Wise plc

Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us this morning for our half-year FY26 results presentation. We have a short presentation from our CEO and founder, Christo, followed by a presentation by our CFO, Emmanuel Thomasson. 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.

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And 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 and 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 Wyze 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 that. So let's get started. We added 2 million active customers over the year, coming to 13 million people and businesses now using Wyzen across currency transactions in the last six 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 85 billion pounds. for this half year. This is quite incredible. This time last year, 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. 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 two things here. First, clearly the features we've been adding, they're really resonating. So people and businesses are getting more out of their 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 25 billion pounds 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've pulled off a pretty incredible feat. We've taken down our price, a price point by about 15%, effectively expanding our economic moat quite incredibly. And at the same time, we've 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. And the last six months, we've been pretty busy shipping more. So as we described on owner's day, you should expect progress coming two 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 six 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 US dollar holdings. And then in addition on Wise platform, actually, we brought live this integration with Ito 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 speeds, 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 recipient's 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 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 were brought live years ago. So 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, Christophe. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to share our financial performance for the first half year 2026, you know, and how our disciplined investments continue to drive sustainable and profitable growth. We're making progress across every single key metric. Our active customers are growing by 21% each year over the last two years, to now over 13 million active customers for the first half year. The cross-border volume has grown at a similar pace to 85 billion pounds, and the customer holdings have exceeded 25 billion pounds. This is growing by 34% each year. Underlying income growth has grown by 16% to annually £750 million, and we are delivering underlying profit before tax and at the top of the range, our range is by 13% to 16% of target margin. So what I want to focus on today is how we achieve this and through focus, targeting investments that build our competitive mode, but also drive long-term growth. Let's start with our customers because clearly they are the heart of everything we do at Wise. In the first half of the year, over 13 million customers complete international transactions with Wise, experiencing the ease, the transparency, but also the affordability that define us. Personal customers grew by 18% year-on-year to 12.8 million. And then business customers grew by 17% to 613,000. And we're particularly pleased to see the acceleration in this business segment. This is the strongest SQL growth in Net Addition that we have had. The cross-border volume increased by 24% year-on-year to 85 billion. This is a growth of 26% even in custom 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 Christo 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 six 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 noticed 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 long term. The wise account is key to our strategy in increasing customer retention and broadening the product usage. The car usage has grown significantly with car spend exceeding 15 billion in the first half year of 2026, generating 132 million of pounds 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 20 billion pounds in Wise account and another 5.6 billion in assets. So that totals customer holdings over 25 billion pounds 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 successfully shifting the mix of our revenue base, which make our business more resilient, but also represent multiple engine for growth. The non-course 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 investments 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 leads 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 rest structure to onboard and provide a better service to a growing customer base. Our investments in servicing increased by 20% year on year to 134 million pounds. And we are pleased with the benefit that we are seeing from AI and automation 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 example here on the screen. In particular, we have been able to expand our net promotion score to 69. The high labors 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 join Wise through the word of mouth. But we are also going beyond that, as we continue to increase our investments into marketing and sales, as we share at our Honest Day in April this year. We're investing more strategically across diversified channels, increasing our brand marketing spend, and build awareness and drive more organic growth. In Edge 1, our marketing and sales investments increased by 59% year-over-year to 57 million pounds. We invest as much as possible within our targets, and this is evident with our payback period remaining strong at six months. So in H1, we run brand campaigns in regions like Australia, Canada, and the US. And you saw some examples from Australia on this day in April. And today, we also played an ad of the US 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 on new customer acquisitions. Importantly, we add 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 144 million pounds in H1, and this is up by 18% here and there 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 rolling out their existing features into new market. And Christo shared an 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 might not be customer facing, but they are essential for sustainable growth. The spend here increased by 35% to 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 base to continue in H2 with their administrative expense of around 1 billion pounds for the full year. And this includes investments in our people across the area that I just covered, In Edge 1, we welcome over 1,000 additional colleagues at Wise, and we plan to keep on hiring in Edge 2. And these investments, together with the top-line growth we delivered in the period that clearly highlights how we are delivering on our strategy. And as you can see clearly in our margin progression over the past two years, The increased profitability we generate 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 promised 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 the profit before tax for the period of, was there 255 million pounds. So now I'll have 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 the cost and currency basis. And based on the phasing of our investments, we continue to expect underlying BPT of around 16% for 2026, excluding the one-off listing expense of circa £35 million. On a 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 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 matrix 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 leave you with another ad as we set it up for questions. Thank you so much.

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Thank you.

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. If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand as some of you are ready. Do introduce yourself, ask your question and do hand back the mic so that we can get it to the next person that would like to ask a question. So if we could just start over to the right here.

Hi, thanks for taking my questions, Uzair from Goldman. Firstly, platforms demonstrated a strong inflection in the half, now 5% of volumes going around three times 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 Christo, please. Stablecoins are certainly gaining traction within the payment ecosystem. Can you talk to us about where you see why it's positioned with respect to stablecoins and what are some of the opportunities and potential challenges given you've built one of the lowest cross-border payment infrastructures?

I'll start with platform. Well, thank you very much. Yeah, 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. It 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% mid-term and the 50% long-term. So yes, we have a good momentum here. And we see interest from new partners or potential new partners.

Thanks, Azhar. And 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 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 stable coins in that context of money transfers that goes just beyond moving US dollars between wallets, then it's these regulated on and off ramps into those local currencies. How do you get that? 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 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 US dollars next to Fedwire and Zelle and Venmo and other options that are there today for our own customers.

Thanks. It's Adam from Morgan Stanley. So I've got two 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? Thank you.

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 we've 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... 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 potentially our marketing team is one of the world's most disciplined when it comes to payback. And 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.

Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for the presentation. Christo, first of all, looking at that photograph, I wanted to ask you which shampoo to use. But the real two 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, 10 pounds 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. You know, 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're talking about are like 100,000x potential. Thanks.

I'll take the first one, maybe Manuel will take the second. Yeah, 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, we want to grow because there's a massive opportunity out there, as you know. So we, Christo 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 the 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 these fields that I mentioned, but also all the features, the direct integration. So we're really, really busy. And we still deliver on this margin at the top of the range right now. So I think in terms of margin, we are really disciplined. The money we don't spend, we invest. We want to have a return. And that helps 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 silly not to do this. But we 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.

Good morning. 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've been live for a long time versus the ones who've been onboarded over the last year or so? Second, on the hiring, so you've had 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 you think about that for H2 for next year as well? And then the last one, on $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 you should think about that, again, flowing back into the profitability? I'll take the easy one if you don't mind.

Let's go. Your question on investment and how are we able to invest so much in this first six months? 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 an instant service and the The confidence that customers then bring like 25 billion pounds 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 effect. That's 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. And that will take a bit of ramp up. So I'm actually pretty proud of that. we wanted to invest. We talked to you about this at the owner's day, that this is a fantastic time to invest now and feel like we're making more progress in the first six months than we hoped for.

But leave the heart of it. 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 custom partners that have been there before that are extending the contract with us. So We're in a very comfortable position where basically, as we told you, usually we start with one route and then all of the time they extend the contracts. This is what we see. So clearly there's new customers that we signed last year. 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. And that's driving this 1% increase, or even more than 1% increase. Yeah, on the high end, just like as Krista said, I mean, like, you know, Wyze 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 customer. So that's very good. I think on the last question was the reinvesting capacities or?

I just went back into the next year on reinvesting capabilities.

Yeah, I mean, this is clearly a one-off due to the dual listing. That's why when we got right now on the margin, we clearly exclude basically the one-off. So we're going to have a small part of recurrent cost, but this one is a one-off by nature.

You should not forget the left side. Hey, Pavel 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 picks in Brazil? And should you 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 multi-year 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, so 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 six months ago. It kind of ramped up. So it's probably more of that than picks. We'll see some from picks 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, you know, that's the first maybe statement. Like we know long-term price will matters and this will position us at the number one option. Last year, as we do the price adjustments, we also increased some price. I mean, like, you know, 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 customers. And that was so immediate reaction. So we saw that basically people are reacting to offering as we decrease the take rate for the larger transaction. 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 the efficiency so that we can pass this back to the customers.

Thank you. 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 discovered that one payment method, say people paying in with cards, is particularly more expensive. And we raised the fees on cards, lowered 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 fees. the take rate. But for them, this is actually a benefit. So you get these little secondary mix shifts, but generally it is the, like we said, the prices.

Hi, Ellie Hall, Rothschild & Co. Redburn. Thank you very much for taking my question. 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, you know, 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 are looking at internally to do with Stable Points. Thank you.

Thank you. 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 stablecoins. So we're not making a bet on one payment scheme over another 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, and, 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.

So for needs here, please. Hi, thank you. Vinit from Autonomous Research. Just two 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, I think on direct integration, we're not done yet, right? I mean, like, there's so many payment systems that we think we should integrate in order to be even increasing the instant payment. I mean, like, you know, we've done the tremendous jump. I mean, like, if you remember, we had 64%, if you 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 numbers 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 you know we we have eight today we will continue to integrate more payment systems and then and uh on the comment of uh

a rumor, so just the fact is the OCC in the US 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. Sorry? In the UK 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.

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

I'll try.

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. corks 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 this is 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 a thousand 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 know, you really quickly understand the culture of Wise. Yeah. and you get the support of your colleagues. So I think Wyze 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 had the pleasure to be here after four weeks. It was because basically my colleagues, also in this room, 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 to Indians. 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 to 1.

thank you so moving over to zoom um justin forsyth from ubs over to you thank you very much uh christo emmanuel and thank you martin for letting me on here um i want to hit a couple of questions on my side so first christo the foray into stable coins uh maybe we could just talk a little bit it felt like six months ago it was a bit of an afterthought for you guys how 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 it 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 PVT margins. So I think 1H was X listing costs around 17.5%-ish. Now, you effectively reiterated the full year guide, but X 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 percent plus in 2H as the take rate comparison eases? Thank you very much.

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 The qualities that make these on and off ramps so amazing in the fiat world of going from Australian dollar to US dollar to Euro, that's exactly the same cost, speed, regulatory reliability, the same things that will matter in the future. stablecoin world. So you're spot on that this does work exactly the same way.

I mean, I start with the margin evolution. So the margin, the guidance that we give for the full year, we're excluding our one-off expense for the listing. And we want to be at the top of the range. We'll reach this, the 60%, around 16%. What we would see basically in H2 is that we're driving this investment in Q in the first half year, and we will also continue to invest in H2. And this is basically our promises that we give in Honest Day. I mean, we're going to invest where we can, when we get a good return, and still guide the market to the 13% to 16%. And that's without Atlas 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 recurrent costs, but nothing compared to the 35 million that we're expecting for this year. And when it comes to income, underlying income growth, I hope I understood the question rightly. So yes, you have a kind of disconnect between the volume growth that you see, the cross-border volume, and the underlying income or the revenue that you generate out of this cross-border volume. But this is basically a like-for-like issue. So we're comparing basically two periods 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 a 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, Bharath.

Hi, thank you. Thanks for taking my questions. Bharat from Canterfish. Could you highlight some of the logos that you signed previously within the platform's 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 US, 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? Thank you.

I'll try to take the first one. Barath, unfortunately, I think if we did a case study, it will be misleading because 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, uh, with our past, uh, past announced and past logos that have, have gone live and, and you see that in the results. So it's, uh, it's something where it's very early to start singling anyone out, uh, 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 platform volumes.

To your question on marketing and ROI, comparing Australia and the US. 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're starting in which country. However, comparing Australia and the US is difficult at this time, because Australia campaign is running for one and a half year, while the US is basically starting, I think, two 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 US is quite successful. We invest also in three of our other countries, New Zealand, Canada, and UK. So we are monitoring the progress in every single country, but it's really, really difficult because of their... Very difficult. It's challenging, let's put it this way, to compare Australia, where we have this campaign running out for a year and a half, and we continue to invest because we see the result. Result is our 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 and tricks. We say, oh, 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.

That's right. Well, thank you very much for joining us today. That concludes our presentation and Q&A for our half-year results for FY26. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, everyone. Thanks, everyone.