Well, good afternoon, everybody. If you can just bear with us a few moments while everybody joins, that would be much appreciated. So a few people are still joining, but as it is 5:31 P.M. here in London, we'll kick off. My name's Tim Metcalfe. I'm Managing Director of IFC Advisory, which is Boku's financial PR and investor relations agency. With me, I've got Stuart Neal, CEO of Boku, and Keith Butcher, CFO. Stuart and Keith are going to run you through a presentation that they've been giving to various investors and we'll be doing over the coming days. And then at the end of the presentation, we'll have the opportunity for a Q&A session. I'd like to thank those who've already emailed in a few questions, but we do appreciate other questions.
Unfortunately, given the number of people online today, it's not possible to go directly to each person, ask you to unmute, and put your question directly to the team. So if you do have anything, please use the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, type it in, and I will ask the questions of Stuart and Keith at the end of the presentation. Okay, so without further ado, I'll hand over to Stuart to start the presentation. Stuart.
Thanks, Tim. Good evening, or wherever you happen to be in the world. Hope you're having a good day. Thanks for joining, and also thank you for your interest in Boku. So I'm going to do a quick introduction, and then I'll pass it quickly to Keith, who's going to run us through our latest set of financials. Then following that, Keith will hand it back to me, and I will do a bit of a refresh on the Boku strategy and bring you up to date with our thinking in terms of the future. So let me just flip this on. So I'm Stuart Neal. I am, as of the 1st of January this year, the CEO of Boku. I would like to hand this over now to Keith Butcher, our CFO. Keith, over to you.
Thanks, Stuart. Are you flicking down? Sorry. Good evening, everybody. Thanks for joining. Yes, let me just quickly go through. Got three or four slides on the results for the year. So let me just quickly pull out a few highlights. So, 2023 is a very successful year for Boku from a revenue perspective. Revenue's up 30% and, and almost $19 million up to $82.7 million, up from just over $63 million last year. That's a long way ahead of where we had expected to be and, in fact, where the market expected to be. I think the market consensus at the start of this year was around about $70 million. So we've come in significantly over that. That 30% is actually 33% growth if you actually took out the slightly negative impact of FX on our results.
So a great result, and I'll come on to the drivers of that shortly. The second line talks to you about the revenues that are coming from our newer forms of payment. For those of you who don't know, we grew our original business was direct carrier billing is where the bulk of our revenues come from—but we launched into these newer payment types a couple of years ago, and we've seen very, very strong growth. The main driver of our business is connecting our global merchants to these other payment types globally, and Stuart will talk to those. As you can see, revenue's up to $16.9 million from these newer payment types, up from $6.7 million last year.
And then with our run rate, about 25% of our monthly revenues are coming from these newer payment types, up from virtually nothing a couple of years ago. And this will be the primary driver of our business growth, as we look out to sort of the next few years. For those of you, we calculate our take rate as the percentage of our total value processed that we take as revenues. And that take rate on average is growing. And the primary reason for that is, as we've launched into these newer areas, particularly the take rate we're achieving from digital wallet connections, is higher than the average we've been making across the rest of the business. That's primarily because we touch the cash and we make some FX revenues on the way through.
And so on average, our take rate is going up as we charge slightly higher amounts for these newer wallets. And the growth, I'll come on to it, the growth of our business is really driven by the number of connections we make. So what does Boku do? We connect global giants like the list there below: Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Sony, all those kind of guys are our primary merchants. And we grow our business by connecting them to payment types around the world and taking, you know, our 0.79%. And so we grow our business by continuing to plug those merchants into more and more payment types globally, and that's how we grow our business. If we just move on to the next slide. So how are we looking at the profitability?
The headline says, "Revenue growth translates into increased profitability," and that's true at both the EBITDA level and the PBT level. So, you know, EBITDA are up 27% to $25.8 million. And it's worth just flagging a couple of things. That number's sort of suppressed by a couple of things. One is we chose because we had such a good year, we chose to pay all of our staff a one-off bonus this year. And that cost us about $900,000. Otherwise, our EBITDA would have been higher. We won't pay that again this year unless we see a similar level of TPV performance, which is unlikely. So that's a kind of one-off, non-recurring amount. And it's also worth flagging that there's sort of contractual bonuses to some of the senior management, which also dampen that EBITDA number down again because we overperformed.
And again, they won't recur next year. So as we head into 2024, there's probably about $2 million of bonuses that we paid in 2023 that won't recur in 2024. I won't go into it. There's a small sort of we changed auditors and PwC re-required us to sort of change the, the accounting for a small number so that actually dampens our EBITDA down by another $0.3 million. But again, the number itself is a good growth year-over-year at the EBITDA level. And it's worth just saying that, you know, we have been over the last two or three years building out a new business under the covers. We were a carrier billing business connecting to carriers all around the world, which is a highly profitable business and one that we dominate sort of globally.
But we moved into these newer payment types, and we've really been building out this new business under the covers over the last two or three years. So if you like, these results are this jump in EBITDA and growth in revenues despite that, you know, continued investment in our network, which is growing all the time. So I think these numbers need to be viewed in that light. You can see at the bottom line, Profit Before Tax tripled as we see sort of the performance of the business drop through to the bottom line. And this is excluding our identity business that we had, which we sold last year. If I can go on to the next slide, please.
A reminder that, you know, that one of the beauties of Boku is the fact that we have got very strong cash balances and no debt. Just a reminder. So the year-end, we had about just under $151 million in our bank. Some of that is cash in transit. So we have 160 bank accounts. We're collecting cash on behalf of our merchants from wallets, from carriers around the world, passing it through our bank accounts and passing it onto those merchants. In some cases, as I said before, we convert those funds into a single currency so the merchant gets paid in, say, dollars or euros, and we make some money there. But off that $150 million, if we were to stop the business tomorrow, about $70 million is our own cash. The rest is, if you like, merchant cash in transit.
But we have very strong own cash balances and the working capital benefit of those balances passing through. During the year, we spent about almost $10 million in buying our own shares back. For those of you who know the business, we issue shares, RSUs to all staff on a three-year rolling cycle. If you're still here, three years later, you get these shares. And so, in 2023, that was about 3.2 million shares were due to be issued to staff to reward them for staying around for three years. And instead of sort of issuing new shares, we bought 3.2 million shares back in the market. That cost us about $10 million. And the idea of that is to not dilute shareholders down as we continue to sort of to reward our staff with those shares. And of course, we're debt-free.
One of the things that's sort of coming up, as a sort of benefit of having these large cash balances, is as interest rates go up, we're starting to make increased interest income from those balances. It's up to $1.9 million in 2023, up from virtually nothing the year before. We're now run-rating, actually, something like $3.5 million run-rate of interest income. But neither of those numbers is in our revenue or EBITDA numbers, but this is a benefit of running our business. And then finally, on to the last slide. You know, ultimately, what drives our business? What's driven the growth in our business? And ultimately, it's the number of users or consumers that use Boku to purchase these goods and services from our global giants like Apple, Sony, Spotify, Netflix, Google.
As you can see in December, this is a December number: 67.4 million consumers made a purchase via Boku in the month. That's 29% up year-over-year. And those monthly active users, you know, obviously spend money. And that so it as the users grow, they spend more money. That's what we call our TPV, our total payment volume processed. Oh, excuse me, the light's gone out. And that's jumped up to, that TPV's jumped up, and in turn, the revenues have jumped up. You'll see at the bottom that those, you know, the real growth is coming from these newer payment types. So a big jump in these monthly active users just of the local payment, the newer local payment methods, and a big jump in new users sees a sort of a 150% jump in revenues from these newer payment types.
Just before I hand back to Stuart, we presented a Capital Markets Day back in February last year where we said we thought we could double the business in the medium term, being three, four, five years. And at that, if we could do that once the investment phase was over, we thought that that would see our EBITDA margins jump from the current level of about 32% heading towards 40% and 50% over the next few years. I guess with back then, we'd just come off a year where we grew our revenues at 14%, so we'd imagine that it would take us four or five years to double the business. Obviously, with 30% EBITDA growth this year, we should get to that doubling of revenues much quicker than we thought.
We sort of maintain the idea that that's both achievable and that as we get there, our EBITDA should both grow and our EBITDA margins should grow. Let me hand back to Stuart, who's going to talk you through the sort of strategy of how we plan to take Boku forward over the next few years.
Thanks, Keith. I'm going to switch your lights back on now. So I appreciate not quite knowing who you are as listeners to this. So I'm going to pitch this on the basis that maybe you're not as familiar with the company, even though some of you may be. So apologies for anybody that's heard this before. But the way I would think about Boku is as a kind of global alternative to Visa and Mastercard, a rail that binds together some of the world's most popular local payment methods and serves it up to some of the world's largest customers. And let me just kind of put a bit a little bit more color onto that. You know, we very much see ourselves as a global network of localized payment solutions. We're around about 450 people now. We are spread across 29 countries.
So although we're not big as an organization, we are truly global, and we can justifiably call ourselves so. Keith's talking through the numbers already. You know, we cover a multitude of countries, and we connect together, you know, almost 300 local payment methods for our customers who, you know, as Keith pointed out, are some of the world's largest digital technology companies. So let me just peel back from that a second and just explain where this opportunity comes from and why we are confident that our strategy is the right one. So if you think about the global payments landscape, as we know it, certainly if you're sitting where I am in the U.K., you'll be very familiar with the left-hand side of this chart.
The global, you know, giants that are Visa and Mastercard rolling out debit and credit cards for the last 50 years, you know, helped the world go from kind of a cash society to an electronic payment society. That's become the dominant form of payment, worldwide. What's kind of changed is, first and foremost, e-commerce has really opened up the globe and the world of cross-border commerce. And also, candidly, the ecosystems that have evolved around the mobile phone have really changed the way that we live our lives. And so, you know, in many parts of the world, people are living their lives through their wallets. And their wallets is not just a payment vehicle. It's actually a way of life. I order my taxi. I order my dry cleaning. I order my takeout food.
I earn my loyalty points. I communicate with users. And actually, I want to pay while I'm in that ecosystem, you know, with the same within the same wallet. And that doesn't mean rooting around fishing for my plastic credit card with my 16-digit PIN on it. So the wallets have become a very rapid, growing and popular payment mechanism. And it's not just a developing markets or an Asia-Pacific thing. If you think about where we are in Europe, there are a growing number of very, very popular wallets that are emerging in Europe. The one we put here is Satispay, but there are others. There's BLIK in Poland. There is, you know, Bizum in Spain, TWINT in Switzerland, Swish in Sweden. You know, the emergence of the wallet is now a global trend.
The next global trend is the move of the banks to try and come back into the payment space. We refer to it as account-to-account. It's a way of describing, you know, what you might know of as sort of open banking-initiated payments in Europe. But essentially, it is people sending money from their bank directly to the merchant's bank. This is becoming a very prevalent payment method in many big markets. I'll come back onto this point later in the presentation. Then finally, but by no means least, you have direct carrier billing, DCB. This is Boku's heritage, and this is where, you know, most of our revenues still come from. It's still a growing product. Essentially, it's the original buy now, pay later.
Consumers in various countries around the world on postpaid phone accounts are able to make purchases of digital goods and services to their phone bill, and then they will settle with their carrier at the end of the billing period. You know, it's the original credit product, and it does very, very well for the business. So grouped together, the right side of this chart is the local payment methods that we talk about in our strategy. Why is that interesting? Well, when you look at this chart, you can see what is being predicted. As we sit here today, Visa debit and credit cards make up around about 30% of global e-commerce. You know, project that forward to 2028, that actually drops to 20%. So Boku is now firmly placed in a market that is growing and it is predicted to form 80% of global e-commerce.
That is the local payment methods. I'm going to skip through this. No, so why is this happening, I guess, is the question. You know, for the consumer, I've already kind of mentioned some of the kind of benefits of living your life through your app, the rewards, the security of being able to authenticate yourself through your device, the sheer convenience of living your life on your phone. But there are other reasons. You know, for governments, you know, they candidly handed the responsibility and the ownership of delivering global payments over to Visa and Mastercard when they were membership organizations. You know, fast forward to today, they're both U.S. publicly listed companies, you know, driving, you know, rather impressive financial results.
But actually now, the move is for the, you know, the central banks of certain large economies around the world to kind of take some of that ownership back. So the sovereignty of the payment network is becoming increasingly important. And when you layer on top of this kind of economic argument, there's actually a real socio-demographic, you know, reason for governments to want to own the payment system. I mean, if you think about Pix in Brazil, 140 million subscribers are using Pix in Brazil. It's now a significant portion of commerce in the country, and it's been pushed out by the Central Bank of Brazil. You know, merchants of a certain size are obliged to accept the payment method.
You know, there's a significant amount and this was launched during COVID primarily to make sure that people did not get dropped from the payment network during times of lockdown. So look, there are a multitude of, I guess, pull factors as to why this macro trend is happening. You know, and it people don't change payment habits because payment companies tell them to. But payment companies such as Boku are now taking advantage of these trends. However, there's always a but. If I'm a global merchant, it's actually quite easy for me to plug into any number of card processing organizations around the world. It gives me standardization. It gives me the ability to reach a whole bunch of places. But hang on a minute.
So how does that get me reach to the 80% of online commerce that's going to be taking place on local payments? It doesn't. The issue with local payment methods is it's spaghetti. There's hundreds of them. They're disaggregated. They have no standards for technology. They have no standards for settling funds or processing refunds or reporting. And so put incredibly simply, our mission and the whole purpose of the global network that Boku has created is to simplify the acceptance of all of these LPMs for some of the world's largest merchants. We're helping and enabling, you know, cross-border commerce for some of the world's biggest merchants by offering them access to all of these great local payment methods. But it goes beyond that. You know, it's not as simple as plug into Boku and then Boku can just walk away.
We actually do quite a lot of lifting for these customers as well. Global e-commerce is actually quite complicated. So the first role that we do, if you start at point zero at 12 o'clock, is we help our customers to acquire new subscribers. You know, it may not seem like it, but there's still a war going on out there, the war for subscribers. You know, whether that's as a streaming media player or an online advertiser or just for general e-commerce, people are looking to win share and recruit users.
Boku helps in a number of ways, either overtly because we run marketing programs with our payment network, and that and that takes the form of either a carrier bundling type activity, you know, subscribe to Vodafone and you get three months free of Netflix or Disney or other product supply, or, you know, or more subtly in terms of the fact is more payment choice drives more commerce. We are saying to our merchants, we can get you attract more users within a given market by offering payment choice through the Boku network. At point one, you can see just how well distributed that is. We now have local payment methods in 77 countries. We have almost 300 different connections, and that's growing all the time. Payment choice means more customers can buy from you. Put simply, that drives more commerce.
On point two, the transaction processing, this again is a very important but subtle difference about how Boku approaches these problems. Because we work with the world's largest merchants, we're able to take a far more tailored approach in how we build connectivity. So we don't just do a plug and play like you would if you were connecting to a card network. We actually spend quite a lot of time making sure that the APIs that we design with our customers are effective, that they have a good user experience, that they convert well, that they deal with exceptions. And so transaction processing and the focus around how we build that connectivity to the merchant is very important to us. And then finally, and by no means least, you know, doing business cross-border around the world is actually quite complicated.
And the moving the money part is really hard in certain areas. You know, you have to have licenses to move money in a whole bunch of markets. You know, and that requires you to set up legal entities. It requires you to have a sophisticated network of banks to help you move that cash. It does create an enormous amount of opportunity. And so Boku has already at this point accumulated licenses to move money in 56 countries. We have 34 legal entities and over 150 bank accounts. And we are going to continue to invest in this area. And I'll talk about that a bit later on in the presentation. And then finally, above all of that, this is not a static thing. We do not just build it and then walk away.
It's like our network is kind of a living and breathing thing. We, like, spend a lot of time optimizing it, studying the data, looking for ways that we can optimize each connection and purely for the benefit of driving more successful transactions through the network to our customers. The more transactions that they see, the better it is for Boku. So our goals are entirely aligned with our customers. So how big could this be? The cross-border e-commerce market is a $2 trillion market and growing at 12% CAGR. You know, so we're playing in an enormous global marketplace, one that's growing. And we have a sliver of that market today. You know, so all the progress that we've made to get to this point, 30% growth, is a phenomenal set of results this year.
Look how much more there is to go for. How do we tap into that? You know, these are the five kind of underpinning areas that we're going to focus on in order to grow our share of that $2 billion pie. So the first bit is around continuing to build out the network. You know, that may look like 300 LPMs to 400 LPMs. You know, we'll figure that out. But ultimately, there are a bunch of new connections that we need to make in order to grow that network, you know, and important ones, you know, doing more with Pix in Brazil, you know, getting our license in India up and running and moving traffic across that, very, very important. And that plays into the next opportunity.
You know, as I said right at the beginning of this presentation, you know, the banks are, you know, repatriating ownership of the payment landscape within their given countries. And so, you know, the A2A schemes are going to become more and more prevalent around the world. You know, banks will go direct to merchants and direct to consumers. And so it's incumbent on us, you know, to have a credible proposition in the A2A space. It's a high volume, low take rate, more complicated sort of part of the landscape. But actually, with some investment in our backend around, you know, automation, treasury management, etc., you know, we will be ready to go on A2A, and we'll be driving quite a substantial part of our growth will come from that particular product.
I've talked about marketing via LPMs. Let me just reiterate that point. If you look at the Boku network and through our supply chain, our funding sources give us access to over 7 billion individual accounts, whether that's a mobile phone account, a wallet account, or a bank account. 7 billion. Now, that's not 7 billion consumers, but it's a big chunk of 7 billion consumers. That's quite a powerful marketing channel. So there's already a kind of growing interest from around our existing merchants and beyond. So how can we use that marketing incredible network and access to consumers to drive awareness of our products? And that's going to be increasingly about owning property within the super app ecosystem. How can I advertise my products within a wallet in Indonesia, for example?
So marketing via LPMs is going to be an increasing way to make ourselves more and more useful to our customers. Banking and settlement capabilities is absolutely key as we grow our TPV. So we did $10 billion of TPV last year. Our ambition is to do way, way more than that, which means we're going to be flowing considerable amounts of funds through our platform. And that's going to take some sophisticated treasury and banking capabilities, not only to move the money, but to find opportunities to drive margin by converting currencies and doing settlement lifting that even our biggest customers don't really want to have to do themselves. And then finally, you know, a lot of our strategy and, you know, Keith talked about the capital markets, you know, commitment around growth. You know, that comes from our existing customer base pretty much.
So, you know, we are already thinking beyond that, and we're starting to look out sort of on the five-year time horizon and say, what else can we do with this phenomenal network that we're creating? So we're starting to make exploratory moves, you know, kind of slow and steady here. We don't want to completely distract our teams. But we are starting to look at new verticals. We did, as an interesting aside, put our first online travel company live at the beginning of this month. So just one market, but one global travel company. It's a great proof point. We'll see how that goes. But I, you know, I firmly believe that we will find multiple new verticals and use cases to use our incredible network with. So let me just summarize before I open it up for questions.
We're sitting in this incredible tailwind, you know, the consumer adoption of local payment methods in every continent, frankly, around the world is a massive tailwind for this business. You know, within that tailwind, there's this growth in cross-border e-commerce. That's our sweet spot. We're working with, you know, predominantly, you know, West Coast U.S. mega tech giants who want to expand around the world into markets where, frankly, credit and debit cards will not get them what they want. You know, so we've added for that specific reason, we've added to our network of DCB connections, we've added digital wallets, and we've started to add A2A connections. We have a pipeline, frankly, to die for. You know, I don't have to worry about product-market fit, for our existing company or for our existing customers.
You know, we have an awful lot to get done, and we are predominantly focused on executing deals that we have already signed. But there is an opportunity, as I just said, for us to expand beyond that. And we will make some sort of, you know, sort of cautious moves to expand the reach of the business over the coming year or two. Margins, you know, I think take rates will vary depending on the product. And that's okay because in a given market, we just want to be covering the most popular payment methods. And we don't necessarily know what they will be because it will vary from market to market. The ultimate aim is to be relatively agnostic and then to look for ways to add value on top of the payment processing to drive margin.
One such way that we believe firmly we can do that already is with more sophisticated money movement capabilities. And we've already made some good investments in that space. The finances are strong. You know, I couldn't have inherited a better company in terms of the financial position and the customer base. We do have cash of our own, as Keith said, you know, so I don't need to worry about kind of cash runway. And so, you know, from a financial point of view, I feel very confident we can do all we need to do.
And then finally, you know, our restated ambition to double this business, as Keith says, the midterm. We don't want to be specific, you know. Why be a hostage to fortune, but just to state that the ambition is significant and we're feeling pretty confident about it. So thank you for your time. Thanks for listening. There's quite a lot of slides in there. But I'd like to hand it over to you, Tim, to forward any questions.
Thank you very much, Stuart. Thank you. And thanks, as I said at the beginning, for those who've sent questions in. We do have a few moments longer for questions. So if there is anything that crosses your mind, as I say, please do use the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. Questions that people are asking. The first, cash.
Obviously, there's a large and growing cash balance in the business. Would you consider dividend payments in the future?
Can I take that one? Or do you want to take it, Stuart?
Well, I think the short answer is certainly not now. You know, what does that cash bring us? It brings us a huge amount of optionality, you know, to move quickly. That might take various number of forms. You know, that might mean we need to spin up an entity in a specific market to be able to get a license, to be able to tap into an opportunity. That might mean some tactical acquisitions, you know, buying a license in a market or buying some kind of capability. But that would be sort of relatively tactical. So at this point in time, no to the dividend. Keith, do you want to talk to the buyback?
Yeah, I was going to say that, you know, we contemplated all this a year or so ago or two years ago. And we decided rather than pay a dividend, we would, you know, use our cash to buy back our own shares. And just for those of you who don't know, the rationale is we award our staff shares in Boku. They're called RSUs, on a sort of three-year rolling cycle. So employees get them if they're still in the business in three years' time. Senior management like Stuart and myself have to hit sort of various targets to get them. But if you take in 2023, in March 2023, we had about 3.2 million shares that would have had to have been issued to staff.
That would have added our, you know, effectively, increased our share count by 3.2 million and effectively diluted our shareholders down by about 1% because we have about 300 million shares. So what we did was we bought those 3.2 million shares in the market and then effectively we gave them to staff. So that has the effect of not diluting our shareholders. We're doing that for all staff awards. For those of you who know, we also have a sort of deal with Amazon where they can earn warrants in the business, and we're also buying shares to cover those too. So that's about $10 million in 2023 in total. I think, on balance, we took quite a lot of advice at the time that this is a better use of our cash.
As Stuart says, we've got, you know, optically, I think it's better than paying a dividend, which can be interpreted as that we've run out of ideas. And as Stuart said, there may be tactical things we need this cash to do to use. Also, of the $150 million, only $70 million is ours. We have 160-180 bank accounts and something like that. And you cannot run these bank accounts on zero float. So you have, you know, we don't move the dollar that comes into one bank account in Japan, let's say, is not the same dollar I pay out. So there's an element of a cash flow. So what looks like more like a lot of cash, $70 million, is actually quite a lot less. So, but nevertheless, we're obviously in a very healthy cash position. Thanks, Tim.
Thank you. That leads me neatly on to the next question, which was concerning growth and particularly the Boku platform and how much capacity there is for growth and whether we're going to need significant CapEx to satisfy the growth that we're expecting in coming years.
I think the, I mean, the answer is relatively no. We've got a platform that's been tested to over 500 transactions per second. You know, I guess, you know, there are bottlenecks at different points in the platform. When I talk about investing in the backend of the business, what I mean in that is, you know, we grew up in carrier billing where everything was cyclical, you know, so you would rack up transactions in the month, and at the end of the month, the carrier would send you a statement, and you would run your processes from that sort of a cycle. We're moving into the world of A 2 A where we're receiving consumer payments into our bank account real-time throughout the day, every day. There's just a kind of step up that's needed to be able to do that.
It is, however, if you've seen any analyst reports and I'm not sure everyone on the call would have done that, but we're saying this year, you know, that our OpEx is going to grow. So we'll maintain EBITDA margins relatively flat at around 30-odd%. And therefore, that gives us some more OpEx room to be able to get this work done without relying on a big CapEx expenditure. So we might bring in some software to run a treasury management system. And that's kind of a SaaS model where it gets expensed anyway. So there is no sort of hidden, you know, $10 million kind of requirement to go buy hardware somewhere. That doesn't exist. We will slowly be adding automation and kind of upscaling our capabilities through OpEx, and so everyone will see it.
Excellent. Talk about take rates, the margin on each transaction and some growth in the year. But are you expecting pressure on that going forward, or is there sort of an industry standard level as there is with cards?
Keith, do you want to take that?
Yeah, sure. Sorry, I think my internet may be slightly dodgy, so apologies if you can't hear me. I mean, the take rate, look, it's very simple. Our take rate across carrier billing was blended around about 0.7% until about a year ago. As we've added wallets, almost all of those are a much higher take rate. And so actually, our take rate's gone up in the year. We're now into the year at 0.79% as a take rate, and in the second half, 0.81%.
So these may not sound huge numbers, but when you attach them to $10.5 billion of TPV, then it's a material amount. It's a significant increase. And, you know, the rest, just to give you a clue, somebody like Adyen, who's a massive card processor, will be making about 0.15%, 15 basis points. We're making about five times that. And the take rate is going up, and mainly because of these digital wallets where, because we touch the cash, we receive the funds, we charge a slightly higher fee for that, but also we make an FX turn on the way through. So many of our merchants, we might collect in 20 or 30 currencies for them. They don't want it in 20 or 30 currencies. They want it converted into dollars or euros. So that's how we make our money.
Now, let Stuart talk to it. You know, upcoming is a different form of payment through this account-to-account is a different kind of beast where it will be huge volumes at a much lower take rate, but all incremental, all incremental revenue and profit for us. So although that will take our take rate down, I don't think we should read that as a negative. We don't run our business on a take rate basis, but I do think for those of you who do watch it, you know, the reason it's going up is because we are making more money out of the wallets.
I think that's exactly right. You know, you wouldn't. It's like saying we don't want to do debit cards because credit cards has a higher interchange rate. You know, it's that the logic doesn't hold. And so A 2 A, the beauty of A 2 A is we expect it will drive our unit cost efficiency to the point where our marginal cost goes to zero. And so even though it's low take rate, as Keith says, it all drops through to the bottom line.
Excellent. Just a small clarification question that came through. Obviously, list customers on some of the slides. Are there names that are missing there, maybe people who don't want their name publicly disclosed?
Yeah, we haven't provided an exhaustive list of customers. It's just designed.
No, there's names that have been talked about in the past that are no longer on there, I think, the questioner was asking.
Yeah, let me neither confirm nor deny.
Yeah, I think the truth is one of our major merchants asked us not to use their name, but it doesn't, they're still a major merchant. So if that's what people are adding I won't say on this call, but, you know, that's, it's one of the challenges of being, you know, of working with the global giants is, truthfully, they don't let you use their name very much. So, so most businesses, you know, they say, "We've won a deal here. We know we work with all the world's largest digital entertainment companies," and, they will basically not allow us to, you know, announce anything. The only reason we're able to announce the Amazon deal, which we did a couple of years ago, is because they had this warrant thing that forced them to. Yeah. So apologies for my internet's not working.
But yeah, it's one of the downsides is that we're not allowed to publicize.
Yeah, no, thank you, Keith. It would just clarify that there haven't been any customers that have been lost. I'm conscious that we're coming up on the 45 minutes, and Keith, your internet is slightly unstable. But just to finish off, 2024 is, you know, going to be another exciting year for Boku. What each of you, what do you think the biggest areas of growth and excitement are for you and changes that we're going to see in the next 12 months?
Do you want to go, Keith, while you've got connectivity?
I don't want to take your thunder. I mean, I think that we've talked about it continuing. You know, what are the beauties of Boku? We're very, very sticky with our merchants.
Once you're plugged in, it's very hard to remove us. We're seeing increasing take rates from wallets, and that will continue to grow. We've got plenty of growth to make connections from our existing merchants into these wallets, and we will see higher take rates and higher revenues. What's interesting is that the big change will be as we start to launch into account-to-account, where we'll see huge volumes. And I think, you know, the future is very bright for Boku. I think we, you know, we are becoming a major player in the non-card space. So I think that puts us both in terms of valuation and profile into a different kind of league. Over to you, Stuart.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
You know, look, we have programs up and running that are going to take us a couple of years to work through, and they're going to be, I believe, quite transformative. We have been very careful, you know, in terms of numbers or indications we want to put out there for the coming year because I want to make sure my team has the ability to do the right things rather than chase the short-term things. And for that reason, I think what the market is now playing back as a sort of consensus view on 2024 looks a relatively kind of vanilla and conservative set of numbers. And I'm quite happy about that, frankly, because, you know, I think the things that we're doing this year are going to drive significant value for the business in 2025 and beyond.
Actually, what we'll deliver most of what we'll deliver this year will be stuff that we built last year. And so, you know, it is. I'm really excited. I just think we've only begun to sort of tap the potential of what this network we've created can deliver.
Okay. Well, thank you, Stuart. Thank you, Keith. I think that's a good point to end on. I'd like to thank everybody for joining us this evening and staying with us. Enjoy the rest of your evening. If you've got any further questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch, b oku@investor-focus.co.uk is often the best way. That's on the announcements. And we look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you.