Wise plc

Good morning. I'm Martin Adams. I'm the Director of Investor Relations here at WISE. Thank you very much for joining us this morning for our FY24 results presentation. We will have about 30 minutes of presentation, which I'll hand over to Chris Stowe to start in one second. After the slide presentation, we'll move on to Q&A. And as we always do, We'll start in the room and then I'll facilitate through Zoom as well for those joining via Zoom. So with that, I'm pleased to introduce Christo. Thank you.

For joining in the room, really good to see some old-time owners in the room. I'm Christo. I'm today joined by by our CTO Harsh and our CFO Kingsley for the other parts of the presentation. So first of all, let's kind of remind ourselves why the 6,000 people come to work here. Because we're here to build money that works without borders. Building the best way to move and manage the world's money. Minimum fees with maximum ease and at full speed. I started WISE because there's a huge inefficiency in how money works across borders. For many people and businesses, this actually feels pretty broken. And this is a large and worthwhile problem where we see our solutions are working. We built a profitable, fast-growing company to work on this mission. And the way we're doing this is we're building it through a completely new infrastructure for the world's money. so that it can flow across the borders efficiently, fastly, cheaper, as it now does domestically, but now across borders. And we're bringing this foundational infrastructure and technology to people and businesses through products that they love and they want to recommend. And there's so much demand for what we're building. Most of the people and businesses are still stuck with their slow, expensive banks is trying to hide their fees in made-up exchange rates. And we've been hearing this from our customers. So first of all, people. People are telling us it's expensive and painful to pay someone in another country to move money between their family accounts. And we've been knocking down this friction. We're making transfers faster. We're making them cheaper. We're making it more convenient for people to move money. Businesses. Businesses are telling us it's impossible to operate internationally because no bank can support their international activities. And we've created the Wise Account, which has turned out to be hugely popular for them. We'll hear quite a bit about Wise Account later. And finally, banks. Banks themselves are telling us they know well that their customers deserve better and they want better. But it's so hard. for them to create the same kind of service through the traditional infrastructure. So they're coming to us and we've made our infrastructure available through a wise platform for the banks to build on. In the end, we're actually seeing these solutions working because we see it in customer numbers and we see it in adoption. Last year, this financial year that we just finished, we served 12.8 million cross-currency customers, moving £118 billion and keeping £16 billion on their wise accounts across cash and assets at the end of the financial year. Yet, we're still in the very beginning of the mission. As you recall, we're touching less than 5% of cross-border flows for people and just scratching the surface for businesses. And our growth, as a reminder, comes from the products and experiences that our customers want to evangelize, they want to talk to their friends about. Growth gives us scale, which lets us invest even more into these experiences, into cheaper and faster infrastructure, which in turn brings more evangelical customers to Wise. And we now see the effect of this product-led growth this flywheel in numbers. In the last three years, we have more than doubled the number of customers we serve, which in turn has more than doubled the volume we move across borders. We're built in strong unit economics that lead to financially durable company with a strong balance sheet, adding nearly half a billion pounds this year. With that, I'll hand over to our CTO, Harsh, who will take us through what we have been building in the last five financial year and what we're building for our customers and partners going forward. Thanks, Harsh.

Thanks, Christo. Welcome, everybody. Good to see you all here. And thanks for those who joined on Zoom. So as Christo shared, we are building the network for the world's money. The experiences in cross-border money movement are so broken that we had to go and start from the basics and to improve things such that we can build amazing experiences on top of this network. And when we build on top of this network, this leads to amazing experiences that our customers love and rave about to others. So over the years, we've made significant progress on this infrastructure. Just calling out a few highlights through the last financial year, we moved £118 billion cross-border through this network. 62% of our transfers were instant. This means they go from source account to destination account across borders in less than 20 seconds end-to-end. This is something we are very proud of and something that's very unique to Wise. Going back even five years, cross-border money movement within 20 seconds end-to-end at consistently this high percentages was unheard of. Our network operates in over 160 countries in 40 plus currencies across 65 licenses. We now also have five direct connections to local payment systems. Where we don't have a direct connection yet, we operate with a robust set of partners, which amount to over 90 partners across the world. And we have over 800 engineers working on this problem globally. We believe this is one of the largest engineering teams in the world working on the problem of cross-border payments. So why do we do this? Why do we invest like this? All of this is an outcome of our fundamental learning over the last 13 years that the company that really builds the best infrastructure will eventually take a large market share and will build a very superior product to solve this massive problem of cross-border money management. And this is why we continue to invest with a longer-term view. Whether it's working for years on direct connections, continue to add more redundancy to our partner network, continue to add new licenses, or opening up new countries and new products, or working closely with regulators to meet local requirements and also give them feedback to evolve requirements as the world is changing around us. Through the last year, we made significant progress on this infrastructure, but I'll call it three big ones. First, in Australia, we became the first non-bank to get direct access to the local payment system. This gives us instant payments in and out of Australia for our customers and also a lower price. But finally, it also gives us independence going forward in the Australian market. The other one that we are really proud of and is another big win is the Japanese market. So we got a Type 1 license in the Japanese market. And we became one of the first non-Japanese firms to complete this multi-year process to get this license. So you should ask, why did you spend so many years doing this? Previously, we were limited to 1 million yen per transfer for our customers. Now with this license, this limit has been removed. This not only helps our existing customers who have been asking for a higher limit, but we believe it also opens up the product to a larger consideration set and larger number of customers in Japan who would potentially not have considered us before. Finally, correspondent services in collaboration with SWIFT. So there are over 11,000 financial institutions connected to SWIFT, mostly banks. And as we talk to these banks, we now hear from the business side of folks and business side of the banks, folks are running transaction banking, correspondent banking, that they see the value of what we've built and they want to connect to our network and they want to provide our network to their customers. But it's my counterparts, like the CTOs and the technologists, who tell them that it's going to take not months but years to upgrade the systems and do these connections through an API-based interface that we've had for a while. So we went back to the basics and figured out a solution where now, through connecting with SWIFT, banks can change their correspondent to WISE, which allows them to start dipping their feet into using the WISE infrastructure and sending warning through us. And basically it becomes similar to a config change that banks know how to do. From the perspective of building and servicing this infrastructure, we continue to invest in the tech that helps us scale. Our AI and machine learning models operate on a global data set that we see across a network to make fast and automated decisions while fighting financial crime effectively. So this helps us keep costs low, evidenced by lower prices over the years while we still operate profitably, and also provide a superior and compliant customer experience. Compared to the incumbents who rely a lot more on manual processing, our ability to use this technology helps us reduce false positives for our agents so that when transactions are flagged for reviews by the agents, the agents are focusing on the right things. Similarly, we focus and we apply machine learning to predict our liquidity movements and requirements to meet and move money around the world so that we can do payouts fast. This is what leads to outcomes like the 62% instant transfer number that you saw before. We also continue to invest in the tooling to help our agents. So fin crime investigators, due diligence agents, CS agents need to review transactions or may take customer calls. They have all the relevant information presented to them in a way that they can get their tasks done faster and with accuracy. We operate in over 160 countries across 11 different languages and seamlessly serve these customers across our global centers 24-7. I'll give you a data point on how things have improved from a servicing perspective. So earlier at the start of the financial year 2024, for doing checks that needed humans to review folks when we are onboarding customers, it would take on average about 13 hours. With the automated work that we've done and the investments we've made in the tooling, by the end of 2024, now for these manual checks, an average time of two hours is needed for these agents. So all this investment leads to outcomes like this in speed and price. As I said before, the 62% instant transfer number. But what I'm also really proud of are the other two numbers on speed. 83% of transfers now go through our network in less than one hour. and 95% of transfers complete within a day. This is unheard of numbers in cross-border payments. And on price, we've operated at 67 bps blended price for most of 2024, and we continue to put downward pressure on price while still remaining profitable. We are really pleased to have been able to drive unit cost efficiencies in 2024, which leads to a price drop in Q1 of FY25 of about two basis points. Now, talking about the products we built for our customers. We create experiences today by investing in three core products, the Wise Account, Wise Business, and Wise Platform. For the Wise Account, I would like to call out that we've rolled out now interest assets, enabling the ability for customers to receive a yield on their funds held with us as interest rates have gone up. And now this product is rolled out to five additional EU countries. We also rolled out stock assets, to 11 more countries. For receiving, we made it easier for people to receive funds from their friends and for business, too. And we've enabled a feature called WiseTag that makes it much, much easier to receive. We've also enabled swift details in more currencies. And finally, on the transfer side, we've improved the product for people, especially expats living in China. If you look at or if you see the experience that expats have in China, it's very, very hard and a poor experience for them to move money out of China. and we've started dipping our feet in that market. It's still early days there. We've also enabled the ability for businesses to sign up to 10K USD in Brazil. On Wise Business, we reopened the European market, the product for European businesses to onboard. Some of you may remember we chose to slow down or stop onboarding for EU and UK businesses for a period last year. This was to make sure our existing businesses and those who were already waiting for the product had a better experience onboarding. We worked through that demand and reopened for onboarding for UK e-businesses in Q4 of FY24. For assets, we have made the product available now to businesses in UK, Europe, and Singapore. And actually, businesses now hold $1.4 billion in assets. That's 20% of business customer holdings are in assets. And finally, we continue to invest into making the experience of onboarding and using a product for businesses much easier. We made quite a bit of improvements on the onboarding and verification experience for businesses in the last year, and we'll continue to invest there. Finally, Wise Platform. We have 85 partners now connected to Wise via the Wise Platform. Calling out a few, we have now connected MOX, which is Standard Chartered's neobank in Hong Kong, also GMO, which is a large bank in Japan, which is now connected. to Wise and using Wise as their platform to enable their customers to move money around the world. For non-banks, we also have Agoda, which is a large travel platform in Asia that is now using us. And finally, I'll call out one interesting launch we did. So we built a new product. Some of you hopefully are customers in the room who use the Wise card. And we have now enabled others to issue cards over a Wise infrastructure. So Parpera, which is an Australian company, Neobank, they launched this product on us where Parpera cards are powered by WISE. But what we learned with that in FY24, some of you might have seen, we launched, announced our Neobank integration. Neobank is one of the biggest, largest banks, fastest growing banks in Latin America. So the learnings of that Parpera integration helped us then lead to the deal with Neobank, and we've been able to launch with them in this year. So that's the launches, and that's what we've done. I'll give it back to Krista.