When you're running a business, you're always running a series of experiments. And in the last couple of years, you appear to have run 2 quite big experiments.

One was a significant reduction in the take rate, which seems to have stimulated good volume growth. Curious, a, reflections on that sort of very pronounced 20% reduction in the take rate and how that informs future thinking on take rate reductions for cross-border payments. And also if there was a particular sort of stimulant or breakthrough that allowed you to make that very big reduction in the take rate that may or may not happen again.

And then the second question relates to sort of pronounced increase in OpEx spend in the last sort of year, 1.5 years, areas where you've been pleasantly surprised by increased investment in marketing or service or any aspect of OpEx and areas where you've just not seen the returns that you may have expected.

Between Emmanuel, I'll start. Maybe I'll get to cover most of it. So in terms of our pricing or take rates, I think we'd rather have all of these moves or economics move more gradually than big jumps. I think one thing that I don't know if it was ever part of an experiment to be such a deep sudden cut and then I think that doesn't help anyone if that happens too fast or too big jumps.

So I expect in the future, you'll see a more gradual kind of tightening of the competitive moats, if you like. So making it harder for anyone else to compete.

And then in the other question of, I think where we spending, we see, we would never spend if we don't see an amazing return. All the spend that we've made over the last 15 years has delivered amazingly. And these decisions are not -- are happening at a micro level, really. It's very -- we're quite famous for not doing any pivots. So there's not a lot of features or products that we've turned off or big bets that we have pulled back.

And that's because I think our optimization happens at a kind of much smaller levels of investments. But our teams kind of recombine and kind of move on to different projects all the time. But I see that as a kind of a more natural way of running the business.

Well, I can just say like the take rates follow a logic of cost plus, as I explained before. So basically, we're tracking the cost very, very detailed. We look at this on a monthly base. So once we decide to reduce the take rate, we have a very good comfort that we can still generate the same margin, as we mentioned before, where we are agnostic.

We want to generate the same margin, contribution margin, if you have a private customer, business or a platform customer. And for that, we need to have a very detailed cost structure. So when we decreased the take rate, we already know that we have this efficiency gain and not the other way.

And that's why I mentioned strategically and mindfully because we do this on a regular basis, we check, is this efficiency gain sustainable? Or is it one-off. And then when we have this clarity, then we will continue to decrease the take rate.

And then we do this because this is building a moat. I mean, like the infrastructure, all the licenses that you're building combined with the take rate that is reducing because we pass the efficiency partly to the customers, make it very, very hard for other players to come in this and try to build the same offering that was built out over the last 15 years. And I think that's why this component is very important as a combination of the investments we do in the technology and operations and so on and so forth. Thank you.

So we're going over to the Zoom webinar now and Justin Forsythe from UBS.

Awesome. It sounds like you can hear me. This is Justin Forsythe from UBS.

I wanted to ask on Wise platform and thank you team for -- that is brutal. I don't think that's me. But I'll just keep talking. Thank you for Wise Connect a few weeks back in London. I think that was a great presentation. So I guess this one to start is for either Kristo or Nilan. It seems like you're having a great amount of success in winning the retail banking operations of financial institution platform customers. I'm thinking Standard Chartered, Raiffeisen, UniCredit, Capitec, Itaú, et cetera, are there examples where you had success in the corporate and commercial banking operations as well? Or is Wise platform just simply better suited for the retail bank?

And then Emmanuel, still on platforms. It seems to me like we might hit that 10% medium-term target for a mix of platform TPV this year. If we do so, that will be less than 2 years. The initial target for the medium term, I think, was about 3 to 5 years, so it hit that 10%. What is the output of this? So would you then shift to guidance?

And I'm also thinking about costs there. So if you're exceeding this target kind of ahead of time, does that mean there's a potential to exceed either your revenue and/or the cost side. And on the cost side, I mean, a lot of your costs are fixed, I think, what, 65% of your costs are fixed. So if you're then exceeding on the top line, I would think that would drop through the bottom line as well.

Let me repeat the questions. I think the first one was we seem to make a lot of progress with retail banks. And then question on what was the corporate banking pipeline and in terms of Wise platform? And then for Emmanuel -- we expected the Wise platform income to grow -- revenues to grow quickly. And what's your update on this?

On the retail -- sorry, on the Wise platform side, indeed, we see a lot of traction on the retail banking side, and that's through the dynamic that I talked through earlier around those customers of the retail banks adopting Wise and then they're driving banks to come talk to us.

And so like you can kind of think through from a corporate perspective, we don't as yet have a high degree of adoption among corporates. So the demand from the corporate banking side is less.

That said, we have -- you can imagine when you look at our Wise platform partners, they generally all have retail banking arms, which is where they start and they all have corporate banking arms. And so these are all ongoing conversations that we have with our partners.

In terms of the guidance that we gave at Honest Day, I think we're very pleased to welcome Capitec. I mean like this is the first bank in Africa that we signed. This is the #1 bank in South Africa. So we're on track with what we mentioned before. You mentioned like what could be the impact on the financials. It will also here, we apply the same gross margin logic so that basically, we will be able to operate at the lower take rate for the platforms so to make sure that we get even more customers or more partners in the future.

So on the terms of margin, midterm, we will continue to use the same cost plus margin logic so that we can attract more and more banks and it will become even more difficult to compete with us.

Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much to our presenters today. Thank you very much to everybody for joining us via the webcast and here in the room as well.

A replay of today's presentation will soon be available on the Owner Relations website. So please head there if you'd like to rewatch any part today. And for those of you who are in the room with us, we are serving refreshments upstairs, a couple of floors up either by the lift or the stairs. So please do stay and join us for those. Thank you very much, everybody. Thanks.

Good morning. Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us this morning for our half year FY '26 results presentation. We have a short presentation from our CEO and Founder, Kristo, followed by a presentation by our CFO, Emmanuel Thomassin. And then we will move on to Q&A. We'll start in the room, and then we'll jump over to Zoom. Thank you.

[Presentation]

I'm being here today with us again. So about 70% of people discover Wise because their friends and family tell them about Wise. We've been really proud about this. And I've just lost the notes on the back screen, which will come up in a second. But actually making ads is quite fun in Wise because what we get to do is basically tell the stories that our customers tell their friends, their family, tell the stories again and amplify them with the ads. So what you just saw now is a set of ads we're running in the U.S. on TV, and they kind of follow the same narrative. This is what our customers are telling their friends.

Our update today will show how Wise is yet again serving larger and larger groups of people and businesses, moving more and more cross-border volume and how we're fixing larger and larger use cases for them. So let's get started. We added 2 million active customers over the year, coming to 13 million people and businesses now using Wise and cross-currency transactions in the last 6 months. So that is either moving or spending money across currencies.

Our work on infrastructure and product, the service experience has led to stronger recommendations. And then assisted by advertising, it has led to more new customers, but also stronger affinity to Wise, which then means more recommendations, but also staying for longer. And these customers are transacting more with cross-border volumes up 24% to almost GBP 85 billion for this half year. This is quite incredible. This time last year, we took our -- we took pretty decisive action to reduce our average fees down by almost 15%. And so we shouldn't really be surprised that we saw customers react to that.

They didn't only increase their persistence of recommending Wise to others, but they also voted with their wallet. So bringing us more transactions and larger use cases. And the volume growth that we've been seeing is especially pronounced in this segment of larger transactions and larger use cases. And you've heard us talk about customers shifting from transactions just using Wise transactionally to using the Wise Account for their international banking features. And my team can be really proud of actually 2 things here. First, clearly, the features we've been adding, they're really resonating. So people and businesses are getting more out of the Wise Accounts. They're using it more.

But the other dynamic here is how fast the customer confidence is growing. So our customers are now trusting us with over GBP 25 billion of their cash today, holding this as a deposit or as an investment through the Wise Account. And over this last year, I feel like we pulled off a pretty incredible feat. We've taken down our price point by about 15%, effectively expanding our economic moat quite incredibly. And at the same time, we boosted the growth of volumes and customer holdings. So as the result, recording 13% growth in underlying income.

So this is really the result of the efficiencies we get from the infrastructure that we're building, but also the product that we're serving. In the last 6 months, we've been pretty busy shipping more. So as we described on Owners Day, you should expect progress come in 2 main categories. One is the infrastructure side where we go deep in the direct integrations and also in the regulatory infrastructure. And then secondly, you'll see developments for international banking, as our customers keep getting more and more out of their Wise Account.

And a good example maybe here is Brazil because in the last 6 months, on the infrastructure side, we went direct really deep with Pix -- brought Pix live to our customers and our bank partners. And then separately on the Wise Account, we added interest to both local currency and U.S. dollar holdings. And then in addition, on Wise Platform, actually, we brought live this integration with Itaú that we were talking about earlier. So we're seeing these investments pay off for our customers and platform clients and quite measurably.

So when we look at the payment feeds, the things people really care about how fast the money is going to get on the other side, 74% are now instant. And I need to remind you again what instant means. Instant means money leaving your bank in one country and arriving at the recipients bank on the other side of the world, ready to use in less than 20 seconds and that's now 74% of the payments. And after this large investment in our price mode, we've kept the average rate -- average take rate stable at 52 basis points.

Another highlight coming from our fastest-growing segment, Wise Platform, where we see the cross-border volumes now getting to 5% of our volumes. And we're on track to get this to about 10% in the medium term. You've heard us recently talk about the really impressive brand names and big banks that we've signed on Wise platform, but I'm actually really excited seeing the volumes growing on integrations that we brought live years ago. So this is where -- this is the growth that we're enjoying today.

And before I hand over to Emmanuel, I just wanted to remind you of the huge opportunity we have ahead of us. Because we're building Wise to move trillions, there is a huge, fast-growing market, the network we've created with our products that customers love. These have been built to make money work across borders, the same as it works at home. So Emmanuel, please take us through.

Thank you, Kristo. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to share our financial performance for the first half year 2026 and how our disciplined investments continue to drive sustainable and profitable growth. We're making progress across every single key metric. Our active customers have grown by 21% each year over the last 2 years to now over 13 million active customers for the first half year. The cross-border volume has grown at a similar pace to GBP 85 billion, and the customer holdings have exceeded GBP 25 billion. This is growing by 34% each year.

Underlying income growth has grown by 16% to annually GBP 750 million, and we are delivering underlying profit before tax and at the top of the range. Our range is about 13% to 16%, our target margin. So what I want to focus on today is how we achieve this and through focus, targeted investments that build our competitive moat, but also drive long-term growth. Let's start with our customers because clearly, they are at the heart of everything we do at Wise.

In the first half of the year, over 13 million customers complete an international transactions with Wise, experiencing the ease, the transparency, but also the affordability that they find us. Personal customers grew by 18% year-on-year to 12.8 million, and the business customers grew to -- by 17% to 613,000, and we're particularly pleased to see the acceleration in this business segment. This is the strongest sequel growth in net addition that we have had.

The cross-border volume increased by 24% year-on-year to GBP 85 billion. This is a growth of 26% even in constant currency. This was mainly given by customer growth, but also in addition to that, our existing customers moving higher volumes, a sign of growing trust and deeper engagement. But also, we saw the strong growth in business volumes. And as Kristo mentioned before, the scaling of the Wise Platform, which is now 5% of the cross-border volume means 1% more than in the previous year.

And in the first 6 months, we have the pleasure to have major partners like UniCredit or Raiffeisen Bank, and we are seeing also strong growth from our existing partners. So you surely notice that the volume grew at a faster pace than our cross-border revenue, and this is on purpose. Our cross-border take rate decreased by 10 basis points year-on-year to 52 basis points, the [ sharpest ] adjustments in the company history, while our cross-border revenue increased by 5% compared to last year. So we are investing in pricing because we believe that the lowest cost, the lowest price and the best infrastructure provider will win over the long term.

The Wise Account is key to our strategy in increasing customer retention and broadening the product usage. The card usage has grown significantly with card spent exceeding GBP 15 billion in the first half year of 2026, generating GBP 132 million in revenue. This is an increase of 28% year-on-year. The popularity of the Wise Account also means that customers are holding more money with us, nearly GBP 20 billion in Wise Account and another GBP 5.6 billion in Assets, So that total customer holdings over GBP 25 billion at the end of the period.

And this balance obviously generates significant interest income in H1, even if slowing down pictures of the year-on-year due to the lower yields in the market. So we're successfully shifting the mix of our revenue base, which make our business more resilient, but also represent multiple engine for growth. The non-cross-border revenue now represent 41% of our total underlying income. And we also have a diversified regional footprint, as we continue to invest into growing across multiple markets.

So you've seen this investment framework before, but it's worth reinforcing it, as we explain our financial strategy. And this framework ensures a sustainable approach to investment and earnings growth over the long term. So once we achieve efficiencies, we consider investing back into the business. And we also can invest in price reductions, which drive customer and volume growth. This lead to increased profitability, and then we can reinvest. So this is -- let me go through how we deliver on this. Starting with our servicing function.

As we build the right structure to onboard and provide a better service to a growing customer base, our investments in servicing increased by 20% year-on-year to GBP 134 million. And we are pleased with the benefit that we are seeing from AI and automation and customer servicing with big improvement here and a lot more is planned as we ramp up AI technology. But we are also investing into our teams, including compliance, which is critical to the success of our business.

Our historic investments in servicing are paying off. And as you can see some key examples here on the screen. In particular, we have been able to expand our Net Promoter Score to 69. The high levels of service we provide and our investments into price continue to help us to building a loyal customer base. And this is clearly highlighted by the 70% of customers that joined Wise through the word of mouth. But we are also going beyond that, that as we continue to increase our investments into marketing and sales, as we shared at our Owners Day in April this year.

We are investing more strategically across diversified channel, increasing our brand marketing spend and build awareness and drive more organic growth. In H1, our marketing and sales investments increased by 59% year-over-year to GBP 57 million. We invest as much as possible within our targets, and this is evident with our payback period remaining strong at 6 months. So this is -- in H1, we run brand campaign in regions like Australia, Canada and the U.S. And you saw some examples from Australia at our Owners Day in April. And today, we also played an ad of the U.S. earlier today, but that's not all what we are doing.

Here, you can see some examples on how we brought the Wise brand to our Canadian customers daily commute. So through these investments, we have continued to drive a constant increase of new customer acquisitions. Importantly, we had 3.5 million new active customers in H1 2026.

And this is a result of our strategic investments to attract and retain our customers, including investments into pricing. So next, on tech and development, we invest GBP 144 million in H1, and this is up by 18% year-on-year across multiple teams. This is a significant portion of the spend, goes to maintaining our existing and available products. And for the rest, we continue to invest in launching new features, but also reading out -- rolling out the existing features into new markets. And Kristo shared earlier example of many launches and improvements that the team is working on.

So finally, we're also investing in corporate function and infrastructure. And these teams are -- might not be customer-facing, but they are essential for sustainable growth. The spend here increased by 35% to GBP 131 million, supporting areas like compliance, risk, people operations. And this is also including one-off investments related to our dual-listing project. We expect this investment pace to continue in H2 with the administrative expense of around GBP 1 billion for the full year. And this includes investments in our people across the area that I just covered.

In H1, we welcome over 1,000 additional colleagues at Wise, and we plan to keep on hiring in H2. And these investments together, with the top line growth, delivered in the period that clearly highlight how we are delivering on our strategy, and as you can see clearly in our margin progression over the past 2 years. The increased profitability we generated in H1 2025 have been reinvested, taking us back to our underlying profit before tax margin target range of 13% to 16%. And this is exactly the model that we promise here, and it's working.

So as you know, we only use the first 1% yield we receive of interest income within our underlying profit before tax because we are committed to building a business that is sustainable without relying on cyclical forms of income such as interest. Including additional interest income beyond the first 1%, we reported a profit before tax for the period of GBP 255 million. So now I'd like to cover our expectation for the rest of the year, and we are reiterating our previous guidance.

So for the full year 2026, we continue to expect underlying income growth to be within our midterm range of 15% to 20% on a constant currency basis. And based on the phasing of our investments, we continue to expect underlying PBT of around 16% for 2026, excluding the one-off listing expense of circa GBP 25 million -- GBP 35 million. On our capital allocation framework, as we continue to make prudent decisions to deliver on our long-term mission, our business strategy aims to deliver strong profitable growth so that we can generate strong cash in the future. This means that we can sustain strong level of cash, maintaining a strong capital to ensure resilience and flexibility.

And on the return of capital, I wanted to share an update on the share repurchase program we announced earlier this year. From -- of the incremental 25 million shares into our Employee Benefit Trust to find historic options, we have already repurchased half of it. So we are executing our strategy with discipline and seeing strong results across every single metric that matters. We're growing our customer base. We're deepening our engagement, diversifying our revenue and investing for the future, all this while maintaining our target profitability range. And the fundamental of our business had never been so strong, and we're just getting started. So now I'll leave you with another ad as we set it up for questions. Thank you so much.

[Presentation]

Great. Okay. So we're just going to take any questions that you have. So what we'll do is we'll start in the room, and then we'll jump over to Zoom [Operator Instructions].

[indiscernible] Goldman. Firstly, platforms demonstrated a strong inflection in the half, now 5% of volumes growing around 3x than the total volume. Can you talk to us about some of the momentum and ramp you're seeing within this segment and talk us through that midterm guide of 10% of volumes in terms of the growth you need to get there?

And secondly, one for Kristo, please. Stablecoins are certainly gaining traction within the payment ecosystem. Can you talk to us about where you see Wise positioned with respect to stablecoins? And what are some of the opportunities and potential challenges, given you built one of the lowest cross-border payment infrastructures?

Well, I'll start with platform. Well, thank you very much. Yes, you're right. I mean we have a very good momentum. I mean every time we meet, we are pleased to announce our new names, new partners joining the platform. That was also driving inbound calls so that we're really, really pleased with that. You see basically new names coming and we are integrating them. But also, as I mentioned in the presentation, you see also the ramp-up of names that we mentioned before, where we see the volume increasing over time.

So today, we are at 5% -- a little bit more than 5%. So this is 1% more than our last meeting that we had in April. And yes, we're on track for delivering the 10% midterm and the 50% long term. So yes, we have a good momentum here. And we see interest from new partners or potential new partners.

On the stablecoin question, so indeed, you're right, we've built the world's fastest, the most efficient, the lowest cost way of moving money between countries and currencies. And we've been -- when we talk about this, we often talk about the direct integrations and how we link together the local payment networks. But in fact, Wise Network also comes with this regulatory infrastructure that allows us to do this in each of the jurisdictions around the world.

So if we ask about stablecoins in that context of money transfers that goes just beyond moving U.S. dollars between wallets, then it's these regulated on and off ramps into those local currencies, how do you get the money into the USD stablecoin and out of that USD stablecoin. And that's actually the hardest thing to achieve reliably, which is exactly what we built Wise Network -- or this Wise infrastructure for. So if we want to think about Wise in that context, then as these legitimate use cases of USD clearing outside of the Federal Reserve and outside of the main banks emerge, and we're starting to see reliable anti-fraud, anti-bribery, anti-tax evasion, anti-money laundering mechanics come live on the stablecoin environments.

Then of course, we have the best on and off-ramps to make use of this new technology across the world. And furthermore, if these challenges improve, I'm actually personally quite excited if we can add something like this to move U.S. dollars next to Fedwire and Zelle and Venmo and other options that are out there today for our own customers.

It's Adam from Morgan Stanley. So I've got 2 questions for you. Just first of all, on the pricing, obviously, a big reduction over the last 12 months. The policy in the past has always been to cut pricing as you engineer cost out of the platform. Could you just give us any change to that, first of all? And then any visibility insight you could give to how you're thinking about that over the next 12 months?

And then secondly, on the investment side of things, obviously, a big investment gone in already and more in the second half. Do you see any change in the payback metrics that you're getting? Would you be more comfortable with maybe moving those payback periods out a little bit? And then critically, in some of the new markets you're in, there's a big flywheel effect with Wise in terms of getting people on and getting volumes up to bring the cost down, and we know how that works. Are you seeing that this advertising is accelerating that flywheel in some of these newer markets you're going into? And again, would that push you to do a little bit more to accelerate how you get to more of those instant transactions and so on?

Let me try to respond more principally, we're keeping our investments. We aim to keep our investments really balanced and steady. So we saw -- as we're describing, we did a pretty decisive move about a year ago and now been kind of stable. Going forward, we try to avoid big swings, but definitely, the strategy hasn't changed because we amazingly see this working. We see more volume even coming up in the short term, let alone this economic mode that we're building.

So this is definitely going to continue, but we're going to try and avoid big swings. So that will be kind of a steady expectation. And then the other question that you had around do we see the marketing working? For sure. And I think we're one of -- potentially our marketing team is one of the world's most disciplined when it comes to payback. And I don't -- I think the magic still is if you can reach more people with the same investment return because at the end of the day, we're investing our shareholders' money and that has to have a return.

Kristo, first of all, looking at that photograph, I wanted to ask you which shampoo you use. But the real 2 questions really are, one is in terms of margins going ahead, are we kind of -- sorry, let me ask the margin question second. The first question really being, you obviously currently Wise transfers kind of charges per transfer. And are you thinking of something like an Amazon Prime model where somebody pays in, let's say, GBP 10 or whatever in whichever currency and then they kind of -- monthly, they can have so many transfers. Are you thinking about that? Have you already tried that in any particular market? So that was my first question.

And my second question was about basically margins. Obviously, it's a huge, huge market out there. And are you also thinking of kind of saying -- willing to kind of take lower, lower takes and lower margins because obviously, the volumes that we are talking about are like 100 or 1,000x potential.

I'll take the first one. Emmanuel will take the second.

Yes. So I won't talk about shampoo. But on the margin, look, I mean, we guide the market to 13% to 16%, and we are really serious about this. I mean, like we want to grow because there's a massive opportunity out there, as you know. So we -- Kristo mentioned just now how we reinvest in pricing, but this is one of the options that we have. This year, we are investing in marketing. We're investing in servicing. We're investing in product and development. We're investing in people so basically to offer the best service we can. And we anticipate, obviously, the growth.

We have the strongest ad customers in this -- in history of Wise and basically for customers and businesses. So we know this is working. And while we still guide the market at the 13% to 16%. So this is a massive investment that we're doing. We're delivering not only on the fields that I mentioned, but also all the features the direct integration. So we're really, really busy. And we still deliver like on this margin at the top of the range right now. So I think in terms of margin, we are really disciplined. I mean the money, we don't spend, we invest. We want to have a return, and that's help us this discipline to guide the market to the 13% to 16%. As long as we get room to invest and we get a good return and the time is so fantastic, I think it will be set enough to do this, but you can expect us to be disciplined.

And your other question on the different charging models or bulking together. Of course, we play to a reasonable extent with all of those, and you might see some evolution there. But I think principally, we really value this loyalty that comes with our strings attached. And this is quite amazing if your customers don't come back to you because they bought a subscription, but they come back to you because they want to come back to you. And that's kind of something that however we end up pricing, I don't want to lose a trade away.

This is Aditya from Bank of America.

Three questions from my side. Firstly, on the platform volumes, could you just talk about how much of the growth came from the, as you said, customers who have been live for a long time versus the ones who have been onboarded over the last year or so?

Second, on the hiring, so you've hired 1,000 people just in the first half versus the initial expectations of, I think, hiring 700 people for the full year. So there's been an acceleration. So could you talk about why you decided to step up the pace of that? Which areas you've been hiring in? And then how should we think about that for H2 and for next year as well?

And then the last one on GBP 35 million one-off, should we think about that -- as you think about the next year, does that one-off, I guess, get reinvested back into other areas? Or we should think about that, again, flowing back into the profitability?

I'll take the easy one, if you don't mind. Your question on investment and how did we -- how are we able to invest so much in this first 6 months. So I'm actually really, really, really pleased with that. It seems like it's a fantastic time to invest. If you look at all of those categories that Emmanuel went through, starting with servicing, so the payback that we get from like an instant service and the confidence that customers then bring like GBP 25 billion of their money to hold with you, that's amazing, and there's still room to invest there. Let alone the rate of the growth that we're now seeing, we need to be ready. There's going to be a lot more customers to serve going forward.

So with that, then we talked about marketing already that has a very direct, very clear payback, has a very, very good ROI to use money. And then on engineering, we're actually -- if you look at the numbers, we're actually investing not as fast as our volumes are growing. So we're investing even lower. I wish we could go faster there. So -- and that will take a bit of ramp-up. So I'm actually pretty proud that we wanted to invest. We talked to you about this at the Owners Day that this is a fantastic time to invest now and feel like we made kind of more progress in the first 6 months than we hoped for, but...

Yes. On the -- because your first question was on platform. Actually, what we see is that we have a ramp-up of new customers, like basically volume coming from new customers, but also partners that have been there before that are extending the contract with us. So we are in a very comfortable position where basically, as we told you, usually, we start with one route and then over time, they extend the contracts. This is what we see.

So clearly, there's new customers that we signed last year. So -- and then on top of that, the former one that are extending the contract. So this is really a mix of both, which is very, very healthy. So that's -- and that's driving this 1% increase or a little bit more than 1% increase. Yes, on the hiring, just like as Kristo said, I mean, like Wise is a brand that people are attracting. And then basically, we are in a position where we can scale and anticipating the growth rate that we see on the customers. So that's very good.

I think on the last question was the reinvesting capacities or -- yes, I mean this is clearly a one-off due to the dual listing. That's why when we guide right now on the margin, we clearly exclude basically the one-off. So we don't -- we're going to have a small part of recurring cost, but this one is a one-off in nature.

You should not forget the left side.

Pavan from Citi here. I've also got a couple of questions. Firstly, on instant payments, good to see the step-up to 74% from 63% last year. What's really driving that? Is that mainly from the go-live with Pix in Brazil? And should we expect that to step up again when you go live in Japan? And then secondly, on the elasticity of pricing, you've reduced pricing by 15% over the last year. Has that really translated into the volume uptake that you've seen so far? Or is that really a multiyear payoff?

I'll take the first one. So you're directionally correct that these instant payment rates are basically a reflection to the large part of how good is our local connectivity, how fast we can get Australian dollars to the end recipient. Given the timings, I would probably attribute this more to our Australian integration that went live about a year ago or about 6 months ago, it kind of ramped up. So it's probably more of that than Pix. We'll see some from Pix as well going forward. So I'm definitely looking forward to this number going up further.

And on the price elasticity, so it's clearly for us like a long-term strategy. We know that price matters to every single customer. So that's the first maybe statement. Like we know long term, price will matters, and it will position us at the #1 option. Last year, as we do the price adjustments, we also increased some price. I mean, like it was not only going down, and it was by design.

So basically, what we've seen is that the larger transfer is becoming cheaper and more attractive for our customers. And that we saw immediate reaction. So we saw that basically people are reacting to our offering, as we decrease the take rate for the larger transactions. So there is an immediate reaction, but we think that price is anyway a long-term game, and that's why we want to push on efficiency so that we can pass this back to the customers.

I'm really interested in the decline in take rate that you're reporting. And can you just help me understand and unpick that a bit and the difference between changing mix in the business and like-for-like price cuts on your kind of rate card? And what's the balance between those drivers of a decline in the reported take rate?

I can take that. This is very much driven by us setting the fees and setting the fees lower than we did before. It does bring about a secondary effect of a bit of a mix shift. So for example -- kind of coming up with an example, if in a country, we used to be -- we discovered one payment method, say, people paying in with cards, is particularly more expensive and we raised the fees on cards, lower it on bank transactions, then what you do see is the shift from people who used to use cards before because they were kind of subsidized, moving into bank transfers, bringing down the take rate. But for them, this is actually a benefit. So you get these little secondary mix shifts, but generally, it is -- like we set the prices.

Eleanor Hall, Rothschild & Co Redburn. I just wanted to follow up a little bit more on the stablecoin question from earlier. And I know earlier on in the quarter, there was some news around you potentially exploring hiring in the digital asset space. I know you've been speaking to customers in terms of is this something they'd be interested in. And I'm just wondering if you could comment on the outcome of those discussions or any kind of further updates on things that you're looking at internally to do with stablecoins?

As I already covered, the investments that we're making are quite general in terms of we're building the network that will be useful in the context of stablecoins or without the context of stablecoin. So we're not making a bet on one payment scheme over another or one transaction method over another, but there's a lot of -- we're going to be very deliberate on what kind of use cases are we going to accept and how -- where is it actually going to be useful. So going forward, I think you should expect us to be very deliberate about that.

Vineet from Autonomous Research. Just 2 questions. What other countries do you see -- do you need to do direct integrations that will complete your overall infrastructure build? And any thoughts on rumors about Wise exploring a banking license?

Well, on direct integration, we're not done yet, right? I mean like there are so many payment systems that we think we should integrate in order to be even increasing the instant payment. I mean, like we've done a tremendous job. I mean like if you remember, we were at 64%, if I remember last year, we're now at 74%. We want to integrate more systems. I mean we want to make sure that we come to the highest number as possible in terms of instant payment.

So there are plenty of payment systems, and you can imagine that our team is working actively on that to add more in the future in terms of, well, having the license and then the technical integration. So we -- it's not over yet. I mean, like we have 8 today. We will continue to integrate more payment systems.

And then on the comment of rumors. So just the fact is the OCC in the U.S. has reported that we're in the process of a license application for a trust license, which is a form of banking charter. It's not quite a banking charter, but it's a trust charter. So that is indeed true. In the U.K., there haven't been any announcements. And generally, of course, we have licensing procedures or processes ongoing in probably 20 countries in parallel for different things that we could do for our customers.

Simon Young. Could you just help us understand what the correlation between your direct payments and -- sorry, instant payments and the ones that are direct and therefore, also the impact on the gross margin? Because if I understand it, the gross margin is very high on stuff that goes through the direct payments. And if it goes higher, obviously, gross margin should go up and yet gross margins in the first half were flat. Can you just help me understand what's going on, please?

I'll try a little bit. Just to build your intuition about this a little bit, I think if you look at mechanically on the cost base, you maybe see less of an impact going direct or having a very good indirect clearing mechanism. However, the COGS benefit or the cost benefit does come through quite a lot in the reliability that you get being direct and also the customer experience that you get.

So it's not as direct as what I think you had in mind. But indirectly, indeed, we should see benefits operationally, benefits from customers and customer affinity and so on. So it's definitely very worthwhile investments, but I'm not sure you can translate this as directly into the gross margin increase.

Culture is a massive issue for any company. How do you embed successfully 1,000 people in a half and keep the culture that Wise has obviously developed so successfully in the last 12 years?

I'm glad you asked this question because I'm here for a year, but I can tell you, basically, the onboarding is very successful. I mean, like you really quickly understand the culture of Wise. It's a developing culture and you get the support of your colleagues. I mean -- so I think Wise is a brand that is really highly seen by candidates. But the way we integrate people is really like supporting -- the team are supporting and managing to onboard newcomers like me very, very quickly.

Last year, I have the pleasure to be here after 4 weeks. It was because basically my colleagues also in this room who were helping me a lot to onboard. So I think this is the culture that we have. We have one mission. We repeat this mission. We want to move [indiscernible] and everyone is working every day on that path.

I would amplify that the job of onboarding the 1,000 people is of the 6,000 that are already here. So it's not that hard if you take it this way, 6:1.

So moving over to Zoom, Justin Forsythe from UBS.

I want to hit a couple of questions on my side. So first, Kristo, the foray into stablecoins. Maybe you could just talk a little bit, it felt like 6 months ago, it was a bit of an afterthought for you guys. Clearly, quite an evolution there. Maybe you could just talk through a little bit your evolutions personally in coming to an understanding with this aspect of the market. And it does seem like there's a lot of players in this on- and off-ramp business within stablecoins. How do you expect to differentiate there? Is it simply because of your connection to local faster payment schemes? And is it fair to assume that a lot of those providers, those competitors, if you will, do not have the same level of licensure and local scheme connectivity that Wise has?

Question number two, Emmanuel around the PBT margin. So I think 1H was ex-listing costs around 17.5%-ish. Now you effectively reiterated the full year guide, but ex-listing costs, so to me, that implies 2H margin down quite a bit sequentially, I think, around 14.5%. Then if you include listing costs, I think you're down at like 11.5%. So I just want to understand, one, if that's the correct math and maybe a little bit more detail on what's driving it.

And what that also implies for the cost base going forward in the beginning parts of the next fiscal year. And on top of that, thinking about underlying income growth because it seems to imply that there's quite a large acceleration. Could you be doing 20% plus in 2H, as the take rate comparison eases?

Thanks, Justin. You were slightly tricky to hear in the room for the audio. It's probably an issue on our side. But let me try and respond to the first part, which was imagining the stablecoin ecosystem improving, then how are we competitive in these on and off ramps. And I think you're spot on there that the qualities that make these on and off-ramps so amazing in the fiat world of going from Australian dollar to U.S. dollar to euro, that's exactly the same cost speed, regulatory reliability, the same things that will matter in the stablecoin world. So this is -- you're spot on that this does work exactly the same way.

I mean, like I start with the margin evolution. So the margin that -- the guidance that we give for the full year, excluding our one-off expense for the listing, and we want to be at the top of the range, we reiterated this, at the 16%, around 16%. What we will see basically in H2 is that we're driving the investments in first half year, and we will also continue to invest in H2. And this is basically our promises that we give in Owners Day.

I mean we're going to invest where we can where we get a good return and still guide the market to the 13% to 16%. And that is without [indiscernible] or the dual listing cost?

Bear in mind that this is a one-off by nature. I mean, for next year, we will have some recurring costs, but nothing compared to the GBP 35 million that we're expecting for this year. And when it comes to income -- underlying income growth, I hope I understood your question rightly. So yes, you have a kind of disconnect between the volume growth that you see, the cross-border volume and underlying income -- or the revenue that you generate out of this volume -- cross-border volume. But this is basically a like-for-like issue. So we're comparing basically 2 period of time where we had the price adjustments last year, in the first half year, that is coming to play. And then the comparison like-for-like is very difficult.

You will see this -- we will see the real growth -- I would say, the real growth in brackets in the second half year when this pricing adjustment is not affecting anymore the comparison for year-on-year comparison. So I hope I answered your questions. If not, please just let me know.

We'll now move over to Bharath. Over to you, Bar.

Bharath from Cantor Fitzgerald. Could you highlight some of the logos that you signed previously within the platforms business where you're now seeing volumes ramp up? Is there any kind of like a case study with regards to how long it normally takes to ramp up volumes materially here? And what are the conversations that you're having with these kinds of customers? Is it to do with like lower take rates for these businesses or anything else? That's the first question.

The second one, could you speak about your investments -- the marketing investments across the U.S., Australia and Canada, which ones are faring better? Are you seeing any regions with better ROI relatively speaking? And has there been any change in this ROI coming from these investments, given the macro worries?

I'll try to take the first one, Bharath, unfortunately, I think if we did a case study, it will be misleading because each of the -- we're onboarding the world's largest financial institutions often and each of them is so different. So it's going to be really hard to average those. The -- we're pretty -- we're very happy actually with our past announcement, past logos that have gone live, and you see that in the results. So it's something where it's very early to start singling anyone out, but we're very happy with the onboarding progress here, and that gives us confidence that we mentioned today where you kind of can see getting to 10% in medium term with the platform volumes.

To your question on marketing and ROI comparing Australia and U.S. So first, maybe I should start that we're using the same discipline and the same KPIs, and we have the same expectation on return no matter, which campaign we started in which country. However, comparing Australia and the U.S. is difficult at this time because Australia campaign is running for 1.5 years, where the U.S. is basically starting, I think, 2 months ago or so.

We are very pleased with the return that we see, and that's why we continue to invest in Australia. And we see also that the campaign in the U.S. is quite successful. We invest also in 3 other countries, New Zealand, Canada and U.K. So we are monitoring the progress in every single country, but it's really, really difficult because of the difficult -- it's challenging, let's put it this way, to compare Australia where we have this campaign running out for 1.5 years, and we continue to invest because we see the result. Result is, the CPA is going down. So the cost per acquisition are going down as longer we take the campaign.

So that's -- we're monitoring. We're also adjusting to be quite frank, we do some time adjustment in tricks. We say this creative that you see today, we have to adapt this for this country, and then we start a campaign again. But what I can tell you is that we're looking at this with the same lens. So basically, we want to have the same return no matter what. And if a campaign is not as successful as we expect, either we do the creative again or we change the campaign or we stop the campaign and we come with a better idea.

Well, thank you very much for joining us today. That concludes our presentation and Q&A for our half year results for FY '26. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, everyone.

Thanks everyone.