Wise plc

Good morning, everybody. Thank you very much for joining us today, both in the room and online for our FY25 results presentation. We have some slides that have been produced that will be presented to you by our CEO and co-founder, Chris O'Carman, followed by Emmanuel Thomason, our CFO. We'll then move into Q&A. And I'll explain the process for Q&A once we get there, but we'll start in the room before moving over onto Zoom. So without further ado, it's my pleasure to introduce Christo. Thanks for having me.

It feels like we're doing this every other week now. We just had the owner's day only a month ago. I would love to find a clicker so that I can move on the slides. It's coming. Thank you so much. So great to see you again and happy to cover now as a kind of the full scope of the financial year that we just finished. We did give you a lot of preview already on that during the owner's day. So a lot of the numbers are probably familiar to you. We also added another announcement to our earnings release this morning. So I'll come back to that towards the end. So hold tight. But I'll start with, actually, before we get into the numbers, the reminder of why do we even exist? Why are we doing what we're doing? It's because we believe that money should work without borders. It should work the same internationally as it works at home. But there's still a huge amount of friction and stress when people and businesses move across borders or try to do business across borders. So we will remind today about how our infrastructure and products are addressing this problem and cover the progress that we've made. But first, I'll keep reminding ourselves that we are very early in our journey. We estimate individuals move about 3 trillion a year across borders. We have about 5% share of that. At small businesses, that's another 14 trillion pounds. And our market share there is even more in the beginning. And now adding the... adding the scope of enterprise and corporates, you kind of get to 32 trillion pounds, which not all of it was in scope of our direct apps. But as we started bringing more and more volumes into Y's platform, actually the infrastructure we were building is to serve this entire 32 trillion market. So while today we already move around 145 billion a year, we're building this network to move trillions. So let me take you through some of the highlights of this year. It's across different parts of our product and the service. So starting with the infrastructure, we brought live the integrations into the two payment systems in Philippines. Actually, even before that, from official numbers, we estimate that we deliver 12% of all the money that is going to Philippines in the world for people. The engineering work is still ongoing on Zengen in Japan and PIX in Brazil. And by the way, as a reminder, by the central bank statistics, we're already by far the largest institution moving money in and out of Brazil by transaction count. So we already have a huge headstart or we built up a headstart in Brazil. Now we're linking much deeper into their payment systems. Wise account, it got better for Australians who can now switch their interest for their Australian dollars and US dollar holdings. We rolled out the international account for people and businesses in the Philippines. There's a lot of features that we've added globally to the Wise account to make it a better place to hold. You'll see from the numbers shortly that this is starting to make difference in terms of the customer holdings. on features specifically for our business customers, we're actually addressing the most important task for any business owner. This is getting paid. And in our case, getting paid internationally. So we already talked about invoicing, I think, one of the half years. And we observed that 25% of the businesses who are using Wise to get paid, they're actually getting paid by other Wise customers. So that's why we built QuickPay. So QuickPay is where businesses can get paid online with cards, but they can also get paid with QR codes by other wise customers. So that's enhancing the wise to wise transfers that are super cheap and fast and probably the best way of moving money from one place to another. It was a strong year for Wise Platform. You heard this on Owner's Day. We've added more logos since then. We included Itaú, the largest bank in Latin America, and Raiffeisen. And much of what we've been talking about through this year, all the launches, all the developments, all the investments we've made, they will have a compounding impact on financials for many years to come. Very little on this financial year. So when we start looking at the numbers, start looking at the financials, we will be looking at how our previous year's investments are now playing through and bringing us growth. So let's see how these are performing. When we start with active customers, last year alone, we saw 15.6 million people and businesses who made cross currency transaction. This was 21% more than the year before and 2.6 times since we listed on the exchange. The similar a rate of growth is visible in terms of cross-border volume. We moved 154, 145 billion volume, again, a 23% growth. And when we look at the holding, so people and businesses keeping money on their Wise account, then this has really grown substantially, 33% only last year and reached to 21.6 billion pounds. It's also a big testament and how the wise account is starting to get traction. So growth in customers volumes and holdings, they all increase the return for our owners. Underlying income, 19% in financial year 2025, reaching 1.4 billion, which is 3.2 times the amount that we generated in FY21. Underlying profit per full tax increased 17%. And our reported profit... including all of the interest income was also 17% higher. So reaching now the other side of half a billion. So as we move on towards our goal, moving trillions, we will continue to create more and more value for our owners. But how do we get to that? How do we get to trillions? We will do this through the products that our customers love and we'll do it profitably. But it's us with infrastructure. Coming back to that, there's more and more people and businesses move and hold money with WISE. Our networks is greater flows. Greater flows, we see economies of scale lead to better outcomes for everyone who use WISE network, people, businesses, now banks. And this again brings more users to WISE just because the service and the scale is so much better. And we get more of the share of the 32 trillion pounds that is already moving across borders. And all of these effects are really powered by this infrastructure that we're talking about. This is something that we built from scratch to replace the outdated correspondent backing networks that hadn't been fit for decades already. So our infrastructure, is also the reason why payments on Ys are so much faster and served at a lower prices than any competitor can really match sustainably. So this strategy of continuously lowering our fees makes it harder for anyone to compete and it will underwrite the long-term success and growth of Ys. So by the last quarter, ending 31st of March, we brought our take rate to just 53 basis point, 0.53%. This is in comparison with what people and businesses are charged when they use their bank. This is already so much ahead. More and more payments are also going faster. So now 65% of all the transactions that move from one country to another arrive in less than 20 seconds with a receiver, with a recipient. So it's all these smart investments in the infrastructure, in our technology, in our marketing, the products that will be driving the growth for years to come. So we looked at how the previous ones are doing and we'll hear more later. So as a reminder, this infrastructure that I just covered again and the fundamentals that you're seeing, this reaches our customers through the products that we build and through the experiences that we create in our service. We started with simple transfer products. We remain absolutely focused on providing the best way to move money from one country to another. But we now serve a huge amount of people and businesses through the Wise account. Our customers wanted to get paid internationally. They wanted to hold money and interest and spend without the hidden FX fees. And while it's in the very beginnings, we're already seeing some of the world's largest banks operate through Wise platform. So while we're onboarding more than a million people a quarter to Wise directly, to our apps directly, the vast majority of cross-border volume that we looked at this 32 trillion TAM is with retail banks. And the largest leverage to our infrastructure will be serving this volume through the banks, through Wise platform. And we get often asked why large banks use Wise. So first, cross-border payments are really hard. They're very efficient. They rely on this outdated, under-invested infrastructure that the banks are operating on. They're slow, they're opaque, they operate very manually, and it's expensive for banks. If it's expensive for banks, the banks have to charge it on to their customers. Prices are therefore high, although they try to hide it. And in addition to poor experience, the end users are then hit with these high costs. So many of the customers of retail banks are taking their international business to faster challengers. or other faster banks who move faster on this, and sometimes to specialists like us or other challenger banks. But Wise Platform is a fantastic solution for banks, for them to get ahead of their competition and give their customers a reason to stay in the banks ecosystem. So that's why we see every quarter the network of our banks on this chart expanding. Last month alone, we added Ito and Raiffeisen on this map. The logo should be probably much larger here, but it's pretty good. With that, I gave you a bit of a reminder of how we think about WISE as an operation from the infrastructure through to the product. And now the important part is financial. So how do we do this sustainably? Because what we're doing is pretty exciting. And I'll hand it over to Emmanuel, our CFO, to cover.

Well, thank you, Christo. Good morning, everyone. 2025 was another exceptional year of growth driven by our commitment to our mission. And today, I like to work through the numbers and also the story behind it. So obviously, we are very pleased with the year 2025, with our performance during the year. We saw a preview of these numbers during our Honors Day, you know, in April, a few weeks from now. And during my presentation today I will cover the different drivers, but also the stories behind our performance. In 2025 we continue to see a double digit growth in both customers and volume, but also we saw significant increase in customers balance and we also delivered very strong margins. So I now like to cover the key drivers behind this long performance. And we start with our customers. In 2025, active customers increased by 21% year on year, with no customers experiencing the ease, the transparency, but also the affordability of Wwise. And word of mouth, we man, the main customer acquisition channel with over 70% of customers growth coming from this channel. So this is the evidence that AHA and product convince and continue to have a great impact on people's life and that continue to build our evangelical customer base. On the mixed, the active customer growth was mainly driven by an increase of 22% in personal customers and which increased from 12 to 15 million last year. The business active customers increased by 11% last year from over 600,000 to nearly 700,000 active business customers. And we are pleased with this recovery because of this customer group following an onboarding pause in the second half of 2024, as you surely remember. So now I'm moving to cross-border volume. Clearly, the customer growth was the main driver behind our cross-border volume of 23% last year. And we believe that price remained the main reason why customers choose Wise, which was also pretty evident during the second half of the year. In particular, our price change that we took from the summer made us more attractive to customers moving high volumes. This results in volume growth, outpacing customer growth in the second half of 2025. Overall, the cross-border volume increased by 23% to 145 billion pounds for the full year, with growth and personal cross-border of 22% and business of 24%. And the growth of the WISE platform has continued to outpace overall the volume growth. In 2025 was platform represent 4% of the course border volume, I compared to the 3% in the previous year. So we are very excited, you know about the long term perspective was platform as we continue to ramp up their announced partnership and have new person into the platform. I crystal just mentioned that you know the newcomers on the further the past weeks with lifelines and bank and it out. So now I'd like to move to a different element of our underlying income, starting with our cross-border revenue. Our cross-border revenue grew by 6% versus last year to 840 million pounds. And while the growth rate reflects our price reductions, it also underscores our commitment to making WISE more accessible for everyone, as we will see on the next slide. We closed the year with a cross-border rate of 53 basis points compared to in Q4 2025, a reduction of 14 basis points compared to the same quarter in 2024. And this reflects the price adjustments that we had from Q2 2025 onwards, as well as the impact of current mix and an increase of high volume customers. For the full year, the cross-border take rate was about 58% basis point. And going forward, we expect to continue to investing in gradual but also sustainable price reductions as we continue to share the benefit of the economy of scale to other customers. We have also continued to see an increase in the adoption of wise account, which drive also higher retention with the broader use of our products. In last year, in 2025, over 3.5 million people start to use the wise account. And we also seen a strong growth from cart only customers, which represent around the fifth of our active customers based in Q4, 2025. So as a result of these factors, card and other revenues increased by 45% year on year last year in 2025. And we saw an increase of 31% in card revenue to £220 million. And 71% growth in other revenue to £152 million, out of which nearly 10% was coming from asset product. This increased adoption of the WISE account is also driving an increase in customer holdings. In 2025, we saw an increase of 33% year-on-year in customer holdings to £21.5 billion, and this includes £17 billion from customer holding balance in the WISE account and £4.5 billion in asset under management. We have seen a 55% increase in asset under management as the increased numbers of customers now benefit from our WiseAsset product today. And through WiseAsset, our customers can earn interest on their balance by investing their money in a money market fund. WiseAsset is now live in Singapore, in Australia, in Europe, including the UK. where we can directly pay the interest to our customers, as you surely know. Overall, our underlying income increased by 16% to 1.4 billion pounds, mini-driven growth by the personal segment, as I mentioned before, by 18%. This growth in the wise account has allowed us to further diversify our underlying income with a 38% of underlying income now coming from card, order, and also underlying interest income. So now I'd like to move through our cost structure and profitability. In 2025, cost of sales increased by 5%, which is significantly lower than compared to the underlying income growth of 16%. And this allows us to grow the underlying gross profit by 20% and expand our margin to 75% for the full year. And this was mainly a result of banking and customer related fees increasing by only 4% last year as we continue to enhance our infrastructure through direct integration, we'll talk about this, into domestic payment systems. And also alongside well we optimize our cost and are becoming more and more efficient. The administrative expense increased by 25% last year to 769 million as we continue to invest into the business and also providing a better experience for customers. Our strong growth alongside our reluctance focus on driving cost efficiencies deliver a profit before tax of 282 million pounds, an increase of 17% compared to the year before. And our underlying VPT margin was at 21%, which was flat year on year as we continue to invest in our business. And while this margin remained above our midterm target of 13 to 16%, We expect our investments into building the business and also sharing our economy of scale with our customers through pricing to narrow the gap. So I share this slide with you at the Honest Day in April, and I'd like to cover this again, how the efficiency that we generate and the growth driving is driving investment into the business to regenerate a virtuous cycle. So while we may start with a targeting underlying BPT margin of 13 to 16%, as you know, we see our margins grow our previous investments and also the relentless cost focus drive our efficiencies. And we can then reinvest this additional generate margin back into the business. into enhancing and building the products, creating an even more powerful infrastructure, building the brand of Wise through increased marketing investments, also efficient, effective services, and last but not least, sharing the efficiency with customers through lower prices. These investments drive our mounting back to the 13 to 16% midterm target range again ahead of the next investment cycle. So our focus is making sure that we can reinvest as quickly ahead at the substantial opportunities of the 32 trillion that we mentioned before stand before us. So now let's take a look at how we invest. In 2025, we have increase of nearly 50% in non-employee related expense to 356 million pounds. And this include third party cost, including outsource servicing, advisor spend, but also marketing and tech infrastructure cost. And our spend in employees benefit increased by 9% to 413 million pounds. So let's dive into the detail. The increase I've just mentioned in employees' benefit of 9% was driven by the headcount growth that we saw last year as we were joining by new joiners of around 1,000 new WISERs joiners last year. We also increased our investments in marketing last year as we increased our spend in brand awareness marketing with existing campaign in Australia and most recently in Canada. We also diversified our marketing channels with an increased presence on TikTok and also on Reddit. And we also complement the work with our team with three peak creative agencies to deliver targeted campaign driving brand awareness and considerations. We also increase our spend in product development during the year as we invest in improving our product to better serve our customers and deepen our mode through continuous investments into our infrastructure and also our tech stack. And our technology spend increase broadly in line with the volume growth and this is linked with the data storage capacities due to the volume. And the trading. So we also invest in our servicing function to service a larger customer base whilst we are still driving efficiency by increasing automation and reducing customer contacts. This includes the use of outsourced providers, enabling us to meet demand high quality and also cost efficiency management. And finally, we also continue to invest in other functions. So now moving to the reported BPT in the full year 2025, we generate £444 million in interest above the first 1% yield. And as a reminder, as part of our interest income framework, we seek to keep the first 20% of this and distribute the remaining 80% back to the customers. And in full year 2025, we returned 161 million pounds to the customers out of the 355 million target. Our reported BPT in the full year 2025 was 565 million pounds. This is an increase of 17% year-on-year. And following our income tax expense, our profit after tax was 416 million pounds. So this massive market opportunity, and also the cycle that I just covered, is what underpins our mid-term guidance, and I'm very proud of our progress here to date. Our growth, on growth we expect to deliver on the 15 to 20% CAGR underlying income growth in the mid-term, driven by the mix of customer growth, as well as growth of our products, and also reduction in price. we still expect to deliver on the 13% to 16% underlying BPT margin in the mid-term, with the margin around the top of the range, as we announced also at Honest Day in 2026. So before passing back to Christo, I'd like to provide an update on our capital allocation. And first, I'd like to cover our strong level of cash. We maintain a strong capital and cash position to ensure resilience, but also flexibility and to meet also the requirements of our regulators and we announced it also in honest day was received. An investments a great rating of triple B by both agency s&p and Fitch which will allow us to optimize our working capital. Secondly, on return of capital, we announced it also at Honest Day, we announced a share repurchase program of an incremental 25 million shares into our employee benefit trust to fund historic options. And this we started in early the full year, 2026. And for this program, we have already repurchased 4.1 million shares at an average price of 9.5 pounds. So as I mentioned in Apple, this is a first step. We're talking to return capital to owners, and it doesn't exclude any additional future returns. And with that, I'd like to pass back to Christo for closing remarks.