Wise plc ($WISE)

Good morning, and a warm welcome to everybody here today. I'm Martin Adams. I'm the Head of Owner Relations here at Wise and we have a presentation that we prepared for you today. It will take about 60 minutes. That will be followed by Q&A, and there are copies of the slides on the Annual Relations website. if you would like to take a look at those. We'll be making many statements about the future this morning based on our current expectations. Actual outcomes are subject to many factors and may therefore differ materially as a result. Please review our comments on the side here and the risk factors that you can find in our latest Form 20-F filed with the SEC for additional information and so with that done, let's get started. Please join me in welcoming to the stage the Founder and CEO of Wise, Kristo Kaarmann.

Thank you, Martin. Thanks for organizing this. Hi, everyone, and welcome from New York to those who are following us on the stream. Yesterday, we listed our shares on NASDAQ. It was -- it's awesome to be here. It's awesome to be here, not only to meet the the new owners, the new analysts who follow us, but also for the opportunity to grow into the largest market there is in the world for our products. With me today, I have some of -- some of my team and I'm actually quite inspired by our extended team working on wise, many of us over a decade together now. And what binds us together is this a very clear mission that we're going to be talking about today. and our irreversible impact on how money moves across borders. And indeed, together, we're going to remind today what Wise does, what is unique about our infrastructure, our products and how this creates value for both our customers and also for our owners. So it's great to see a lot of long-term owners here. Some of the new faces as well. And for those of you who join us with us, let me take you back to why did we start Wise in the first place. For a long time, people and businesses have moved money internationally through their bank. And even if they're frustrated by the high cost, how long it takes and the hassle, they didn't really have a choice. And banks not competing with each other and those international transfers has led to decades of underinvestment in correspondence, in technology, in this infrastructure. So over the past 15 years, we've built Wise from scratch to give people and businesses a better way to move and manage money across borders. We've made money work without borders for them. So we're going to soon talk through what makes Wise fundamentally different than anything else in quite a bit of detail. But before we explain that, let me explain how our customers feel about that difference. So when you ask people who do live across borders, travel frequently or run international businesses, they described their experience with their bank describe it as expensive, slow as a hassle. And often the most -- they're actually most disappointed with the lack of transparency in fees. And how unpredictable it is that the money is actually going to arrive at the right person at the other end. So to fix these cross-border payments, 2 things needed to be done. Firstly, completely rebuild a new payment network from the ground up. So when historically international wires relied on chains of correspondent banks across a number of jurisdictions string together, it caused the whole process to be unpredictable in cost and in time and the effort that you need to go through. So now we're bringing together local central banks and instant payment systems into that one network. Secondly, on top of this network, we redefine what's possible for our customers. And those customers we serve in 3 segments. First of all, Wise is account for people? Wise business for small businesses, freelancers, micro businesses and Wise platform for banks and financial institutions who are using our infrastructure to provide these benefits to their own customers. And what does that mean for our customers? How is their experience changed after switching to Wise because of those 2 things? So in the last year alone, we estimate that we saved our customers or rather they saved using Wise, $3.3 billion in those hidden fees on cross-border transactions compared to using their bank. Saving money is usually the biggest reason people say when they switch to eyes. But when they experience these transfers, it is the speed and the predictability that comes with it. This is what usually makes them glued to the product. So we've completely redefined the estimations to the expectations to international transfers. On Wise 75% of transactions international transactions from 1 end of the world to the other, from 1 bank to the other, arrive in less than 20 seconds. So this is in contrast to the prevailing estimate of 3 to 5 business days that you still get from your bank. So given all of that, it's no wonder that 70% of our new customers who join wise, it's because their family, their coworkers, their friends recommended wise to that, which in turn means that our active customer numbers have grown very fast now to $19 million at the end of last quarter -- thus for the last financial year. And so has the volume of money that we move in cross-currency transactions. Last year, GBP 243 billion, and this is growing fast. And as you'll hear from Nilan, it's no longer just the international wires that people use their Wise accounts for. At the end of March, our customers held GBP 39 billion on their wise accounts. and user Wise cards for GBP 44 billion on travel spending abroad and at home. So these are large numbers. But in the context, -- of the enormous size of this market, we're really only starting to scratch the surface. We moved less than 5% of the money moved by people and less than 1% move in the small business market. So this means that, overall, we're less than 1% of this enormous 43 trillion market of cross-currency transactions. And it also means that there's a huge opportunity ahead of us. We've gone from 015 years ago to now moving $0.25 trillion. But we are building this network and the apps to move trillions. We had a great start, but it's just the beginning. So how are we going to get to the first trillion? How are we going to get to the next GBP 10 trillion. My team will take us through the investments that we're making right now how to make the money with our borders work for people, for businesses and for banks. In just a moment, Nilan will come on stage. -- and introduce it to our products and to our customers. You'll hear about how we ship new products and enhancements and how we increase the velocity to do that. Harsh Indiana will then explain the structural advantages that wise holds through the infrastructure and the regulatory architecture that we're developing. And finally, the numbers. Our CFO, Emmanuel will explain how all of this translates into the financials and how the flywheel for growth works. We know this approach will make Wise an increasingly valuable company for customers and owners alike. So let me pass the clicker to Nilan, who s going to tell us about the products and customers. Over to you. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Nilan Peiris, Chief Product Officer here at Wise and I've been here for the last 12 years building our products here at Wise. And I'm really excited to share with you the impact those products have had on our customers' lives. One personal highlight for me was launching our payouts to Sri Lanka, which is where my parents are from a few years ago, delivering super fast, super cheap payments Sri Lanka, whilst it was powerful for my family, I think it was the first time my dad really ever understood what I did at work. So on to our products. I'm going to take you through the wise account for people. Then on to Wise business and a little later on I'll talk about Wise platform towards the end of the presentation. We build and deliver and expand our products at speed. We started with the first cross-border transaction over 15 years ago. And we learned that customers didn't want to just send money. They wanted to hold money internationally as well. And for them, we launched the Wise count in the U.K. Once they were holding money, they want to spend it. We then launched multicurrency debit cards. They wanted to return on their holdings and we launched Wise assets. And the rate at which we've been deploying new features has been accelerating. We recently launched Wise assets in Australia and in Brazil. Let me take you through in a bit of detail what's inside that wise account today and why customers are joining us. And the heart of it is still our money transfer product. Instant transparent, low-cost and convenient payments, instant 20 seconds for money to move from a bank account on one end of the planet, say, in the U.K., all the way to Australia, at the other end. Transparent, you can see exactly how much you're getting paid and really low cost. And how much better this product is than the alternative directly correlates with the rate at which customers recommend us and our NPS and our growth. And that's why we keep investing in making our products and payments better. But it's not just sending, its holding. Customers hold more than 40 currencies within Wise, and they use Wise assets to earn a return. We have 2 products here, interest and stocks. Customers can hold their balances in interest in stocks, earn a return and spend with their card on these balances. But this multicurrency debit card is much more than that. It's a really intelligent debit card. It uses the right balance when you're using it. If you're in Europe, it will use a Eurobalance in the U.S., your U.S. balance. And if you have neither, it will use whatever is cheapest. And the Wise account is so much more than that. We built scheduled payments, spending alerts, you can split bills with friends when you're out. Many banks and providers don't offer all of these features. And this is why customers keep coming back to us and spending more and more with us every day. We've taken AI and used it to create incredible experiences for customers in making payments more convenient. For example, when paying an invoice you get these fiddly account details that you need to enter in and make sure you've entered it correctly for the money to turn up of the other ends correctly. What would be really cool is if you could maybe live demo. I've got a video of a demo here, CX. If you could take a picture of the invoice like this, this is an invoice or some garden plans that we're going to design at and take a picture of the invoice and then Wise will scan this and automatically populate the recipient details. This features live. There you go with the account holding name and their account details. That's a really convenient experience. And one of the reasons customers keep coming back to us. Putting this all together, our vision for the Wise account is to be the world's best account for managing and moving your money. Who are our customers? Today, they are customers with international needs, ranging from travelers through to remote workers, digital nomads, expats and immigrants and freelancers. And as they have an increasing international need, we provide them increasing value and the -- and our most valuable customers are the ones that use us the most. We also, you may have seen, launched a new product for a new segment, current account in the U.K. or what's known as a checking account in the U.S. Here, we enable customers on their spending to earn a market-leading return of 3.26% through wise interest. They earn while they spend. They got the great international debit part and payments features. As we get to developing this product footprint in markets around the world, we'll be launching this everyday account globally. How does our road map evolve? Well, our investments in that international account are our primary route into the market for consumer cross-border payments. And so we'll continue to invest in making this the best international account for these use cases. We'll start to invest in -- or continue to invest in building and launching current accounts globally. And as customers hold more than us, hold more with us we'll be giving them more opportunities to generate a return by onboarding new asset types. All of these investments result in increased utilization of the account and these 2 metrics you'll hear a lot about today, cross-border volume and holdings will grow. Moving on to Wise business. Businesses come to wise to pay and get paid internationally to pay businesses that have invoices to pay. Most businesses have some international dimension suppliers or customers overseas. With suppliers, they'll get an invoice to pay and they start off by using ways to pay their invoice. But they can also use ways to get paid internationally. One feature of the account I've not talked about so far are these local account details. These are things like a routing number in the U.S., a sole coded account number in the U.K. and IBAN in Europe. If you're a U.S. business today and you have a customer in the U.K. and you want to get paid in pounds, small businesses don't have access to international accounts. They all need to fly out to the U.K., incorporate an NC and then go to a bank to get a U.K. bank account with Wise, with a few clicks you'll get a U.K. account number and you can put that on your invoice to your U.K. customers who get paid in pounds and keep the pounds there instead of having to move it back to dollars all the time. But Wise business is so much more for this. We made it work with your team or your team with payment approvals, the ability to add your team, multicurrency invoices you can set up within wise batch payments, API payments, employee debit cards, accounting integrations plus so much more who are our customers for Wise business. Today, they're predominantly small micro businesses with less than 10 employees. But as we continue to invest in the product, we expect the size of businesses using wise to increase. This all comes together into our vision for Wise business to become the world's best business account for moving and managing money. Let me take you through our road map to make that happen. Historically, as I shared, businesses came to ways to pay, get paid and hold and earn a return. Through our same money product, local account details and balanced product. Today, they do more with control. They get employee cards, approval flows, create invoices with Wise, send them out and get -- get told when those invoices get paid. They are a return on their interest and can set up groups with permissions. But in the future, businesses will be able to run their entire financial operations on Wise as we continue to invest in building out expense management workflows. We enabled them to take payments online and they add more asset types. Wise business goes from just making payments easier to enabling businesses to run their entire financial operations. Putting this all together, over the Wise account for people and for business. It's a pretty simple story. We invest in making the account more and more useful. This leads to consumers and businesses using us more and more every day. And this results in holdings growth, cross-border volume growth and card spend growth. And you'll hear from Emmanuel how we earn revenue on these. We've been really successful at making our product more and more useful. We grew a send volume at 31% last year, spending at 37% and holding at 40%. And whilst we're really proud of those numbers, we're really proud of this number that Kristo shared earlier. The GBP 3.3 billion that customers saved last year by using wise instead of the alternatives. And that GBP 3.3 billion in savings wouldn't be possible without our decades-long investment in infrastructure. And I'm really excited to welcome our CTO on stage to take you through how we make that happen. Over to you Harsh.

Thank you, Nilan. Hello, everybody. Good morning. I'm Harsh. I am the Chief Technology Officer here at Wise, and I have been at Wise for 11 years. But actually, I have a story about over 20 years ago, I moved from India to the U.S. to go to grad school. And I paid 6% in exchange rate markups when I brought my first semester situation to the U.S. Unfortunately, at that time, Wise do not exist. So I didn't have an option. But over the years, I've lived a pretty international life. I've lived in India, U.S., in Europe, and I found Wise as a key tool for me to continue to live this international life. I basically bank with Wise or it's my primary account. And my favorite feature is the ability for me to hold GBP, Euros and USD and earn a return on that everyday spending money every day. So together with -- in the next few minutes, me and Diana, who will come on later, we'll share with you the details of the infrastructure we have built that powers these products that Nilan talked about. And this infrastructure that really makes is very unique. As Kristo shared, we are building a network and products to move trillions around the world. And we have been making outstanding progress on this. This network is all underpinned by the Wise infrastructure, which we have built over the last 15 years. This is what enables us to send money globally have international accounts, like Nilan shared, and give our customers unparalleled coverage and speed and price. Almost 19 million active customers used Wise last year. And as more and more people and businesses use Wise, we get greater flows within the network. And with that greater flows, we get more economies of scale, which leads to cheaper price and faster speeds. And these are the better outcomes that people come to use Wise. And this is the flywheel that continues to make the network even better as more people join. But this network is powered by this underlying wise infrastructure, which we believe is the best infrastructure to move and manage your money around the world. This infrastructure has got 4 components. It's the technology, proprietary built from the ground up to solve this problem. It's our global operations. all around the world, 24/7, and also our regulatory footprint with our licenses and the ability to operate this infrastructure around the world and the connections for us to do pain and payouts and move money from around the world and we will walk you through these components in more detail. This infrastructure is pretty scaled out. We now have over 80 licenses globally to operate Wise. From a connections perspective, we use local bank partner and payment partners in over 90 local bank partners and payment partners in countries, but also we are super proud of our 8 direct connections where we are directly connected to the instant payment schemes around the world and have settlement accounts with the central banks in these countries. We have over 1,000 engineers solely focused on this cross-border payments problem. This is one of the biggest engineering teams in the world focused on this problem. And finally, we have an amazing operations team that helps our customers when they need to help sometimes with moving funds or managing the funds across the globe. And this infrastructure is what leads to these amazing outcomes. We're right now in the U.S., sometimes when you do domestic payments in the U.S., it's amazing to me that even ACH payment can take as much as same day to clear. What this infrastructure can do is move money between a source account in the U.S. or in the U.K. to a destination account in India or in Australia, in less than 20 seconds. This is unheard of. This was unheard of 7 years ago before Wise existed. 75% of our payments are now instant. And we do this at scale, but at really low rates. We charge on a blended basis, 52 basis points for our customers. And we continue to invest to make sure this infrastructure is resilient and scalable. Going deeper on our technology. So we have built wise on a single global technology stack. It is global by default and design. So let me give you an example, if you are banking with, say, a bank in the U.K. and if you were to move what would happen. So you have a bank and in the U.K., you decide to move to the U.S. What would usually happen is you would have to go through full KYC onboarding again with the new U.S. bank. You would have to give you a documents, you'd have to for an individual who's allowed to live here. And then you would have to be issued new account details, new debit cards, new Internet log-in and password and new apps to be downloaded. That is not how iCEworks. If you move from the U.K. to the U.S. you basically get the same product and the same experience. Everything works seamlessly, and that's what allows you to be much more global in using a bank account. But also, when you think about how we've built these products and this infrastructure globally, we add a lot of local flavors to it. And this is this local unique expertise that we built by not only how payment systems work, but also how our teams are organized. We have teams across Asia Pacific, North America and Europe, who have key insights in these local markets and how the payment systems are evolving. The example I gave to my friends who live in San Francisco and New York is you don't know how QR-code based instant payments are evolving and operating in Singapore because you've never experienced it in your life. You have to live and breathe payments locally to be able to build an amazing experience, and this is what this infrastructure allows you to do. And also our team set up allows you to do. And finally, by having all of this code and all of this infrastructure in one common stack, this allows us to have insights on all the transactions and all the data that's moving through. across the globe. This allows us to build amazing machine learning models to help us manage our treasury system, building one global treasury system to manage our funds flow efficiently and predict where funds will be needed, for example, going into the weekend. But also, it allows us to fight financial crime much better because it allows us to build these models, which are global. This local setup is what makes Wiser's technology very, very unique and its infrastructure unique. We've always shipped pretty fast, as Nilan was showing, we've shipped a lot over the last few years, but this shipping speed and execution speed continues to increase with AI. I thought I'd pull up a few things. There are 3 examples of how things have improved or gotten faster over the last 12 to 18 months. Now at Wise all our engineers are using AI to ship code faster and getting more features out for our customers. We already shipped multiple thousand times a month, while most banks ship usually a few types of quarter. But that shipping speed has already gone up by 25% over the last year. And we have over 6,000 releases per month, not happening. But I'm even more happy about the other 2 things that we've done. We've improved our experience for our customers to help themselves by using AI. We've launched the Wise Chat assistant, which is completely powered by LLM, and this allows customers to come and get the questions answered in a 24/7 manner without having to talk to a human. And the resolution rate or the quality of these responses are now showing that these resolutions are better than when human is involved. We are getting close to 50% of chat contacts being powered by LLMs. Similarly, we are seeing amazing productivity improvements in our back-office operations. We've built tooling such that our financial crime teams and onboarding teams who have to work through documents when customers on board are being able to use AI end-to-end and in some cases, we are seeing 50% improvement in operational handling times. These are just 3 things I thought I'd call out, but we have hundreds of use cases now in production being run by AI agents. Next, operations [indiscernible] you want and you want a better experience or a different experience than if you're moving $10 around the world. And that's where you may want to call us and get a much more white club experience. We have invested in that, and that experience at Wise is called total service. Similarly, business customers increasingly want someone who knows and understands their business. So we've invested in account management experience for these businesses. This just is in support. You don't call your account manager just when you have an issue, but they actually understand your business and help you grow more volumes on wise. And we invest in operations because we will always anchor our experience in high NPS customer interactions. This is because we know a majority of our growth still comes from word of mouth. So if you have a good experience when you talk to Wise or an you're contact-wise or when you use Wise, that leads to the word of mouth where you continue to move because he will tell your friends and family that Wise is great. But when I talk to our users, people are just amazed at how we've made things simple. What seems to usually be a very daunting task of moving and managing your finances globally. They basically said, Wise has made it very simple. And this simplicity is thanks to our infrastructure. The technology and operations I just covered, but also how these 2 pillars interact and go hand in hand with the licensing and connections. And for that, I will give it to Diana to cover these.

Thank you so much. Hello, everyone. I'm Diana Avila. I have been with Wise for nearly 11 years, and I look after our international expenses. I first -- sorry, one second Hopefully, you can hear me better. I heard about Wise before joining when I have moved from Colombia, where I'm originally the United [indiscernible] master degree. And as many of us here today, I'm sure at some point, I had the need to send money back to Colombia to my country authority to pay for the student loan. And I realize how expensive, how complicated, how low and how obscured it would have been to do this using traditional banking when I was doing my research, and since then, I realized that Wise was building something unique, and I became obsessed with the idea of having these products and the solution available for more customers in more places. Today, in addition to taking Wise to more places, I get to use it as my everyday account. And by far, my favorite feature is I get to send money back to Colombia, and this gets instantly to my mom, for example. It takes 20 seconds for me to send money from the U.K. to my mom in Colombia and this is powered by the infrastructure that we have been talking about, not only this transfer, but 75 of our transports right again. So to continue explaining these infrastructure, let me take another step back and go into the detail of how traditional correspondent banking work. If there's someone, for example, in Australia, that is trying to send a payment to the U.S. and they decide to use their bank. This one bank in Australia, likely is not going to have a relationship with every single bank around the world. They probably have one correspondent relationship with a buying somewhere else in Singapore. And this is how this long chain gets started. The bank in Australia will send a message to their correspondent and then every correspondence in the chain will be adding their own fee. They will be adding an FX spread and their own processes, making this payment probably last 2 to 5 days to arrive all the way to an account in the U.S. and would likely cost over 3%. So we have dramatically improved this process through our infrastructure through our licenses and our connections. What happens is that for the past 20 years or so, most jurisdictions around the world have significantly improved how money moves domestically. If we see most jurisdictions today have instant payment systems that allow us to move money locally within seconds, free or very low cost and very convenient. Let's say, in the U.S. now we have Vietnam. But what happens is that these payment systems work really well domestically. And what we are doing at wise is we're bringing these amazing domestic payment systems under our own network in order to move money internationally or move money for core. And this is the network that we create for the world's on. And this is how we have made something complex, now be way more simplified. We have our own licenses and we have these connections to payments around the world so that we can control each of these payments end to end. And we do this in many cases, leveraging or connecting indirectly those domestic payment systems with our more than 90 domestic payment markets. We hold commercial relationships directly with more than 90 banks around the world and we also connect with that. But what is even more exciting and unique is that in many cases, we don't work with domestic banks. We have a direct explanation to the domestic payment system controlling the whole transaction under our own network. So let's say, if someone is in Australia and they need to send money to the U.K. They will in strong the bank in Australia. and wise receives this instruction and this payment directly. And we will do the same in the U.K. We will send this money and this payment directly to the recipient bank. Everything happening under our own -- and we have achieved this level of direct connectivity and direct participation in a jurisdiction ore. This is. Back in 2018, wise was the first nonbank financial institution to become a direct participant to the payment system in the U.K. And throughout the years, we have been adding more of those, and we are getting faster at building these direct connections. And I believe what is really impressive is the scale at which we can do this across the world. For example, last year, we completed this direct participation in Brazil and in Japan. We're talking about 2 completely different markets, and we went live last year with those. And when we talk about direct connections and operating as direct participants in payment systems, this might sound simple or straightforward, but it is actually very difficult to be -- let me take the latest connection as an example to explain what it takes to become a direct participant. As I said last year, in November, we completed our connection to singing the instant payment system in Japan. In order to do this, first of all, we have to obtain a license. In Japan, we got our first license 10 years ago. And later on, we added another license. You already heard from Harsh that globally, we have more than 8 license. This enables us to operate in different jurisdictions and improve our product in these places, for example, allowing customers to hold more money in the Wise. And once we have these regulatory license, we need to get the approval to have the collection to have the participation to the payments. So first, we started with one bank, then we other more bands. But then throughout the years, we were working with the payment them and with the central bank to become a direct participant and also to have our own settlement account with the bank of the patter center. And to build this connection, we need to deploy technology locally. This is a regulatory requirement. So we have built a relevant technology to have this connectivity. And of course, we did the local operations. to maintain this license to maintain and operate this connection and to serve our customers locally based in Japan, but also customers that are globally base and want to have operation and support in Japanese, we also run local operations because we're literally moving money and operating a system that is in debt. So this is the expertise that we have been building throughout the last 15 years that enable us to reach this level of connectivity to the payment system. This starts with us engaging with regulators, with policymakers. Whilst has now become an authority and well recognized amongst policymakers to think about how to improve cross-border payments and enabling access to the payment systems domestically to nonbanks that are focused on these cross-border money move. And once the regulation allows this, we also need to have the right type of license, and this is normally a multiyear process for wise to obtain these regulatory licenses. And when we think about connecting and participating directly into National Payment Systems, as you can imagine, the payment scheme, the Central Bank would be requiring the highest level of requirements because they need to preserve the safety and the stability of the money movement in these countries. So we go through a lengthy approval process from compliance, from an operational, from a technical resilience perspective. And otherwise, we have been doing this for 15 years. We have developed this credibility, disability, this knowledge that is well recognized by regulators and payment systems around the world. So to sum it up, the first enabler for us to go to different markets is having our regulatory licenses. We have more than 80 of these around the world, and our portfolio of licenses continues increasing. And in terms of connections, we're very proud that we already have 8 direct connections around the world, and we expect to have more and what is very unique because if you're a customer, you might not necessarily get excited that wise is direct participants or not. What you see are the outcomes of this infrastructure and -- and every time we have deployed a new direct connection, we see the clear outcomes with underlying costs significantly dropping, and this is how we are able to sustainably reduce price for our customers. We also see the dramatic increase in speed because we're connecting payment systems that already allow us to move money instantly and this is how we achieved 75% of cross-border payments arriving in less than 20 seconds. And we also see contract rates significantly increasing because we don't have customers having to us force my money because the money would have already arrived where they need. And with this, I'm going to pass it on to Harsh again to wrap up how the 4 components of our infrastructure come together to create these competitive assets.

Thank you, Diana. One of the things Diana and I talk about infrastructure too much, I think people think. Just generally, our conversations are very fascinating to me about licensing and how tech combines together to run money around the world. But hopefully, that gives you a quick run-through on each of our pillars and what makes this infrastructure unique and actually a very big competitive advantage for us. And I want you to take away that it's not just the technology, it's not just software. But it is actually the mix of how we build the tech, the operations, the licenses we own and the connections in each of these countries and the connections to direct payments -- direct connections to payment systems, all together that constitutes this infrastructure and the competitive advantage we have. The other bit that Diana, when she showed those flags on the screen, One of the things that we should cover is we were the first in most of these countries to be able to get access to these payment systems as a nonbank and that's -- that is what adds credibility. So when you're a regulator and you want to open up access for others, nonbanks to your payment infrastructure, we are usually the first one. They would call and ask for learnings. But what Diana talked through under that connection is no small feat. Each of these domestic payment systems have highly complex rails, and they run on very unique and sometimes very obscure protocols and they'll have APIs that are very different. So it's not just you take a wrapper or you take a published API and wrap it around and everything will start working. Each of these domestic payment systems have a very unique standard to maintain and a very unique integration to do. So the fact that last year in itself, we added 2 direct connections. Hopefully, that gives you a proof point on how flexible and extendable this infrastructure is that we've built. We've built this infrastructure from the ground up such that it is very easy to integrate new payment types and technologies in a very easy way. And every time, of course, as a technologist, when I see new technologies coming out that could help us solve the problem of cross-border payments and really help our customers, we actively look at this. And as you can imagine, in the last 12 months, I've been asked quite a few times about our opinions on stablecoins. How will that impact cross-border payments? So what I thought I'd do is take a few minutes to talk through an example of a USD stable coin-based transaction. Like how would that impact cross-border payments. But having spent the last decade in this space, let me give you an example. When people talk about usage of stable coins and cross-border payments, they're basically talking about 2 things from a customer experience. One, using USD stable coins in this example, to do cross-border money movement and two, using stable coins to manage currency volatility. So let's talk about the first, if you were to use stable coins for doing cross-border payments, we've learned that the infrastructure we've built is by connecting local payment systems and direct connections that we've built, is is delivering a better price and speed than current stable coin solutions can provide in this space. As we covered before, we charge 52 basis points on average. And this is actually the global average in some jurisdictions -- if you were to move Swiss franc, like CHF 1 million to GBP, we could get it as low as 20 basis points even lower. And most players in this space using the stable coin route or Sable coin sandwich would charge anywhere between 100 to 200 basis points or more. And obviously, the question you should ask is, why -- so the key insight here is while moving value using stable coin -- USD still coin is easy from 1 person to the other. The real complexity arises when you actually have to on-ramp off-ramp these table cards to different currencies. Because remember, people and businesses want to use money in their local form. They want to pay their taxes in, say, the U.K. or in Brazil. They want to buy properties. They want to pay for colestration. -- in their local currency, they can't pay for this in USD, if that is not the native currency. So eventually, if you on-ramp and off-ramp this, this is where the complexity lies. This is where the complexity is around financial crime screening. The complexity lies around converting and the pricing you get. This is what determines how much you've being charged. And guess what? These local payment systems that Diana talked about. They're very large systems. They're moving trillions in the domestic economy. So they're already very efficient. Hence, the pricing is much cheaper. But that said, that is the story today. We will continue to invest and see how this space evolves and as it evolves and if it does solve the problems for cross-commodity was for our customers in some regions, so maybe globally to make it cheaper and faster, we would, of course, use this technology. And the key thing here I want you to take away as the infrastructure we've built is extendable so that it'd be easy to add this. But the other use case we are seeing is some folks want to manage their local currency volatility. So if you take the example of Brazilian real, the Brazilian real has lost 15% against the USD in the last year. So it makes sense that some people live in Brazil would want to fold non-Brazilian real as a hedge. And for some of them, they might use stable coins. But in a lot of these markets, -- there's already a very solid offering. It's a really good offering and it's called the wise account. With device account, you can already hold 40 different currencies at a click of button, and you can hold fee at USD and you can get interest on that USD holdings. That's very powerful. But here, we could add other asset types. As Nilan said, we have added stocks. We've added money market funds, and we will continue to build this infrastructure with the same way we've built this over the last 15 years. When our customers want new things to solve problems for them, we will add those things. And this could be in this example, a stable coin offering, it's an asset type. The infrastructure is extendable that allows you to continue to add new payment types because we've built this from the ground up in this way. Because eventually, what I see is if you take a longer view, looking forward 10 years from now, I will leave you with this. I see most roads in cross-border payments leading to the wise infrastructure. We have built something very unique with this infrastructure, which gives us a competitive advantage on cost and speed with the use of superior technology. and also how we connect directly to payment systems and the regulatory licensing footprint we have built. No other competitor has built this kind of infrastructure at such global scale. And given the head stock we have, we will continue to invest in this over the next decade. But it's not just our customers whose expectations are changing. We are seeing expectations globally change from customers around what cross-border payments should look like. As I said before, 20-second cross-border payments did not exist about 7 or 8 years ago. It definitely did not exist before Wise was created. So these expectations now are evolving even for our customers who are not -- for people who are not our customers, but they're customers of banks. So we are having financial institutions come to us and say, "How are you doing this magic? "how are you doing 20-second cross-border payments, our customers are asking for this. And this is where our WISE platform product comes in. And now let me introduce -- or let me bring back Nilan to talk to our fastest-growing product, which is white platform.

Thanks, Harsh. Voice platform is our fastest-growing product. And that's a reflection from what you've heard from Harsh and Diana about how great our infrastructure is that underpins our products and our growth. Let me tell you how. The growth we see is customers leaving their incumbent providers, their banks to come to Wise. And this turn that banks are seeing shows them explicitly how valuable the infrastructure we've built is -- and it's so valuable, they want to use it themselves. And Wise platform enables them to do that. Banks are partnering with us because their customers are demanding just what we provide our own customers. We've reset the expectations of consumers and businesses from what they want from payments. They want low cost payments. They want convenient payments. They want it fast. But the infrastructure we've built not only gives that to them, but it also solves the pain points that banks have in moving and managing money internationally. Cross-border payments are really inefficient -- have really inefficient back-office operations, they're really hard to do. Providers have poor visibility of where is the money. It's really slow. -- and it's a really manual process. What this results in is customers churning away from their providers and turns into a customer growth challenge. While some customers do leave their bank, we think it's unrealistic for everybody in the world to download our app. There is inertia in banking relationships, but through wise platform, we can reach more and more of these individuals and businesses. Fundamentally, we believe the most convenient experience for moving money internationally is within your bank or the apps used every day. And Wise platform enables that to happen. Wise platform is a global business. We have go-to-market teams around the world. And we break the market into 3 MEO banks, such as Monzo and Nubank, these are tech-savvy companies that know about ways and can integrate us fairly quickly. Tech companies, such as ramp and Brex, these are complex integrations with nonregulated institutions that are normally unlicensed. And finally, we have relationships with Tier 1 banks. These are some of the largest banks with the world -- and this is where around 90% of the world's money moves through today. It's early days with these banks. But these are banks such as Standard Chartered in Asia Pacific, UniCredit in Europe, Itau in South America and Morgan Stanley here in North America. These are multiyear relationships and multiyear journeys. We usually start with an initial launch with a subset of customers on a subset of currencies. As we prove the model, will expand to more corridors and more customer segments and product types. And over time, we may add more of Wise's products to the relationship. Wise platform as our third product is what gives us a path to moving trillions as we onboard more and more of the world's banks and products, -- it enables us to get greater leverage of the infrastructure that we've built. And now I'm going to hand over to Emmanuel, who's going to discuss how this growth is not only profitable, it's sustainable, too. Over to you.

Thanks, Nilan, and good morning, everyone. Welcome also from me from New York. I am Emmanuel, I'm the CFO of Wires. But I'm not only the CFO also become a very wise everyday customer since I moved to London 2 years ago. I have to move this one. So I moved to London, and I'm becoming a Wise users. So while benefiting from the services that we're offering, why is it also allowing us to enjoy the quality of our by -- when I get my salary paid on my wise account, when I use the car every day and also by keeping my money growing with assets. But since traveling also frankly, I'm using my Wise account when I go back to France, when I go back to Germany and also when I'm traveling to the U.S. lately. So obviously, I've heard from Kristo but also from Nilan, Harsh and Diana, we have building infrastructure products that give great value to our customers, allowing us to grow and also to create substantial value for both our customers and you, our owners over time. So today, I'd like to walk you through is from the financial point of view. And Wise has delivered an amazing financial performance. We have a track record of delivering sustainable growth at attractive returns, and we've been profitable every year for the last decade. Since wire was funded, we continuously delivered volume growth as we tackle the massive opportunity ahead of us. Over the past 10 years, not only that we have been profitable, but we've also grown a core-border portfolio over 30x. So since we set on margins based on our unit cost, we are in control of our destiny and 2026 hasn't been an exception. As you will have seen from the press release yesterday, we continue to drive active customers' volumes, an growth whilst targeting the top end of our target margin range. During our last fiscal year, around 19 million active customers transfer over USD 240 billion and guess what, they also increased their holding by 40% to up to nearly $40 billion. So today, I want to take a step back and take you through our financial profile, focusing on 3 main items of our P&L. Well, the first one would be on net revenue and answering the questions on how we generate revenue from customers activities including our trust on their interest framework or their interest income. But second, operating expenses, explaining how we invest part of our margin back to supporting our existing customers but also into driving our growth. And lastly, our income before tax or margin framework. So let's start with our top line metric and the net revenue. So as you have heard from Nilan, our net revenue is a combination of revenue generated by -- as a result of our customers' activities, but also the interest on customer deposits. And looking at 2026, our total revenue was USD 2.5 billion, of which USD 1.9 billion or 76% was related to our customer transactions. And roughly $600 million of interest -- of net interest income. So this revenue is driven by customers using our products for international needs. -- but also, as you have heard from my colleagues before, they are also using wire to manage their everyday finance, just like me. So I'll take you through now each component of our net revenue. And let's domain and start with the first component of the cross-border revenue from customers sending and receiving money internationally. First border is at the core of what we do, supported by our best-in-class infrastructure. As mentioned earlier, in 2026, we had nearly 19 million active customers using Wise for cross-border transactions, generating over USD 240 billion, of course, border volume. And we monetize these customer activities by charging a low transparent fee to our customer. In 2026, this was on average 52 basis points, generating GBP 1.3 billion of cross-border revenue. So we are able to offer these low fees by being focused on our unit cost with strong cost discipline, but also by driving efficiencies. We seek to sustainably reduce our price while maintaining a cost plus margin framework and sharing part of our excess margins with our customers. And we do this mindfully but also actively -- we only reduced our price when we have achieved sustainable reduction of our cost. And we finished the year with a take rate of 51 basis points. And this is a drop of around 20% if you compare this to Q1 2025. So this price adjustments are strategic, and we see the clear benefits from it. So the first one, Price is very important for our customers, both personal and businesses and even more relevant for our customers moving high volumes. Our cost plus margin logic and sure sustainability of our price reductions. And as such, we can maintain a price advantage, and this is being the driver -- we've been a driver of the industry in this. And finally, our platform partners, they appreciate the benefit of partnering with us because we are focused on driving continuous focus on driving continued efficiency. So as you have heard today, as we have built more products or customer love, we have seen increased adoption of a wise account. And as a great example of these customers using Wise card, while spending money both at home, but also when they're traveling, just as I mentioned before. And in 2026, customers spent over $40 billion with a wise account Wealth card, sorry. And this is an increase of 37% compared to last year. And we monetize also this activity for interchange and other card-related fees. Sorry. And customers are using wise more as an everyday account. Just like me, leveraging other products to manage their money or making it grow. In March, from the total customer holding of nearly $40 billion, our customers held $9 billion on wise assets. We get revenue from fee related to domestic pharmacy transactions and the use of other products such as wise assets. So in total, these transactions related to customer activities generated $1.9 billion in transaction revenue in 2026, an increase of 22% year-on-year. And this includes a price adjustment. So that's not all. Our customers are trusting Wise more and keeping more money in their Wise account. At the end of 2026, customers held $30 billion on their wires account. We invest these funds in liquid instruments and generate interest income from the balances. So when we invest our customer balance, we follow our interest income framework. And on the left-hand side, you can see the components of this framework. Under this, we would seek to use the first 1% yield to cover the cost of the Wise account and also to retain 20% above this first 1% yield as a profit and to redistribute 80% back to the customers. So we build this framework to avoid cyclical movements of the interest rates set by the central banks is like the Fed. And what's making this account interesting for our customers. On the right-hand side, you can see how it played out in 2026. So we generate $800 million of interest income, and we're able to pay around $200 million back to the customers. So roughly half of their 80% target. And this is obviously below our target due to certain geographical restrictions like in the U.K., as of today, where as of today, we're not able to pay interest to our -- on the customer balance. So overall, I took you through the different layers of our customer activities, sending and converting money, spending with our wide card and also growing with wise assets and holding balance with us. And this drives our net revenue generation. And again, in 2026, we delivered USD 2.5 billion in net revenue. So as you just saw, the growth is also creating a diversified business. As customers adopt more for product, -- this is -- has reduced our mix of course border revenue. And in 2026, this was around 50% of our net revenue. But we also have a geographical footprint as we have launched new countries, but also grow and roll out products in countries where we already have a presence before. And if you were to look at this from a volume perspective, it will be even more balanced since we are generating more net income in the U.K. due to the regulation I just mentioned before. So as you have heard today, we still have a massive opportunity ahead. And one reason we are so excited about the listing here in the U.S. is that we see the U.S. market as the bigger single market opportunity for our products. presenting a very attractive potential for growth. So I'd like now to cover the second part of the second item of our P&L and operating expenses and now how we invest in our business in a different area my colleague covered before, ensuring that we invest to build the best infrastructure, but also acquiring an old wording more and more customers an attractive return. Through our operating expense, we invest to maintain and service our current customers through transaction and expense and services. We also invest to drive future growth through tech and development, but also marketing. And we invest into having the right support functions. Our transaction expense and transactions and also credit loss reflects the cost of providing our services and correspond to roughly 20% of our net revenue. And this includes things like the banking and partner phase, where we work with domestic bank and other partners to provide our services to customers, for example, to access the domestic payment systems where we not have access yet and also like banks and partner fees, the largest component of the transaction expenses. But this also include FX-related costs and other product costs. We are continuously seeking efficiency in this area, making sure we get the best terms from our partners as we grow in scale while also becoming more efficient in how we deliver our products to our customers. So as an example, today, transaction cost for wise for transferring $10,000 from the U.K. to the U.S. is only a couple of basis points. Our sovereign expenses related to onboarding, but also providing the great services to our growing customer base. And services -- servicing corresponds roughly today to around 15% of our net revenue. And Harsh already covered our progress in the adoption of technology and automation. We're also investing in offering the best onboarding experience to our customers, while complying with the regulatory requirements around the globe. With around 1/3 of our employees in functions related to compliance, we invest in developing Robert's process to drive customer trust. And this is particularly important to some customer groups such as business customers and individuals sending high transactions. And for this, we have launched a service product, and we call it total service. And this build on the great -- this is built on a great customer experience and also that their infrastructure are providing having a tailored approach to serve our top customers. Technology and development reflect the investments that we do into building up new products and as well as maintaining our existing products. And this corresponds to around 15% of our net revenue. As you also heard from Harsh today, we're investing ificantly in our technology. With over 1,000 engineers launching 6,000 monthly developments, we will continue investing to grow and to improve our customer experience. Now marketing and sales reflect our investments into building the Wise brand and also growing our customer base and Pay2026, this has been around 5% of our net revenue. So we have been investing to scale our highly effective digital marketing to date, but also we have been targeting a minimum return of 20% as a minimum return on investment. And we also have been extending our marketing mix to new channels, specifically on flying like TV and also beatboards, as you might have seen with them to reaching our target audience where they are. And very impressively, today, still 70% of our customers come from word of mouth. So here, I wanted to show you some examples that you've probably seen on the street, how we bring this to the U.S. with a campaign that we launched or this week actually. So these increased investments in marketing are important and sustainable for works because our customers stay with us for many years. Every year, we are adding new and stronger cohorts with which gives us the confidence that we can continue to lean into our marketing investments. So finally, General and admin expenses reflect the support structure that we have set up to power our growth. And today, this is around 15% of our net revenue. This includes our corporate functions, so it's like finance and legal, with also the team that are helping us to build unique elements of our infrastructure as well as offices and as well as our external services providers. And we invest back, we are -- we're investing back into the business. The operating expense, I just talked you through, bringing income before tax to around 25% of net income. And we are able to deliver this at a very high cash flow generation. So we believe that in driving growth through continuous investments, our investment framework is a clear evidence of this. By trading medium target, 15% to 20% income before tax margins considering that we were able to pay our target interest income back to customers that I mentioned before, we are able to invest in our growth. And this, in exchange drive more scale and operational efficiencies, providing us with additional margin capacities to reinvest. But this is truly a vitro cycle. So reflect this in our financial targets. In the midterm, we seek to deliver 15% to 20% net revenue CAGR and also a 15% to 20% EBITDA margin. Again, if we were to pay the 80% of interest above the yield I mentioned before to our customers. So here, you can see how top line growth, combined with a stable margin drive incremental profit dollars. And this framework is expected to drive future value, driving incremental net revenue and income before tax over time. Our business strategy aimed to deliver strong profitable growth so that we can generate strong cash flows. And our capital allocation framework has 2 main components. The first 1 on a strong level of cash, we maintain a strong capital and cash position to ensure resilience, but also flexibility as well for our current licenses but also for the future one. And secondly, on return of capital, we are focusing on returning capital to shareholders, and we expect to provide an update on this approach at our full year results in June this year. So our strategy helped us to expand our moat. By driving scale, we are able to create excess margin capacities to fuel our investments -- and this investment allows us to continuously their head in the industry as we continue to build a unique global infrastructure. which also support our focus on driving down the unit cost and sharing these benefits with customers maintaining our price advantage. So this then drive our more new customers and customer engagement. -- and as we continue to fuel growth and scale. So at the end, we have huge ambitions. And we believe that in the long term, it will be the player with the best infrastructure and the lowest price that will win in the industry. And now I hand back to Kristo for the final word.

Thanks, Emmanuel, and thank you all for staying with us. So we had -- we had lost to talk about. But as proud as we are about what we've achieved so far, we're really only just getting started, and I will show you this slide again because this is an enormous market. We're growing really quickly, but we still have nearly the entire road ahead of us. And we ask ourselves, why haven't 95% of people and 99% of business owners gotten smart. I can't they use wise, and then every day, we wake up with my team to methodically solve for these opportunities. And we do it. We did it by building products, products that people and businesses love and recommend. We build a plumbing, how they can access that, how can we move money around the world, and we do this financially sustainably. So this is how we make wise an increasingly valuable company for our customers and for owners for decades to come. Thank you for being with us onwards.

If you'd like to take up on the stage, then we're more than happy to take a few questions. And we'll start in the room. And then if there are questions on the Zoom webinar, then we'll jump across to that as well. [Operator Instructions]. I'll start with Sanjay in the middle here, please.

Thanks Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW. Hoar.Thank you for the presentation. I was just wondering product road map. Obviously, you guys take in deposits of sort. Have you got any operate an asset-light model. Curious if you guys have thought about extending that into lending to your customers. for example, or other types of asset-heavy models? Just curious if there's anything there. And then maybe if we just think about competition, right, understanding that the system is quite inefficient today, A lot of the incumbents are thinking about modernizing it. If you have like the networks, for example, Visa and Mastercard are working with banks to figure out how to move money quicker you talked about stable points of maybe tokenized deposits are part of the future as well that can link Fiat together. So I'm just curious if we could just talk about those competitive dynamics as well.

Thank you, Sanjay. Maybe I'll -- I mean, Nilan's the boss of our product road map, but I'll sneak this one away. That's a very good question. We do have a lot of customers hold money with us, and this is growing really, really fast. But they don't really come to us for borrowing. And that, therefore, hasn't really gone usually doesn't get very high up on our road map. It's there. So I'm sure we will have customers who occasionally need to borrow. But I doubt that we'll be doing this from our balance sheet in the near term. So mostly people come to make -- they come to wise to either save money or to make money, but rarely so to borrow money. But coming to the other one, I wonder if Harsh, you have comment -- I guess this is probably a wise platform question on whether our customer -- where the banks as our customers going to need more than just payments. I don't know, maybe it's maybe to you, maybe to you.

Yes. I can start and -- has maybe you can go into. I understood the question I can answer from a platform perspective. So from a competitive dynamic, how do we see competition in the space? How are banks evolving their infrastructure and what challenges do we see. So I think -- our infrastructure is quite differentiated, as you've heard from Diana and Harsh. These 8 direct integrations that we have enable us to move and settle the money instantly. And when you look at that versus the alternatives provided by alternative providers in the market. There isn't really anything else that enables payments to move instantly at such low cost with a really high quality as well. And we continue to see demand in the market for Wise platform as a result. Harsh, maybe you want to talk about future tech.

Yes. One thing I'll add to what Diane -- sometimes people don't realize, like by building a consumer and SMB product. As I said before, operations like things do get stuck sometimes across better payments. We've learned over the last 15 years, how to run this network. So if you're just a B2B provider, selling to banks, you've never run your own payments. You don't know when somebody calls you and says, there's no money, what happened to this transaction and how to operate that and make that very efficient. Now they do the banks because if you're Bank of America, you're only operating in the U.S. and you don't know how to run cross border payments, you're just using your correspondents, right? So that learning of those 15 years is baked into how do we operate this infrastructure. And that's what leads to 22 basis points or lower pricing. That efficiency is also what banks come to us fall like they've learned that they can't operate this payment the same way as you can operate a domestic payment. And then on the future, yes, I mean, I think as I said, like there's a lot of players we're talking about a lot of things. But the one thing I would go back to is, for example, in the U.S., in the U.K., FPS is a fast payment scheme in the U.K. It drives all payments in the U.K., right? Pretty much. Instantly, it's got massive limits. People are getting paid the salary. And even ACH moves $60 trillion. It's the most well-oiled machine, right? The government's social security payments go through that. So this could kind of take a long time for a new infrastructure to come up and say it's going to be more efficient and more scaled out and more secure than these, right? So that's the thesis. And that's why we are seeing the benefits of that, where by connecting directly to these payment systems, we automatically see the outcomes that Diana covered of like massive price drops and amazing experiences. So we'll see how this evolves. And as I said, our structure is pretty extendable so we can add these connections. But I think for the foreseeable future, the domestic payment systems are very well set up for this.

Thank you. Gus.

Thanks. Gus Kala from an [indiscernible]. The main question I just want to dig into, can you talk about the delta in the contribution margin between the platform business side and core consumer it just feels there's a lot less, I don't know, surface area for intervention. There's net need for dollars to go into marketing to generate demand there than perhaps the core side. So just help us think of the delta there. The other one, just going to Sanjay's question on the fast payment systems opportunity there. Can you help us think maybe there are geos where it makes sense to be on the front leading edge of helping build out a technology or work on a new platform where perhaps there isn't a fast payment system. And then in the U.S. specifically, can you kind of talk about what the cost opportunity is from being more domiciled here in the sense of getting access to different rails, right? That's it for me.

I'm going to smash some of the easy ones again. So I love your question about Wise platform and our consumer business. And we were very deliberate about this when we set the Wise platform up. Is that they're financially equivalent to us. So economically, we don't have a difference on our economics, whether a customer comes through our bank clients and make a transaction or comes directly. So that's an underlying principle that's also very helpful then because we don't have parts of is fighting with each other and like who gets the transaction who gets the customer. And it's very clear to our partners as well as look, a customer can come to us in the same economic terms. So if you -- it's up to you what you're going to charge them. So it lets us also very logically to compete with our clients. because we do naturally compete with our clients as well. But leaving the other questions, which were more on -- I think maybe to Diana on how the other developed economies that struggling to get to the instant payment, like the best fix the incentivized [indiscernible].

I can answer that -- what we see is that, in general, both developed and developing economies, all of them are introducing instant payment systems and -- what is very unique about is is the level of local expertise that we have and also how we are participating in the early stage conversations of how to develop and how to set up these payment systems. Let's say, in Brazil, Peak was introduced only 4, 5 years ago, and we have been in the conversation from early days to the point that we are now directly connected -- in the U.K., the U.K. was one of the first economies to introduce an instant payment system. And right now, we're having conversations of how to modernize and how to get this payment system ready for the future. and wise is one of the participants of this dialogue and this planning on how to introduce domestic instant payment rails for the future. So -- to answer your question, we see this trend happening around the world and what is part of these conversations. In the U.S., for instance, but now is probably one of the newest instant payment systems that we see have been introduced around the world. In the U.S., we work still with bank partners. And through them, we are able to access the different payment rails that we have in the U.S. ACH, wires, RTP and more recently, FedNow which is picking up and increasing the level of adoption.

I don't know, Martin, if that was the third question. It was around the U.S. domicile in the [indiscernible]

Yes, I can continue. In the U.S., I can keep answering -- in the U.S., we have been operating for more than 10 years with our 49 monitors meter licenses. So we are very well domicile. We have also our local teams. In Austin, we have one of our biggest hubs in we continue increasing our license portfolio and our direct relationship with local regulators and payment schemes. Right now, we have been operating as a locally domicile money transmitter with our connection with through local banks. Thank you.

Alex, over there.

Alex or with Emmett. Just wondering the -- sorry, the guidance, right, the -- I'm sorry, here it is. In the old world, the guidance of 13% to 16% underlying income -- sorry, PBT margin on underlying income versus the new guidance of 20 to 25 or 15 to 20, depending on the regulatory backdrop. -- it's obviously wider now. It used to be 300 basis points wide and now it's 500 basis points wide. And I believe you're holding interest rates constant in this new guidance, right? So there's no volatility there. So I'm just wondering where the sort of -- what's slightly less forecastable in the new guidance methodology? Why is the range wider than the 300 basis points before?

Well, I think it's 1 for me, I guess. The margin of 22%, 25% is reflecting how much we can pass back to their customers. I mentioned before, we have some geographical restrictions like in the U.K. So that's reflecting basically the net revenue increase that we -- from the interest that we compass back to the customers as we did before. our underlying income was only reflecting the first 1% yield. And that's why also the guidance of 13% to 16% underlying logic was reflecting this. In the future, we have the 20% profit that I mentioned and also like what we can pass to the customers. That's the difference.

And I think I may ask my question is confusing question is why the new age the [indiscernible]

To reflect basically how much we will pass back to the customers in the future. So if you -- if you assume that at some point in the U.K., we can pass back all the interest to the customers, then we will have a lower margin. That's reflecting the movement.

You have a new rate you are passing back the months your range

Yes. But this 20% that is included in this. And then the 20% to 25% are reflecting the interest again that is not -- that we assume we will pass back to the customers at some point. These are -- we provide a website, ex website for this, but happy to follow up if you have any question -- further questions on that.

Over to Chris.

Great. Chris Kennedy from William Blair. Can you just talk about the journey in the business initiative? You've talked about kind of how your product set has evolved Today, it's mostly micro businesses and you want to go upmarket. What do you need to capture that opportunity?

Thank you, Chris. That's a perfect 1 for Nilan, how the business market has been growing.

That's a great question. Thanks for it. The road map that I covered really -- and those areas that we invest in is what will enable larger and larger businesses to use us. So when we talk to larger businesses, the barriers to using Wise is being able to set up multiple users within the product, which we're now live with, enabling to give them permissions on different aspects of using the account, creating workflows within was for creating invoices and invoices getting paid. And then a lot of complexity around integrating into their accounting systems. So businesses want to be able to take a picture of an invoice and then maybe assigning to a cost center, that's from an account pulled from their accounting system and that getting synced automatically and similarly with an invoice coming in, being able to align that with their accounting system so that there was product becomes very tightly integrated with their accounts. And that is probably the single biggest driver behind it. Sorry, biggest area we'll need to invest in, in order for a larger business to users. From a core product perspective, large businesses are using us today for large payments and beginning to use us for holding money. But to use us more and more every day and to move more of their payments to us, these are the types of areas we need to invest in.

Thank you. Alex.

Alex Mark Raff, eBank Capital Markets. I had a question on Wise platform. Just with respect to traditional banks and neobanks, how you think about prioritizing direct versus indirect relationships with customers. I think understanding the economic equivalent transfer side. There are other sort of product opportunities in consumer. And so just thinking about owning that relationship directly versus indirectly on the consumer side as it relates to scaling wise platform.

I think Kristo laid out the economics really of how we price and think about from a cost and margin perspective, a transaction coming from platform versus a transaction coming from the retail business. And then I'll take your question is like why should we invest on the platform side? Why should we invest on the direct side. I touched on this, these when we integrate a platform partner, -- so some of those partners transactions were already coming to was, but there was a large chunk of those transactions, which weren't coming to ways. These are generally customers that have infrequent use cases and maybe lower value transactions. And so wouldn't get over the inertia of downloading was. So there is economic value in doing the integration in order for this to happen. But it's a win-win for the partner. -- because what happens is when we go live with a partnership with Wise, their customers no longer need to use the wise app. And those transactions, especially if the economic are the same for us, can transition back into that partner's interface and deliver a much more convenient experience.

It's David Scharf at Citizens Capital Markets. Wanted to follow up on the competition question. I mean at a high level, it seems like at the end of the day, the biggest differentiation for Wise as you bypass correspondent banks and became a nonbank member of individual payment networks. Can you speak specifically to first, just what are some of the hurdles and challenges for a nonbank to get accepted to a local payment network like ACH BAC, Zing. And then secondly, since these payment networks by admitting you have sort of set the precedent for admitting a non-bank, are you aware of any kind of backlog about the remittance providers sort of seeking to ultimately embark on the same kind of integration.

So a fantastic question. I feel like we've covered the first part quite a lot down a day, what are the complexities involved through licenses and et cetera. I think the second question is very fair. -- given that we were trailblazing through the first 8, surely, there will be people behind us who try to do the same. I think one thing to appreciate though is that in order to build up this network, it's kind of not worthwhile doing just 2. You kind of need to invest behind doing the 30 or the 40 or the 50. So none has seriously started yet. So it's hard for me to comment how far behind they will be. But it's an enormous investment of time efforts and the kind of expertise that you need to build up this, what was covered.

Yes. And worth covering again that even though the regulation can change to enable on nonbank financial institutions in order to become direct participants, this also comes with really high requirements around, first of all, we will still require the right type of license to access this payment system. And then as I was sharing, we go through a lengthy process of approval from the payment scheme from the central bank that would look into the compliance framework, operational framework, technical resilience, so it means, yes, it opens up for the -- to enable more competition, not only on cross-border, but in general, to move payments domestically with other competitors coming and joining the payment system. All of them with these high requirements. And as Kristo was explaining, what makes our network for the world's money is our ability to deploy this level of connection not only in 1 or 2 places, but to do this sustainably and at scale across the world.

Thank you. So how many more questions have we got in the room, if you could just raise your hand Okay, it looks like we have 2 more. So take 2 more from the room, and then we'll jump over to zoom. So if we could just start with the lady here, then we'll go to James.

James, Razor Ventures. In the summer of 2025, you guys applied for your nondepository trust license in the U.S. I'm wondering, is that an end game here? Or are you using that as a stepping stone to get a full bank charter? Do you think that offers any sort of competitive advantage in the U.S., especially now given the openness of the administration to give out new bank charters.

That's a great question for our expansion team?

Yes. That's a great question. Thank you. You're right. We applied for this license. And as we were saying, we already have more than 80 licenses around the world. This means that our portfolio of licenses keeps on expanding and growing throughout the years, in particular, with these national tras licenses, I was saying in the U.S., we already have our money transmitter licenses. And as you heard from Milan, our different products are fully live in the U.S. for our customers. With this new license, we expect to deepen our level of connectivity to the payment systems in the U.S. That's the main price.

Over to James. Thank you.

James mean at Longwall. When you're running a business, you're always running a series of experiments. And in the last couple of years, you appear to have run to quite big experiments. One was a significant reduction in the take rate, which seems to have stimulated good volume growth. Curious, a reflections on that sort of very pronounced 20% reduction in the take rate and how that informs future thinking on a rate reductions for cross-border payments. And also if there was a particular sort of stimulant or breakthrough that allowed you to meet that very big reduction in the take rate that may or may not happen again. And then the second question relates to sort of pronounced increase in OpEx spend in the last sort of year, 1.5 years, areas where you've been has pleasantly surprised by increased investment in marketing or service or any aspect of OpEx and areas where you've just not seen the returns that you may have expected.

Between the Emmanuel, I'll start. Maybe I'll get to cover most of it. So in terms of our pricing or take rates, I think we'd rather have all of these moves or economics move more gradually than big jumps. I think one thing that I don't know if it was ever part of an experiment to be such a deep sudden cut and then I think that doesn't help anyone if that happens too fast or 2 big jumps. So I expect in the future, you'll see a more gradual kind of tightening of the competitive moats, if you like. So making it harder for anyone else to compete. And then in the other question of, I think where are we spending we see, we would never spend if we don't see an amazing return. All the spend that we've made over the last 15 years has delivered amazingly. And these decisions are not -- are happening at a micro level, really. It's very -- we're -- we're quite famous for not doing any pivot. So there's not a lot of features or products that we've turned off or big bets that we have pulled back. And that's because I think our optimization happens at a kind of much smaller levels of investments. But our teams kind of recombine and kind of move on to different projects all time. But I see that as a kind of a more natural way of running the business.

Well, I can just say like to know the the take rates follow a logic of Cost Plus, as I explained before. So basically, we're tracking the cost very, very detailed. We look at this on a monthly base -- so once we decide to reduce the take rate, we have a very good comfort that we can still generate the same margin, as we mentioned before, where we are agnostic. We want to generate the same margin, contribution margin, if you have a private customer business or a platform customer. And for that, we need to have a very detailed cost structure. So when we decreased the take rate, we already know that we have this efficiency gain and not the other way. And that's why I mentioned strategically and mindfully because we do this on a regular basis, we check, is this efficiency gain sustainable? Or is it one-off. And then when we have this clarity, then we will continue to decrease the take rate. And then we do this because this is building a moat. I mean, like the infrastructure, all the licenses that you're building combined with the take rate that is reducing because we pass the efficiency partly to the customers, make it very, very hard for other players to come in this and try to build the same offering that was a built out over the last 15 years. And I think that's why this component is very important as a combination of the investments we do in the technology and operations and so on and so forth. Thank you.

So we're going over to the Zoom webinar now and Justin Justin Forsythe fromUBS..

Awesome. It sounds like you can hear me. This is just in foresight of UBS. -- oh, that sounds very bad -- is it better now. I wanted to ask on is platform and thank you team for an that is brutal. I don't think that's me. But I'll just keep talking. Thank you for Wise Connect a few weeks back in London. I think that was a great presentation. So I guess this 1 to start is for either Kristo or Niland. It seems like you're having a great amount of success in winning the retail banking operations of financial institution platform customers. I'm thinking Standard Charter, Refis in, Unicredit, Capitec, Itau, et cetera, -- are there examples where you've had success in the corporate and commercial banking operations as well? Or is Wise platform just simply better suited for the retail bank? And then Emmanuel, still on platforms. It seems to me like we might hit that 10% medium-term target for Vixa platform TPV this year. If we do so, that will be less than 2 years. The initial target for the medium term, I think, was about 3 to 5 years, so it hit that 10% -- what is the output of this? So would you then ship to guidance? And I'm also thinking about costs there. So if you're exceeding if you're exceeding this target kind of ahead of time, does that mean there's a potential to exceed either your revenue and/or the cost side. And on the cost side, I mean, a lot of your costs are fixed, I think, what, 65% of your costs are fixed. So if you're then exceeding on the top line, I would think that would drop through the bottom line as well.

Let me repeat the questions. I think the first one was we seem to make a lot of progress with retail banks. And then question on what has the corporate banking pipeline and in terms of wise platform? And then for Emmanuel -- we expected the wise platform income to grow revenues to grow quickly. And what's your update on this.

On the retail -- sorry, on the Wise platform side, indeed, we see a lot of traction on the retail banking side, and that's through the dynamic that I talked through earlier around those customers of the retail banks adopting wise and then they're driving banks to come talk to us. And so like you can kind of think through from a corporate perspective, we we don't as yet have a high degree of adoption among corporates. So the demand from the corporate banking side is less. That said, we have -- you can imagine when you look at our waste platform partners, they generally all have retail banking arms, which is where they start and they all have corporate banking arms. And so these are all ongoing conversations that we have with our partners.

In terms of the guidance that we gave at Honest Day, I think we're very pleased to welcome Capitec. I mean like this is the first bank in Africa that we signed. This one back in South Africa. So we're on track with what we mentioned before. You mentioned like what would be the impact on the financials. It will also here, we apply the same cross margin logic so that basically, we will be able to operate at the lower take rate for the platforms so to make sure that we get even more customers or more partners in the future. So on the terms of margin, midterm, we will continue to use the same cost plus margin logic, so that we can attract more and more banks and it will become even more difficult to compete with us.

Well, thank you you very much. Thank you very much to our presenters today. Thank you very much to everybody for joining us via the webcast and here in the room as well. A replay of today's presentation will soon be available on the owner Relations website. So please head there if you'd like to rewatch any part today. And for those of you who are in the room with us, we are serving refreshments upstairs, a couple of floors up either by the lift or the stairs. So please do stay and join us for those. Thank you very much, everybody. Thanks.