Wise Group plc (WISE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody. Thank you very, very much for joining us this morning. So as you know, this morning, we released our Q2 trading update. So basically, I'm going to spend a few minutes as normal talking through that. And then we're going to open up to Q&A. So Martin Adams here in our IR team is on hand to take questions. So raise your hand, as usual, and we'll try and answer your questions. As a reminder, this trading update follows the announcement we made on the 29th of September. And I think most of you already know that information. So in that announcement, we showed continued strong momentum in the business and where we saw volumes going around 50% and revenue is growing faster than that year-over-year. And we also talked about how, to some extent, that income growth is going to be supported by increasing levels of interest, which, although we do plan to share much of that back with our customers, I'll talk more about this. And we also shared that our expected total income growth for the year is now between 55% and 60%, which is an increase on prior guidance. And we continue to expect EBITDA margin at or above 20%. But -- so that's -- just to recap, make sure you're current with what we've already shared. But let me just talk today around what we've actually seen in Q2 and then take some questions on that. So stepping back, at Wise, as you know, we're on a mission. We're solving a massive problem. We're trying to make money, help people move and manage their money around the world faster, cheaper and radically easier than they can with their banks. And many hundreds of millions of people so have this -- people and businesses have this issue. So it's a massive problem to solve. And we continue to do that by investing in our product and investing in our infrastructure. And actually, if you read our mission update and detail in the release, you'll see that we've made some great progress. We've made our product much, much easier and simpler to use for many of our customers around the world. And that's how they make payments, how they pay money in and the convenience of using our product has improved. We managed to maintain payment speed above 50%. Actually, we had 52% of our payments instant in the prior quarter and now that's dropped back to, but it's still over 50%, which is still radically faster than the alternative and much faster than we were a year ago. We did drop prices for some of our customers, but we actually had to increase prices for many of our customers around the world. In a world of increasing volatility, the cost of us moving money around the world from an FX perspective actually increased. And whilst, over the long term, we want to drive reductions in the cost and therefore, reductions in price for our customers, we actually had to increase price for some of our customers. We price fairly, transparently and sustainably. So whilst many other institutions would normally see just an increasing spread in these times of volatility, we're actually very transparent with our customers and where we have to pass that through. We're still committed to driving prices down in the long run there. So what are we actually seeing? Well, in the long term, the investment we're making in our product is paying off. We saw 5.5 million active customers on Wise in last quarter. That's 40% more than we had last year. Those customers moved GBP 27 billion in volume. That's 50% more than they moved a year ago. And actually, just if you look at the revenue, as we've talked about before, that was GBP 211.5 million of revenue we got from those customers and fees they're paying us. And that's almost 60% increase year-over-year. But on top of that, we had GBP 17 million of interest income. So if you look at total income, which is the revenue we've always talked about, plus that interest income at GBP 229 million of total income and that's 73% increase versus the previous year. So actually, you can see in the business that, yes, there's a lot of uncertainty and also a lot of volatility, but actually, we've got very strong healthy momentum in our base. The biggest indicator is how many people are using our product. We've invested long and hard in our Wise accounts, whether it's in the U.K., in the U.S., in Europe or in other new jurisdictions around the world, such as Brazil. And that's really having an impact, driving the rate at which customers are finding Wise, using Wise and then moving money through Wise. And this is the underlying growth that gives us the confidence for the rest of this year and into the future that we're fundamentally making the right investments. So to summarize, we've got a massive problem we're solving here. Moving and managing money around the world is still kind of broken. We're starting to fix that and you're starting to see that with a big number of customers using Wise. We've invested in our products, made lots of investments in many areas, whether it's in the price, the speed, the convenience of the product and that's enabled by our underlying infrastructure, which is really driving a lot of our growth. And then if you look at how we're doing, yes, we're growing fast. We're significant in size now, but we're also committed to being profitable at or above this 20% EBITDA margin. So very proud of all those things as you put them together. So going forward, we continue to invest and we continue to invest in these things. Actually, if you check out our mission road map, you'll see the kind of things that we're investing in over the coming quarters and years. We've talked about in our guidance of expecting total income to grow at 55% to 60% for this financial year. And we continue to run a healthy, sustainable and profitable model. So I'm going to pause there because I know, I imagine there'll be a bunch of questions. So please raise your hand and happy to take your questions.

First question for today from the line of Alastair Nolan.

I'm not sure if you can comment, but it would be great to get an update around the Wise account balances. They're obviously to generate some interest income. And I know the last time we got an update was the end of back away FY '22. Is there anything you can share around what that balance is like today, what the growth rate is? That would be really helpful.

I'm actually not going to give a number for balances. We'll have our half year statement in, in later in November and we'll go into much more detail then. But if you step back over the long term, we've seen very healthy uptake in the use of the Wise Account. And it's really the volume being pushed through that the customers are moving through the Wise Account is what's driving the momentum in the business and in our revenue. Balances have continued to grow, whether it's balances held in pounds, dollars, euros, as customers continue to use the Wise Account. But it's quite early in this new interest rate environment to speculate too much on this. We'll give more update in November.

Thanks, Alastair.

Good morning, Josh.

Hi, good morning. Two questions. The first, at the time of your listing, you had disclosed that Wise Platform generated about or somewhat less than 2% of Wise's total volumes. Can you provide us an updated figure for Wise Platform and perhaps more broadly an update on how Wise Platform is faring?

Was that the first question? Or...

That's the first question. The second question is, on Page 7 of the release, you disclosed interest income from personal and business volumes, it looks like they're roughly equal in most periods. Can we infer from that, that personal balances and business balances are roughly equal?

Cool. Right. Let me just take the second question first. Actually, they're roughly equal in total balances held. But if you think we've got -- we've got many more active personal customers than we do active business customers. So we see quite a radically higher balance for business customers, Josh, than we do for personal customers. We don't disclose the actual number here because we don't disclose the number of active Wise Accounts or Wise Business accounts. So -- but we do see businesses holding a lot more. And that makes sense because businesses are -- the personal balances are comparable with what you might see in a typical bank. Guess what, customers are using us for -- like transactional flows. And so businesses and businesses move a lot more money than people receiving their -- maybe their revenue from their customers and paying their payroll balances as well, Josh. So actually, the business balances are quite significantly larger than personal. But let me come back to the Wise Platform question. So yes, you're right. We did disclose that and we haven't updated the percentage of our volume that is coming through our Wise Platform and don't have any plans to update that soon. This business is still -- was small and it's still in the context of a fast-growing Wise Account and Wise transfer product is still a relatively small share of our business. What we can say is that we've now got over 50 partners live on the platform using us for quite a range of different models, actually and quite a range of different use cases. So we're very heartened by the kind of traction and interest in the product. Our team has grown. We continue to invest in that team, but these investments are incredibly long term like the conversations we have with banks are definitely multi-quarter and often multiyear. And this is a -- I've always said that this is something that's very much for the long term and that, that doesn't change. The growth that we're seeing today and the momentum in the business is driven by our Wise Account and Wise Business. And we believe that this long-term investment in our Wise Platform will help in the future. But you're seeing momentum and quite a lot of diversity in the types of customers and enterprises that are integrating us on the Wise Platform.

Thanks, Josh. The next question, Matt, comes from the line of Kim Bergoe at Numis.

My question is, so we have...

Sorry, Kim, I think you cut out. I don't know if it's just you. We got another question, Martin?

Just can you hear me now?

Got you. Yes.

Okay. So I'll just repeat the question. So we heard from you on 29th saying that Q2 had been good and we've got a bit more meat on the bone on that today. Can you tell us, how much can you tell us about sort of trading now, we're on the 18th of October? What are you seeing right now? I think, yes, we're all trying to sort of get a sense of your macroeconomic sensitivities. So how are things looking at the moment? What's current trading looking like?

So we've had nothing that tells us to change our -- we continue to stick to our guidance for the year. And it's remiss of me to comment on current trading too much. So we're in -- yes, there's lots going on in the world. And we have -- we've seen trading in the first 2 quarters that despite a lot of this noise and volatility, we've seen very healthy momentum in the way customers are using and increasing customers that are using Wise and how they're moving. Over the course of days and weeks, it's too soon to make judgment calls. But the momentum we've seen in the first 2 quarters gives us pretty good conviction for the rest of the year. That said, I think some of the macro -- I think we're seeing a lot of noise in the markets around different policies, et cetera. But I think, really, like the way this will play out for economies is going to be over the next year. And whilst we look with caution around what the macroeconomics might look like around the world over the coming year, maybe years, we see healthy momentum and resilience in the way our product works and the way our customers use Wise that give us confidence in this -- in the investments that we're making and the returns that that's going to pay in terms of the growth we're seeing over the coming years and many years ahead.

The next question, Matt, comes from the line of Omar Keenan.

I just had 2, please. Firstly, on net interest income. I'd just be interested to hear from you any more color about how the mechanics of interest income works. Interested to hear about the share of assets in money market funds, for example, in government securities, how that has changed? And what the pass-through agreements with banks might look like to help us model interest income? And the second question I had, please Matt, was I was hoping if you could comment on the virality of the business model and whether that's still at 2/3? We've seen some really good growth in active customers. And I was just wondering how much is being driven by word of mouth versus direct marketing spend? And whether related to that, you can also comment on customer acquisition costs? Just trying to get sort of comfortable with the marketing spend number and understand how much of that is driving customer growth?

Very cool. Very cool. So on net interest income, we haven't -- it'd be remiss of me to try and go into too much detail here on this. But just stepping back, like what are these deposits and how might interest income be earned on these? So these are deposits that our customers, maybe yourselves hold with us and our commitment is to making them safe and secure and available immediately should you want these. So we hold these balances typically either in banks, which is the primary expectation that we've done to hold these balances. So in high banks that you recognize the names of our partners. We can also, in some jurisdictions, hold them in government-backed bonds. And then in some jurisdictions, we can hold them in like high credit quality money market funds. And this is all we work with regulators to make sure that we kind of comply and get very comfortable with what we're doing. So it takes time to move this. And also some of these investments that we've made in government bonds over the past couple of years need to roll off before we'd break -- instead of breaking those contracts to put them into other products. But we are able to earn interest income and interest income will grow over time as our balances grow, but also as we shift these into products that will earn interest. And then, obviously, we're subject to the actual rates themselves. So I'm not going to give any more color than other than we do expect that to continue to grow through the year. And the interest that we talked about, the GBP 17 million, wasn't earned uniformly across the last half year. As you see, it's more strong in the last quarter. So we'll reveal a bit more detail on this in our half year statement. And then as we go through the coming quarters, we'll learn. And obviously, we'll learn as well like how do our balances behave when customers have alternatives elsewhere because they will have alternatives to earn direct interest income in other products. On the second question then, so virality, this is a subject close to many of our heart here as you think about Wise, what we've really done over the last decade is built by a product. We really look at Net Promoter Score and built a product around what helps customers love our products and recommend it to others. And that virality has actually continued very healthily over time. And what we're seeing is, yes, you're seeing an increase in the number of active customers, particularly personal active customers accelerated. And that's thanks to a strong adoption of our products around the world, including this Wise Account. And I would say that there's been no material change in this mix, which means that actually, this is -- this growth is really somewhat driven by -- we are growing the rate at which we spend money on marketing. But actually, this is totally consistent with how we've done this before. We haven't changed our payback constraints. We haven't seen a radical shift in the share of customers that come through marketing. What this really is, is investment in our product, which is driving increased virality of a larger base, which then is driving increased usage and active nature in our products. So it's a very healthy growth model that we've built over the last 10 years, which is continuing to persist even at the scale that we're at today. So to answer the question, no, no major changes in the CPAs or the returns that we're seeing. No major change in the virality, it's rather just this model of building products that customers love and then will recommend to others is really scaling.

That's what the thought back. Could I just ask a quick follow-up question on that? Could you just give an indication of what's sort of underline -- I appreciate what you said about the mix of growth is still nicely weighted towards viral growth. Is there anything you can say about the impact of inflation on like-for-like direct customer acquisition costs?

It's going to be quite marginal. I wouldn't comment. We still managed to pay back. So the way to think about that is like if we cap the rate at which our teams can invest is up to -- we've set up to a 12-month payback. So it ends up blended around 8 to 9 months on the paid spend and a couple of months really super high return across all of our acquisition. Really, the rate at which we can invest is governed by the economics of our customers. And we're seeing that -- what we're seeing in our customer base is that customers are moving more money, increased mix towards the Wise Account, which actually enables us to invest more because we're seeing a richer set of economics from our customers. So really, what drives CPA is our -- is the improving economics of our customer base and the rate -- and that affords us to invest more in growth.

Matt, the next question comes from Aditya at Bank of America.

Just 2 things for me. Firstly, on the business actually you're seeing very strong momentum. Could you maybe just give us a sense of the type of customers you work with there in terms of the end markets or maybe how they sort of split in terms of maybe the geography, just to get a sense of how those customers fare and maybe a more weaker macro, and how confident you're about the resilience of the business in that environment? And then second question is, you now have this benefit from interest income, which as you said, you have to see how that sort of pans out. But as you think about getting that back into the price and investing, I mean, how do you sort of communicate -- a, communicate that to your customers to make sure that there's no sort of large-scale swings in their expectations of the price? And, b, how do you sort of think about the incremental investments you can make because I guess there's a bit of a lag between getting that benefit and putting that investment into the business. So how do you sort of -- how do you think about those decisions from a strategic perspective?

Type of business customer, I think, was, when we talk about who are these business customers? So we have a significant number now of active business customers and that's continuing to grow. These business customers, small businesses and actually when Wise started, were very small businesses, micro businesses, I think they'd be typically be called. We see increasing numbers of less small -- small businesses, medium businesses using Wise. But really like to understand our base, it's small businesses, who wouldn't get, otherwise get a decent proposition from their bank. So it tends to be at a smaller end. They're very distributed across different verticals and geographies now, too. So clearly, there will be -- just like people around the world, they're going to face pressures economically. The question is what are they going to do during this? So we're trying to support businesses, find cheaper ways and easier ways to manage their money around the world. And so we think we're well positioned to help these businesses as much as they can as things get tougher. But that's also in the context that businesses are becoming more global. We're seeing more and more businesses want to use Wise. And the use cases, we expect to continue to stay strong. But maybe we can help them save some money as other costs are increasing. On the second question on interest income, really interesting question. And obviously, it's something that we are managing and learning and working our way through internally, which is what, what are we going to do with this interest income? We've signaled that and we've always said, which is, we believe in sharing economics. What does that mean? That means that actually, this benefit is -- that's flowing into our accounts, into our P&L, is coming from things that our customers are doing with us. So we believe in sharing much of that back. And it's this attitude and philosophy that's really help build Wise into the success it has been today. The previous question around virality, why do people love Wise and what is driving our growth, it's this attitude towards our customers. The question is how can we give that back and how can we invest that? So the first thing is, we want to invest back in our customers and in price, if we can. We can't pay interest, but customers don't come to us to earn interest. They come to us really to help move money around the world faster, cheaper and easier. So if we can invest back in that, making it cheaper, that's -- we believe that's the right thing to do. And as you said, Aditya, we've got to be able to explain that very clearly. Second thing though is, we will invest in the service that we offer our customers. Our customers -- our Wise Account has many more things to it than just a TransferWise was to send money product. So we're going to be investing in better customer service, faster verification, if we can. And this needs people and teams and operations. So that will cost us, invest is interesting, but it'll end up in a better service for our customers that should feed back into that virality. And then the third thing is we're able to invest in our products. So we're able to maybe invest slightly faster in our engineering teams, our product teams to build things for our customers for the future, just like that's been driving our growth today. And then some of this interest income, really, if you just sort of our total revenue, what -- as we look at that, we still expect a 20% EBITDA margin overall. So there's a balance of that, that will flow through to our investor base. And why do this balance, then not one or the other? Well, really, we need to build a really sustainable business that stands on its own. And this interest income is very healthy today and gives us a good tailwind, but we can't become overly reliant on this, neither can our price for our customers. So we'll manage that balance as we see this changing interest environment play out. What you can count on us doing is continuing to focus on what really drives the long-term success of our business, which is really focusing on helping more and more customers, whether they're people or businesses around the world manage and move their money. And we'll monitor that by looking at the rate at which their volume that they move with us grows. And this interest thing is really just giving us an opportunity to continue to invest over the long term, but nothing really changes from what the company is really trying to do.

Next question, Matt, comes from the line of James Goodman, Barclays.

[indiscernible] here actually from Barclays instead of James. Just 2 quick questions from me on the take rate. First is sort of on the seasonality, H1 take rate, very strong sequential improvement. But if I look at this last 2 years, we've seen H2 seasonally a bit weaker in terms of the take rate. Would you expect a similar seasonal trends with H2 sort of weakening off or do you think the current high take rates can be sustained into the second half of the year? And then the second question is on prior, sort of on the take rate. In the release today, you know that interchange contributing quite a bit. I was just wondering in terms of sort of the ancillary revenues beyond cross border. Is it fair to assume that interchange still accounts for the vast majority of this? Or are you already seeing some of the new products like the investment product in the U.K. also adding a little kick in to the take rate currently?

Thanks for the question. So on seasonality, I wouldn't try and read or spot seasonality in our product life, unfortunately. Fortunately, we're still growing at such a rate. But I think actually, we blow through what you might read into seasonality for our products. So particularly on take rate, this is -- this might be driven by route mix, but predominantly driven by pricing choices that we've been making. And certainly, the last few years have not been -- certainly not been stable comparisons, whether we're looking at going into COVID, coming out of COVID and all this stuff. So I wouldn't try and read too much into that. If you look at the Q-on-Q, what's happened on take rate and the trajectory we've seen in the last quarter probably gives you the current level of take rate is probably a reasonable place to start. On interchange, which obviously affects take rate. So for the less -- the less -- the people are getting up to speed a little bit more is our total take rate or our take rate is made up of the -- is all of our income divided by our cross-border volumes. You've got the cross-border elements of it. You've got -- and we talked about other income, which was interchange and then any other fees we get from our customers, whether they are domestic payments, ATM income or including the assets. And then actually, we've got this -- if you divide total income, you've kind of got interest rate on top of that as well now. But to answer your question on interchange, yes, that still does make up a significant chunk of that take rate. It's been growing fast. The Wise Account adoption has been growing fast and people are using the cards, our cards as part of our Wise Account more and more, particularly as the world has opened up a bit more and people have been traveling. So that is really helping drive that. But Assets is still small. It's really only live in the U.K. And I wouldn't say that's making a big contribution to that yet. It's still something we're very much working on and hoping to roll out elsewhere in the world. So still very much driven by interchange, which is the spend on the cards.

Thanks, Matt. The next question comes from the line of Alex Faure, BNP Paribas.

I have a small follow-up actually. I think you said on the 29th of September and again this morning, that some of your customers trying to find alternatives now that to hold their deposits elsewhere. I was just wondering if this is just a note of caution that you want to share with us or if this is a trend, perhaps it's you in the recent few weeks? And just trying to get your thoughts, if you're thinking there might be some differences between business customers and personal customers when it comes to placing the deposits and interest earning balances?

Thanks for the question. I think it's more a note of caution and something we'll monitor than something we really see. And, inevitably, some customers will have options to earn more interest. And if that's what customers really value, then they'll do that. We're really focused on customers coming to use Wise for managing and moving their money around the world. And we're very much focused on solving this. And it's more -- we'll observe what happens in our base. Inevitably, there will be some customers that want to do this, but other customers that will value the proposition that we offer and that will be reinforced with whatever we can do on price to help our customers move and manage money around the world cheaper and easier. But yes, rather the caution rather than something we're seeing. Just as a follow-up to that though, really, when we look at our growth for the year, this is really driven by -- and the revenue growth for the year, this is really driven by the volume that customers are moving with us, rather than -- and on the assumption that much of any interest income that we get would really be reinvested back into our customers. So we'll monitor this and look at this. But really, the fundamentals of the business and what's driving our growth is the volume that people are using on the Wise Account.

Thanks, Matt. Next question comes from the line of Mohammed Moawalla at Goldman.

It's actually Lucas. Mo could not join. So just 2 questions for me. One -- first one on the take rate. I know you made the comments earlier, but given that take rate has been higher on the back probably the currency volatility, should we expect the price cuts to come on the back of higher interest income that you will make or is the key metric to watch is the currency volatility as this substitutes you'll sort of start lowering the prices? And the second question is on the customer adds in Personal segment. I mean, we've seen probably the largest absolute number you've added in the quarter. Is this a function of high sort of same customer acquisition costs that you've been spending, so higher marketing spend or do you see sort of more of a viral model and customer just changing because the pricing -- the lowest pricing model that ultimately wins in the marketplace?

Cool. Cool. Let me -- so take rate. I think -- I think all of the things you said, Lucas, makes sense there, actually. So if we can -- if our economics improve and we can reduce prices thanks to interest income, we will. If cross currency becomes cheaper because volatility cedes and the cost of moving money reduces, then that would actually help the stock prices as well. And that would drop on this cross-border conversion costs. So we would do both and we'd do that in the context of sustaining a very healthy EBITDA margin. What we don't know is just how quickly this market volatility would cede, even if it gets better before it gets worse, we'll watch and see. But really, the change that we saw in the last 6 months is really what drove some of the pricing increases that we passed on to customers in the last quarter or so. So I think it's going to be a bit -- well, those are both dynamics, which would drive us to consider price changes. Then on the customer adds, so yes, it's a bit of a follow-up to the question earlier. We have seen -- we have seen a big increase in the number of active customers on Wise. And this is a function of very healthy cohort performance. What I mean by that is the customers that have joined in the past are still active on Wise and finding increasing ways to use us. They're using more products. They're using them more often and the engagement is very healthy. But actually, we've seen more and more customers joining Wise. Some of you tell me, you monitor these app download numbers and you see both in our existing countries of U.K., U.S. is very healthy and then in places like Brazil, it's been very, very -- we've seen very healthy growth as we've launched the Wise Account. But this has come through a pretty consistent mix of viral growth and marketing spend. This 2 -- rough 2/3 spend we've talked around before is very stable and we haven't changed our payback. So we haven't done this by changing our approach to sustainable investing. What's happened is, as we continue to invest in the product, this has driven customers that love using the products and recommend it to others. And more and more people are finding use cases on Wise with our Wise Account. So all of these things together feed -- more people are looking for Wise that helps our marketing channels. But really, it's, fundamental kernel of this is building a great product supported by great infrastructure rather than us relaxing our discipline on marketing, which we absolutely not in the game of doing.

Just have a follow-up question from Kim Bergoe at Numis.

Matt, so just a follow-up for me. And I guess it ties into some of the questions we've had and what you said. It's just, how should we be thinking about and modeling that EBITDA margin guidance that you've given, you said sort of at or above 20%? Obviously, there's some sort of your discretion in there, partly on making sure that you're at that level. How should we be thinking about -- how much of a sort of KPI, I guess, is that for the group?

It's a really important KPI for us and has been for many years. Why is that? We make sure that we have healthy sustainable profitability in the product, which generates all the capital, all the cash we need to build a very healthy balance sheet. Also build huge discipline into the products, just how we price. We got well over 4,000 people in the business wanting to drive down prices, but we can only do that if we help maintain a very healthy margin. We also want to invest significantly in our growth. So what this real KPI does for us is it makes sure we stay disciplined and invest in things that drive profitable long-term growth. The way clearly, like there is a bunch of operating leverage in our business, which we choose today to reinvest. And we do that because we served 5.5 million people this quarter. There are maybe 300 million people that aren't yet using us. There's quite a long way to go and a lot of product to build in order to help that materially shift from where we are today to where this potential is for this business. So over the medium term, we should absolutely keep investing in our products. We'll keep investing in our -- in the service we offer, in our price, in our engineering teams such that we'll maximize the investment in this while maintaining this healthy 20% -- at or above 20% margin. And as you've seen over the last year and people are learning how we do this is, we will invest down to that as much as we can because the marginal return on our marketing spend is still very high. The return on the engineering investments we make in building products, if you look at what we've launched in Brazil, is really high. So actually, there's a lot of temptation to invest down below this 20%, but we keep at this level because it sustains a very healthy profitable model, which, especially in the current environment, in the last year as we've seen, has served us incredibly well. This -- the almost GBP 230 million of revenue in a quarter, growing that well above 50% or 70% this quarter and still have a -- with a 20% plus EBITDA margin this, we think we're quite unique in being able to build a business that's growing at this rate, whilst still managing to be profitable and cash generating like we are. And whilst we can do that and invest in these opportunities over the medium term it's absolutely the right thing to do rather than trying to increase that too significantly in the near term. We'd be leaving a massive valuable opportunity on the table.

Matt, we have a question from Justin Forsythe, Credit Suisse.

Actually, I have 2 quick ones. Matt, I wanted to play off the comment you just made on Brazil. I think in Q1, you said that while Brazil downloads and the people using -- downloading the app in Brazil had increased a lot, it was a minimal contribution, I think, to the results in the quarter. Can you just update us on the relative contribution of Brazil and how users are ramping in terms of their engagement on Wise Account? I also wanted to ask about gross margin. Obviously, that was down quite a bit from the update you gave the other day. Is that still a metric that we're managing to? And you've got this incremental lever in there with the interest income coming through. And so it seems like these levers could be pulled relatively quickly with regards to pricing. Are you still managing to a specific gross margin? And has the volatility driven that downwards for the rest of the year? And how should we think of that in the context of interest income?

Justin, I'll try and answer those pretty quick. So yes, Brazil saw a lot of activity there, a lot of traction with our customers and we are starting to see that impact our volume growth. We're seeing very healthy volume growth and active customer growth across all of our markets. So it's not too focused in any market. But definitely, the launch in Brazil that we've seen is now impacting and driving -- helping drive our volume growth of the business. We're not going to give you specifics, but it's definitely something that's now meaningful for us. On a gross margin, we did say actually, as volatilities come, we've seen increasing -- we've put up prices, but we've seen some quiet increases in some of the COGS and our FX costs and that has maybe reduced the gross -- the percentage gross margin of income -- of revenue. Whilst we monitor this, we don't strictly manage to a specific number there on gross margin. What we're doing is fundamentally like, are we generating enough gross margin and cash flow to fund all of the investments and to have it sustainable at or above 20% margin. So really, we look at it this way and we'll trade off these. But we have seen this volatility come through. That's put some pressure on price up and margin -- gross margin down. And who knows how long that volatility will last. Hopefully, we can reverse these price increases over time. But really, I'd rather just focus on what's happening on the total level from an income perspective and then we really manage across all of these elements of our P&L to make sure we deliver this sustainable at or above 20% EBITDA margin.

Okay. Got it. So you're more managing to, I guess -- basically, is everything else in input then to get to that 20% EBITDA margin? Is that the right way to think of it going forward? Or can we think of it as potential upside in any given quarter?

Yes. So ultimately, this 20% is how we think about it, there're clearly movements in there. We'll monitor what's happening in the -- because we want to make sure we've got a highly cash-generating product that enables us to invest significantly on our growth. So we don't want a very low gross -- we want to be sure we are a cash-generating business that helps us invest. We're investing significant amounts in product and marketing and in the service we offer our customers. So we are very mindful of this. But ultimately, I think it's easier for everyone to think about this 20% number.

Matt, we have a question from Greg [indiscernible].

The first one would be on prices. I think in the trading update, you've shown where you sort of are able to decrease the prices in the future, thanks to new partnerships. I was just wondering, so far, where have you actually increased the prices, in which regions? And as well in the future, I think you said that interest income would sort of benefit some of your customers as you would pass on through these benefits. Could you tell us where actually are you planning on decreasing prices, which regions? And the last one would be just a follow-up one. On the growth of active customers, you've said that it was a mix between actually existing customers more frequently using maybe Wise and some new one joining the platform. Could you actually tell us if the rate of new Wise joiner has actually increased or if it's a constant rate?

Cool. So I could tell -- so where are the price -- where the price increases have changed from the market? Where might they be? Where might price drops come from interest income? And then what's driving the active customer growth? So if you're in the U.K., if you're a U.K. customer that sends primarily pounds or euros, you wouldn't have got an e-mail saying price is going up most likely. But if you send USD or other currencies, you might have got an e-mail a couple of months ago saying, unfortunately, we had to raise prices. So really, it's on -- in those markets where we've seen prices go up, and it's really a function of where do we -- which are the customers or the currency movements, which drive the FX exposures and risks for us. And we try and -- we try and allocate -- we try to have all of our -- no subsidizations. We try and allocate the cost to the customers where we experience it, just like if we see benefits, we give that back to the customers where that comes from. So those are the markets where we've seen prices go up. It's too soon for me to comment on where prices might go down for customers. They might go down across the board, or they might -- we might find specific segments of customers that we're able to focus on. So more to come on that. We're working it through and it will evolve over the quarters. I can promise you this. So what's driven the growth in active? Just to clarify, on our existing base, we've seen very healthy -- certainly seeing very healthy behaviors in the cohorts. So actually, we've always had this, but over time, you can see our cohorts are very stable and that's not really changed. But like as we see a Wise Account adoption, people are moving more money with us. So we just see the kind of composition of our customer base being very healthy and going in a pretty healthy direction. But to your customers, have we actually seen -- have we seen an increase in the new customers joining? I actually talked, it wasn't this, it was a quarter ago, we said actually over 1 million customers now joined us in a given quarter. And that's grown significantly over time and actually has grown over the last year. We've seen more new customers joining us quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. And that's a balance of viral growth and also our ability to spend more on marketing without spending -- without reducing down the return on investment. So to answer your question, Greg is, it's -- yes, we have seen more customers joining us and an increase in the rate. And we've been focused on this over time. Yes, 7 years ago, we started, I think, we had 50,000 joining us on a quarterly basis. Now it's over 1 million.

Thank you to everybody who has asked the questions. We have no more questions, Matt. So I'll hand over to you for any closing remarks.

Nothing really to reiterate here. Fundamentally, what we're seeing in the business is just very healthy momentum in the adoption of our Wise Account and our products and the rate at which the volume that customers are moving through. Its GBP 27 billion, growing 50% year-over-year. It's significant and that's continue to grow and give us confidence that the investments we've made in the past are paying off. And we continue to make investments like that in products, also in marketing, which is going to continue to power for the future. We've got this help from interest income, but really the fundamentals of the business are driven by the fundamentals we've been focused on, which is helping people manage and move their money around the world. We're doing that significantly at scale. It's growing fast and we're also very healthy, profitable, which, very tough times in the market, but positions us extremely well and gives us confidence over the next year. Thanks for your questions. We'll be back end of November, with a little bit more detail, and I look forward to speaking to you then.