Wise plc

Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for our financial year 2023 for your results presentation. Usual format today, we're going to have Christo, Harsh and Matt taking through the results and key highlights for the year. And then we'll follow this with some Q&A, which we'll take from the room first. And then we'll also take Q&A on the live web stream. You can do that just by raising your hand virtually. Before we hand over to Krista, Harsh and Matt though, I'd just like you to hear actually from our customers.

So my name is Athena. I'm the founder and creative director for No Names People. I think that the most special thing for me about being born and raised in Colombia was that I got to really absorb and experience all of the cultural richness that we have back home. So No Names People's mission is to foster economical and social development within indigenous and artisanal communities in Latin America. preserving the culture of all of these amazing communities. These traditions have been passing from one generation to the other for a century, and I just believe it's really important to preserve that. One of the biggest challenges of having your production and all of your logistical team happening overseas is you have to deal with the wire transfers from the bank, and that implies a lot of fees and also a lot of time waiting from when you actually do the transfer and people receive it. And when I came across WISE, it really changed the whole way in which I handled the business. Having access to an app like WISE has made our lives so much easier. it has really become the backbone of our business. Having a platform like this is allowing people really to create job opportunities all around the world.

Thanks, Athena, and welcome everyone to our second full-year annual results as a public company. It's the Financial Year 2023. Of course, we're going to get to share the detailed numbers and financials, but it's also the time for us to check up on the progress we're making on our mission and what we've been shipping. So before we're going to hear from Matt going through the detailed numbers, you're going to hear from me and from our CTO, Harsh, on what we're shipping and why. So every day, we come to work at WISE to work on a mission, to build the best way to move and manage the world's money. Because as we've talked about before, the international banking, the traditional ways of doing this is broken. It's so expensive and often a frustrating experience. And it's not a small challenge because there's a lot of demand for it. A lot of people are hoping for better. There's about 2 trillion pounds moving across borders and looking for a better way to do this for people. And it's even worse for businesses. It's 9 trillion pounds. 9 trillion moving across borders annually, and the experience that the small businesses are getting from their banks is usually even worse than people. So our customers and people are telling us that it's expensive to move money, that there's no real banking services for their international business, and banks are saying it's impossible to build better experiences on the infrastructure that is there, on the technology. This then summarizes what we're solving. We've already made a ton of progress on making transfers fast, cheap, convenient, and go around the world. We're building a wide account, a new solution to international banking. And this is going to transform how people and businesses think of handling their money across borders. And we have created new infrastructure. Because the current one doesn't work. Mike is telling us that. And that's what enables us to build these other two products. And now we're opening this up to our partners so that they can build their own bank accounts on top of it. And it turns out what we've been building resonates with the demand, and it's paying off. So if we look over the last four years, we've seen us triple the number of customers that are using WISE. using our products, and we've seen us quadruple the volume. So clearly what we've been working on is resonating, hanging off. And all that time, I think it's now the seventh year that we're operating profitably. That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is we're still scratching the surface. We're only serving about 5% of the total market for people and less than a percent for businesses. So we have a long way to go. So let's set the scene for today. It kind of talks a little bit about the problem we're solving, the things that are broken, the things that we're here to fix, and the demand for it on the lesson side. And I'll give you a glimpse of what the numbers of the results have been over the last four years, and Matt's going to go deeper into that. So this is clearly working. We've gone from the problem to the solution. The question is why. So what makes us a special company that is able to solve this enormous problem and achieve our mission? I think it really boils down to two things. First of all, it's our obsession on customers. We are one of the few financial services companies that have evangelical customers. And this is not by accident. I think I'm surprised when I hear people loving their bank. But our customers do that and they tell their friends. We can't stop them telling their friends. And this is because of the products and the experiences we create. And we can only do this as the second block by creating the new infrastructure that enables this. Fundamentally, a different experience. And Harsh will talk a little bit more about the second. I will cover the first. So let's go into the evangelical customers. And I'll start with a number. I love numbers. 66%. Two-thirds of our customers join because someone recommended wise. This is an awesome stat. The important question is, why did they recommend? Why are they recommending wise to their friends? And this is because of this radically better experience that we create. Because that's what our customers are seeing, or used to be seeing, and that causes the frustration, which is now replaced with instant transfers. 55% of our transfers arrive in less than 20 seconds. Five to 10 times cheaper than using your bank. And we're not hiding fees. Tell you what you're getting charged. And it's actually a delightful experience when you get your business account going, any less than a couple of hours. And we do this by investing in three products. WiseCount for individuals, WiseBusiness, and the WisePlatform for banks and our enterprise partners. So not to go into everything that we covered over the last year, but I'll just give you one highlight of how we think about developing these experiences. As we see the WISE account getting more traction and we're building out the experiences our customers have, not just sending, but also invoicing their customers internationally, spending across borders and holding money with WISE, we realized that coming to holding money, the problems are not pretty similar than what we see in cross-border transfers. Turns out that it's also quite expensive to hold money in a UK traditional current account. When the inflation goes up, the central banks are paying 4% to 5% interest rates, and of course the current account pays nothing. And we found a way to solve this. Over the last couple of quarters, we launched Wise Interest, which is a Wise Assets product that allows our customers to hold government-guaranteed assets in the UK and now rolling out in Europe, that beyond being 100% with a government guarantee, but also they paid interest close to what you'd expect from the central bank. So that's slightly older data now, from I think the beginning of June, but in the UK our customers are earning 4.12 on the pounds and a little bit less in euros. So this is just one example of how the experiences that we create are creating evangelical customers because now being one of the highest earning current accounts in the UK, of course everyone's talking about it. I'm not going to go through more of those, but I would recommend just click into the quarterly mission update. This was one of the, I think, 23 highlights that we brought up and things that we shifted in the last quarter. And without going through this, these changes or these improvements that we're making to the voice accounts and voice business, they are resonating. Because we now see about 50% of new joiners starting to use the account. It's going beyond just sending money We're using it for spending, for proceeding. That's across the world. But if we click into some markets, like Brazil, this is the majority of customers now using Wwise as an account rather than just a transfer product. And, of course, it's placed through to our entire base, which is then growing on the business side. It's more than half of the users using Wwise as their business account. And why this matters? From the financials perspective, the customers who use us for more fully, for whom we can satisfy more of their international banking needs, they do three times more transactions and bring two times the volume just to send money to customers. So this does translate into our results as well. But bringing this all together, while we're talking about this, These are the experiences that create evangelical customers. This is what will drive our customer growth, and the customer growth in turn drives volume. We see our customers growing 3x over the last year. We see the volume following that. On businesses, it's even more. Customers are growing faster, but the volume is growing even faster. So that's kind of setting the scene on evangelical customers. And going into what's next, there's going to be the same similar investments that we're seeing bring that result over the last four years continuing. So just to give you some examples, Matt's going to talk through some of the benefits that our customers are seeing, for example, from the heightened interest rates and the interest income. We will have... improved servicing and onboarding so that the net promoter score can go even higher. Our customers can get more evangelical. We're talking about new features such as assets, but there's more around spend, experiences, and some of these features are yet to be rolled out around the world. So we start in UK and Europe and then roll out around the world. And then we're after the footprint. of where we operate. We're bringing on not just individual features, but the entire footprint to more and more people and businesses. And all of this, all of what we're shipping, is leading to more customers, more active customers. And that's not just this year. Actually, the improvements that we're making today are going to bring the customers over the next four years. Both the three times customer growth that we saw over the last four years We won't have to continue because we're really only scratching the surface with what we started. And now going more deeper into the infrastructure that enables all of this, I'll hand over to our CK.