Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us on our first ever Retail Investor Day. I'm Peter Gray, co-founder and global COO at Zip. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and recognize their continuing connection to land, waters, and culture. I pay my respect to their elders past, present, and emerging, and I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples joining us today.
Zip has a significant retail investor base. There's over 130,000 of you, and we're grateful that so many of you are able to join us today. Many of you are highly engaged and passionate, whether you are Zip customers yourselves, or really just advocates of our products within your own networks. We value your engagement and support. We also value your feedback. We are listening.
We acknowledge your feedback that we can do better with our communications and messaging. In the last few months, we've been working to provide you with greater access to information about our business. We've launched a retail investor newsletter and are working hard at enhancing our investor website with additional content that is relevant for you, such as recordings of our results calls. We're also investing in events like today, where you have the opportunity to hear directly from Zip's leadership team. I'm extremely pleased today to be joined by my colleagues from both Australia and the U.S. Shortly, I'll hand over to my co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Larry Diamond. That will be preceded by a short introduction from our Chair, Diane Smith-Gander.
I'm Diane Smith-Gander, chair of Zip, and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to speak to you as part of our first ever event dedicated to retail investors. This is an exciting time for our sector. While buy now, pay later currently accounts for just over 2% of global e-commerce spend, it is expected to be the fastest-growing e-commerce payment method over the next five years.
Following a period of rapid growth, capped off by our recent rebrand, Zip is now one of the few truly global buy now, pay later providers. Operating under a single unified brand, our business is well-positioned to capture a share of the AUD 22 trillion addressable retail market. As we look to the year ahead, there is a huge opportunity for Zip, as awareness and adoption of buy now, pay later products continues to grow around the world.
We have the people, products, and expertise to seize that opportunity and create value for our customers, merchants, Zipsters, and you, our shareholders, who continue to be a key partner in our growth. I want to thank you for your ongoing support of our business. I trust you see the great potential in Zip's future.
Just prior to before handing over to Larry, I'll just cover off the agenda in terms of today. As mentioned, we constantly receive feedback from all our channels and, in fact, have received over 530 specific questions from our retail audience for today. We thank you for this. We have read and categorized every single question. While we can't always comment on rumors or media speculation, we can take the time to focus on the areas you are telling us you would like to know more about. It really all boiled down to how Zip competes. How do we differentiate? How will we grow? What are the key indicators to look for in Zip's path to profitability? We see these key winning ingredients as a formula, and we'll discuss these today.
One, product and innovation. Our ability to innovate through product innovation, providing customers and merchants the tools they need to live and operate fearlessly. Two, growth. Opportunities to scale these products across different markets, customer segments, and merchant verticals. Performance, the sustainability of our underlying business model, how we measure ourselves, our ability to deliver growth for our shareholders. These three buckets will be followed by a Q&A, where we'll digest and investigate some very popular questions submitted by you, our shareholders. I'll now throw over to our global Founder and CEO, Larry Diamond.
Thanks, DSG, for those lovely words. For those who don't know me, I'm Larry Diamond, the Global CEO and Co-founder of Zip Co. It is an absolute privilege to be here today talking to you guys for Zip's first Retail Investor Day. As Pete said, we've got a really exciting lineup talking about product innovation and growth. Before we go there, I think it's really important to talk about where we've come from and who we are. Eight years ago, Zip was founded. Our first merchant was a bicycle shop called Chappelli Cycles in Sydney, Australia, selling hipster bicycles. Naomi came through in December, just before Christmas, looking to buy a bicycle for her son. She had two choices.
She could have pulled out the credit card and paid for that bike, incurring 25% interest and paying off balances in years, not months, or she could spread the cost of that bike over six months interest free. She chose Zip. It was a great win for Schiaparelli, gaining a new customer, a new loyal customer, and a great result for Naomi. It was at that point that Pete and I realized there was a huge opportunity to rebalance the power of payments by shifting it away from financial institutions and to consumers and merchants. We saw an opportunity to leverage technology to create responsible, fairer financial products that are on the side of customers. Our purpose is to create a world where people can live fearlessly today knowing that they're in control of tomorrow.
You can only buy now if you can pay later and do that responsibly and affordably. If we can create financial products, if we can give people the knowledge and access before they take on these products, then we have the opportunity to create a more financially fearless world. It's a hefty promise, and it's one that we're not going to be able to do overnight, but it's going to guide us as we build products and innovate right across the globe. Our mission, as it's been since we started, is to be the first payment choice everywhere and every day. We see payments as the access point to the relationship between us and Naomi, and we're just getting started. Three years ago, many financial institutions and banks claimed that BNPL was a fad.
What we've seen over the last few years is the incredible growth as customers have shifted their behavior from clunky, broken credit cards towards better and fairer alternatives. You guys have asked us how are we going to compete in a world that's getting incredibly crowded. I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about some of our key strengths, three in particular that I think really differentiate us globally. Firstly, our global footprint is truly remarkable. We have got some of the greatest global footprints of any buy now, pay later company. We're in over 13 markets. As commerce and retail becomes globalized, merchants can now integrate once and we can give access to multiple regions. We've done all that heavy lifting ahead of the competition. The second is that we're able to offer installments, not just for short duration, but also long duration.
For small purchases and also big purchases. We can offer short duration buy now, pay later as credit training wheels for customers and then grow with them over time, but also provide products that allow AUD 2,000 to be split over six months because two months is the equivalent of a mortgage. Finally, our credit decisioning is unparalleled. eight years ago, I remember Peter Gray and I, we built all the rules, and we used to have some level of automation. We used to approve transactions every day, even on the weekend. Fast-forward eight years, and we've now underwritten over AUD 10 billion in installments. That rules-based engine has turned into fully automated, using a variety of machine learning AI models and algorithms that now power our decisions globally. We are well ahead of the competition.
Today, we are uniquely placed to offer any installment, big or small, to any consumer, young or old, anywhere. That's just not globally, but also in different ecosystems and also marketplaces looking at buy now, pay later as a service. From 2013 to 2019, we cut our teeth understanding the product, trying to secure product market fit, building our credit decisioning engines, finding that balance between risk and reward, and proving out the model. In 2019, we went global. In less than two years, we have now gone into 13 markets with a presence in the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia. As you can see by the purple dots, we are only just getting started. Our teams are poised and ready to expand our business over time. We've also adopted a really interesting go global approach, really different to many of the competition.
It's what we call the Coalition of Founders, where we found founders and founding teams with a sense of passion, local understanding, hustle, innovation, and a shared goal. We come together, and this is through a mixture of acqui-hires and also acquisitions, where we've brought on fearless leaders to really carry our flag, all under a common brand, and soon, a single global technology platform. Adam and Brad were fearless when they went to America five years ago to start up Quadpay, which is now Zip. Anuscha was fearless when she left private equity in the Middle East to offer an innovative new solution. Carlos was fearless when he left traditional consulting to fire up the first buy now, pay later interest-free in Mexico. Together, we can focus on our Zipsters, our culture, which we see as the competitive advantage.
As Ben Horowitz said in "The Hard Thing About Hard Things," "Take care of people, products, and profit in that order." We have everything in place. Over the last five years, we have delivered tremendous growth. If you look back to 2016, we were processing around AUD 100 million in TTV. That's now grown at an average of 150% to AUD 5.8 billion. In the same time, our customers have grown from 50,000 - 7.3 million, and our merchants from 2,000 - 50,000. We are a growth company, and we have been able to deliver value, not just for Naomi, for the customer, value for ourselves, but we've also delivered incredible value for our merchants, who have been able to convert browsers into paid customers, lift their basket, and drive repeat behavior. Don't just take it from us.
We've got Doug, who's going to share with us a few words, who comes from Fanatics, one of our marquee brands in the U.S.
I'm Doug Raymond. I am the Director of Business Development and Sales for Fanatics Payments Group. Fanatics is the global leader of e-retail sports. We hold the major licenses with leagues such as the NFL, MLB, NBA, MLS, NASCAR, PGA golf. Individuals are looking for different ways to pay, and a lot of people understand that there's Mastercard, there's Visa, there's American Express, but not everybody has access to those financial services and payments. The key piece of us looking at Zip was attaching ourselves to those individuals who actually couldn't get those financial services. It was very simple. It was four easy payments. There's no interest associated with it. If there's a late fee, they were very judicial about how they charged that.
We're actually seeing not only an increase of people using the Zip product from buy now, pay later perspective, but the average transactional value is actually increasing for us as well. I tell the Zip team all the time, it is one of the best decisions we have ever made as an organization. The Zip folks are so dedicated to what they're doing. It makes our job that much easier. The promotions we do with Zip relative to some of these other major competitors, it's almost a two to one from a valuation perspective. We're so pleased with the management team and the marketing team at Zip.
Thanks, Doug. Go Fanatics. When we've delivered the customers, we've delivered the transaction, and we've delivered the revenue. If you look at the same five-year period, the Zip share price has grown from AUD 0.20 to just over AUD 7. A big reason for that is thanks to all of you who have supported us, some since the beginning and some recently. We know that growth is not linear, but you can rest assured that we are as committed as we were back when we started and incredibly focused on the growth ahead, because founders will do whatever it takes. For those new to the Zip story, you might recall in 2016 that Peter, myself, and Adam flew to Perth.
We did three months due diligence on Rubianna Resources , which was a copper and gold mine, and we acquired that business because that's what founders do at odds of 10 to one. How many fintech sensations do you know that have bought a mining company? We've only just begun. We are eight years in, and as you're going to see over the next hour, there is incredible growth ahead, and we are as committed. I'd now like to hand over to our good friends and Co-CEOs of the U.S., also co-founders, Adam Ezra and Brad Lindenberg, to take us through some of the exciting product and innovation that we have in store.
Thank you, Diane, Larry, and Pete. Thank you to all of our shareholders. I'm Brad Lindenberg, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Zip US, previously known as Quadpay. I'm super excited to be sharing with you our amazing roadmap for the future of Zip. When Adam and I set out to start Quadpay in 2017, we knew that we needed to do something different and approach this game from a different angle. We knew that we had to build a culture and a DNA that would set us apart from everyone else. Since day one, we have been laser-focused on building world-class products and services for our customers and giving as many people access to our services as possible from anywhere and everywhere.
When we bought the Zip and Quadpay businesses together, it was clear that Larry and Pete both shared the same vision as we did and had created a unique organizational DNA and culture around building world-class leading and innovative product experiences. Today, I plan to share with you some of these exciting product innovations and features that will pave the way for the future of Zip. Before I talk about our future, I'd like to set the stage and share with you what has enabled us to achieve such explosive growth to date. From early on, we built a business that has placed equal importance on building solutions for the merchants while making our services available directly to consumers through the App Store.
The immense product-market fit of buy now, pay later meant that customers who had outstanding experiences on merchant sites wanted to be able to have the same experiences wherever they shopped, even if Zip was not integrated on those sites. We set out to expand our offering to do just this. In the U.S., we were the first pay-in-four platform to partner using virtual cards that enable customers to shop anywhere they want at any merchant instantly. Shortly after that, we launched the app in the U.S. and then Zip launched Tap and Zip in Australia. These products have accelerated our growth materially and have enabled us to serve more customers than ever before. As you can see on this slide, the user experience is delightful and beautiful. You simply choose your favorite store, search for any store, confirm the amounts of your purchase, and pay.
Zip automatically completes the checkout on your behalf, fills in the billing details, the shipping details, and the credit card form so that you can pay in four installments anywhere you shop. In addition to this, we have launched an over-the-top browser extension that enables shoppers to shop in Chrome and soon in Safari and Microsoft Edge to have the same experience that we offer in-app on the desktop. More on that later. The ability to shop anywhere has unlocked buy now, pay later at over 400,000 unique merchants this year, and our products, both web and app, are driving significant traffic with over 20 million referrals being directed from our platform every single quarter. We believe the future of our business lies in combining the powerful forces of our network, comprising over 50,000 merchants and over 7 million customers around the globe.
Our unique approach means that we have been able to create a flywheel ecosystem that benefits both the consumers and the merchants as the network effects of our business accelerate. As more consumers use our services, they become stickier and shop more frequently at our merchants. As our merchants' networks grow, we grow our customer base as well. This flywheel creates a powerful force that compounds the growth of our business and drives significant viral word-of-mouth over time. Our mission, however, extends way beyond the shopping flywheel. We don't just want to become the first payment choice everywhere and every day. We want to give customers the tools to control their lives, and the merchants the tools to grow their businesses. From this lens, our opportunity extends well beyond BNPL payments, so that people can access the tools they need to be financially fearless.
For our customers, that's a single place where they can take control of how they spend and shop, budget and learn, get rewarded, and build financial wealth. Underpinning our flywheel is a sophisticated machine learning algorithm, which enables for personalization as well as the approval of many more customers than would usually be approved through traditional finance products. Across the globe, we are working hard on new product innovations to put the customer and the merchant at the heart of everything that we do. Our vision for the future is to increase the utility of our digital wallet and also enhance the merchant experience. Our vision is to really create a super app that supports the needs of our customers and provides them with the utility in this new world of digitized financial services.
It has become increasingly important, and also clear to us, that there is a pathway to support what we call the millennial finance diet through a common platform that services their financial needs in simple, elegant ways, powered by machine learning, personalization, and beautiful user experiences. We tailor the needs of local market dynamics based on what we hear from our customers. As such, some of these products might look and feel different in each market. Our vision is to really build a combined product suite that works across the world. Our mission is to be the first payment choice everywhere and every day, so that we want our shoppers to be able to use our products in more places across every category. One of the features that we're going to be launching soon is our Pay in 4 Card.
While in Australia, tap and pay is accepted at over 99% of merchant terminals, in the U.S., only one in 10 terminals actually accept tap and pay. To accelerate the usage of Zip, we are building a physical Visa card that will allow customers to swipe, and in a single swipe, split up the entire purchase into four equal installments. This means that we can access point-of-sale terminals and other real-world physical locations where they don't accept Apple Pay or Google Pay, such as Walmart, restaurants, and other popular venues. The card has been beautifully designed and has a QR code on the front, which allows our users to quickly share by scanning the code and sharing the app with friends, or just access the app with a scan.
We've been testing this on over 5,000 users, and the cohort of customers who use the physical card, the Pay in 4 card, transact three times more frequently than those who don't have the card. We have also built a fast and simple way to request the card through our app. You simply open up the app, tap on the request card button, and we will mail you a card in the mail. It'll take a few days to arrive. This feature will be rolled out in our app prior to the holiday period. Next up, we are introducing a new rewards program designed to drive retention, reward loyal customers, and those who have displayed good repayment behavior. Our rewards program will incentivize our best customers to continue to shop with Zip frequently at their favorite stores.
We will be introducing rewards in the form of cashback, with different cashback levels available to users based on their frequency of purchase within the platform. Our program will be funded by lower processing costs, as users will be required to connect their bank accounts as a primary funding source in order to gain entry into the program. Customers will be able to then apply cashback rewards to purchases in the app or in checkout. In Australia, we have seen up to 60% lift in TTV at merchants who have been targeted through our Australian reward program. When we think about our customers and their relationship with money, at the center of their financial lives is their bank accounts. Whether you are making payments or getting paid, the bank account is critical infrastructure on which modern financial services are built.
We are taking the initial steps to lay the foundation in a world that's going to go beyond just BNPL, but a world where Zip can form the center of our customers' banking lives. The Zip Savings account will allow for users to manage their finances through the Zip app. Users will be able to migrate their funds into the Zip app, and then also connect it to their payroll system and access additional features from our ecosystem. Once we have visibility into customer savings accounts on a common platform, we will then be able to extend higher BNPL balances to these users, while reducing the risk to the overall business and also lowering our costs. We are also going to enable savings accounts to function as a funding source.
This means that buy now, pay later repayments can actually be processed from the cash inside these savings accounts. We expect that it'll improve the unit economics of the business, while also allowing us to pass some of these savings on to the customer in the form of rewards. As we think about the credit life cycle of a buy now, pay later customer, we understand that throughout the course of their lives, they are going to want to make larger and more important purchases. Much of your ability to participate in the credit markets here in the U.S. depends on a great credit score. We feel that by enabling customers to build their credit through Zip, we can help them pave the way for a brighter financial future. Our credit builder feature works by allowing customers to build up and boost their score.
When you activate this feature, you choose to report your payment history to the bureaus. By making your payments on time, you can increase your score. This will be an optional feature that users can choose to enable, and will not be turned on by default. However, for those who want to build their credit with Zip, they will be able to do so. This has been a popular feature request from most of our merchants, and we're super excited to announce that this is coming soon. At Zip, we are firm believers that what we are witnessing is a new financial system that's emerging. The innovation around crypto right now feels like the internet did in 1995. Fast-forward a few years, and we are likely to witness structural change across the underpinnings of how our money flows and how our financial system is stitched together.
The distributed ledger is one of the most powerful concepts in fintech today, and we feel it's going to be a revolution that we have to be a part of as things innovate. Importantly, we are committed to ensuring that our approach is compliant with regulations in all of the markets that we operate, and that we make access to these technologies simple for all customers and for our merchants. We don't know exactly where this is going to land. However, every day it becomes more clear that we need to be a part of this movement. We all have to learn, and we have to evolve as it evolves, and take our customers and our merchants along for the journey. In order to facilitate this, we will be developing a number of features based around crypto.
We have done a lot of research at Zip to figure out what the overlap is between BNPL and the usage of crypto. What we found out is that BNPL customers are 67% more likely to trade in cryptocurrencies than non-BNPL customers, and around 7% of users who have shopped using Zip have also purchased crypto, and this number has doubled in the last six months. As crypto gains in popularity, we want to be there and we want to be ready with the infrastructure that will allow our customers to grow and buy/hold with crypto. While this will be an initial launch here in the U.S., we do plan to roll it out around the world and make it more broadly available over time.
We also expect to see heightened levels of app engagement as users check their balances and log into the app as they buy and trade. We will be introducing what we call Bitcoin Back, which is our take on cashback, but in the form of Bitcoin. Our customers will be able to convert all of their cash rewards into Bitcoin and hold that as a balance inside their wallet. In November 2020, we launched the Zip Chrome extension, which is an industry first and proven to be successful amongst all of our desktop shoppers. Desktop shoppers can now use Zip to pay for anything on any site on the internet. Next, we plan to reimagine this experience by further delivering on our goal of saving time and money at checkout.
First, we'd like to recap how our Chrome extension works, as it is only available in the U.S., and our Australian investors may not be familiar with it. The Chrome extension is available inside the Google Chrome Store, where you can download it for free. Once installed, if we detect that you are on the product page of a website, it'll automatically trigger and then allow you to pay in four installments for that product. You just go ahead and click on Pay with Zip, and it'll generate a virtual Visa card, which we insert into the payment page and form. Zip pays the merchant upfront, and then we collect the remaining four installments over six weeks.
This technology makes it possible to offer Zip on any website that accepts Visa. We plan to release extensions and support for Microsoft Edge and for Chrome and for Safari in the very near future. In addition to this, we have a robust plan around the development of our browser extension product line, which will soon be expanded to include coupon codes. The extension will automatically generate codes for the page that you're on and the site that you're on and insert them into the checkout, and apply that discount when you're checking out, all automatically. Lastly, we will help our customers find amazing deals anywhere they shop on the internet with our Deal Finder feature. They will always get the best price, no matter where they shop.
When you bring all of this together, our roadmap of consumer-facing products is amazing and robust and will allow Zip to drive volumes, loyalty, and frequency and reach, while empowering our customers to take control of their financial lives and futures. We are already seeing exponential performance across our base, including more than 300% increase in our power users and acceleration in engagement from our app user base, four times the increase in distinct merchants shopped in the last 12 months, a 90% repeat purchase rate in the Zip app, and 2x the increase in customers using multiple channel products. Now, I would like to hand over to Adam, who will take you through the merchant roadmap.
Thank you, Brad. Hi, I'm Adam Ezra, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Zip US, previously known as Quadpay. Our merchants are our lifeblood, and we're committed to building the best checkout experiences and merchant tools so that we can drive revenue growth and customer growth for their businesses. Our product team is focused on continuing to innovate on the merchant side of the business. Today, I'm going to walk our investors through new and existing technologies that have enabled us to attract and scale with leading e-commerce players globally. Our merchant roadmap is robust and has been designed to do a few key things. Firstly, expand the addressable market and allow servicing of broader consumer needs, remove friction from the checkout experience, and enable simple methods of implementation for merchants, many of which are serving customer bases all over the world.
We'll touch on each of these core areas in the following slides. Zip's heritage is grounded in long-duration lending through our Zip Money product in Australia. We want to give merchants across the world access to Zip, no matter what vertical they are in, and we are planning to launch a long-duration product globally, enabling them to meet the payment demands of their customers and drive incremental business. This move will increase our addressable market materially, whilst unlocking new verticals and categories for Zip. Lending products have historically been unfair, very confusing, and clunky. We want to provide our merchants and their customers a product that is seamless, fair, and completely transparent.
Point-of-sale lending is expected to be the fastest-growing payment method in the U.S. over the next three years, growing at circa 30%, 20% year on year, which is two times the rate of personal loans, four times the rate of credit cards, and in significant contrast to private label cards, which are experiencing negative growth. When we launched Zip, enabling repayments through your choice of payment card ensured no change in behavior to how consumers typically shopped online and, importantly, minimized checkout friction. We're excited to launch our express checkout, which will further expedite the checkout experience and promote the Zip checkout further up in the funnel, including the ability to check out from the product detail page. The faster checkout will result in an improved experience for the consumer, driving further conversion for our merchant partners and overall visibility of our offering where it matters most.
When our merchants partner with Zip, they not only gain access to a technology platform, but they also gain access to a captive ecosystem of shoppers that engage frequently with our digital assets, including our app, our website, and our email program. Our demand generation engine aims to provide merchants with the tools to set up their own promotional campaigns so that they can target Zip customers with offers, rewards, and incentives and deals. Examples might include self-publishing sale dates and discount periods so that they automatically show up in the Zip app and website. At Zip, we are always working on ways to improve the conversion rate and optimize the core checkout experience. Our latest feature, which is called Remember Me, and is designed to speed up the conversion for existing customers.
With the majority of our transactions coming from repeat users, this feature works by allowing existing customers to check out without having to go through a regular SMS verification flow if we of course detect that they've authenticated on the same device within a recent period. The results have been strong, with a greater than 60% lift in conversion rate for existing customers where Remember Me has been used. Buy now, pay later is a global phenomenon. We are now operating 12 markets, which will certainly expand in the future. For our merchant partners that are global, we've made it possible to deploy Zip in all markets through a single integration, greatly reducing the complexity of launching buy now, pay later for retailers who are serving a global customer base, and also the facilitation of cross-border transactions with ease.
This also means a single point of reporting and platform management, enhancing the experience for our partners. On the topic of integrations, our team has built the most sophisticated virtual card technology market, which allows for merchants of all sizes to integrate with Zip in less than a day. The technology works by generating a virtual card and inserting it behind the scenes into the credit card form of the page. This allows for Zip to appear to merchants like any regular debit or credit card transaction, allowing for full compatibility with their downstream order management system and repayment systems. Our virtual cards can be tokenized, charged, refunded, just like you would with an existing card. In addition to this, we support complex order flows, such as charge and ship or multiple shipments and so on.
Importantly, we built this capability to be a permanent solution for merchants, as opposed to a trial method of integration which long-term needs to be switched. Many of our top enterprise merchant partners are actually using this method of integration already. As you can see, we have an exciting roadmap and technology stack that will continue to allow us to scale our merchant base, now comprising more than 50,000 merchants globally, and has seen 90% year-on-year growth over the last five years. We anticipate this trend to continue as we broaden our product offering and expand into new markets all around the world. I'll now hand over to Tommy and Larry, who will continue on with the growth section.
Wow. Some incredible stuff there from the guys, which is really going to drive our flywheel and our mission to be that first payment choice everywhere and every day. Let's talk about growth. There are some really cool things happening around us right now, which is setting up the stage for really explosive Zip growth. First, we talk about installments. We were pounding the pavement eight years ago trying to drive awareness. There isn't a day now that you can't pick up the newspaper and read about buy now, pay later and installments. Every merchant wants to offer it and every bank is scared of it. The market's expecting buy now, pay later to reach AUD 1 trillion in the next four years, which is growing more than three times from where we are today.
The pandemic has also accelerated e-commerce, some say more than five years, a trend that we believe is here to stay, meeting the needs of customers, driving convenience. With inconsistent vaccination rates globally and new variants, the flight to online is absolutely here. You look at the data in the U.K., for example, you look at fashion retail, more than 50% is now spent online. In the U.S., they're expecting 20% of retail to be online. This has been an amazing tailwind for buy now, pay later, where in more mature markets like Australia and the Nordics, about 20% of e-commerce is running through buy now, pay later rails. Debit is taking over credit. Debit has arguably fueled the buy now, pay later revolution, where customers attach a debit card and pay back with their own money. In Australia in 2019, debit purchases overtook credit purchases.
In markets like Mexico and the Philippines, only 10% of the adult population has access to credit cards, but over 80% have access to debit cards. Finally, the amount of investment that is now going into payment rails for merchants, but also new payment rails such as UPI and fast payments in India, open banking, or even new exciting protocols like decentralized finance and DeFi, which are removing the middleman, the financial institution, and allowing customers, or even customers and merchants, to now connect at a much, much lower cost. For fintech, and in particular, buy now, pay later, there has never been a more exciting time, we believe this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Zip is incredibly well-placed to take the ride of this big wave. We arguably got here just in the nick of time.
We are now global. We have a footprint that matches our rivals and exceeds many, too. We also have teams that are in local markets that can adapt, they can fight the competition, and really localize what we do and how we offer. We've also got a scalable global technology platform that's able to roll out products and services with engineers globally working on the same platform to drive issuing, acquiring, whether it's QR, virtual card, and a range of other exciting products as we've seen today. The credit experience that we've proven over eight years means we can balance the risk and reward as this tide rises. Now, when we look at growth, there are really three levers. We've got the consumer and the merchant, which is our two-sided ecosystem, and we've got the global strategy.
For consumers, we have to continue to drive acquisition, where two-thirds in the U.S. comes from merchants. We also have to drive engagement so that we do become that preferred payment type. We saw an incredibly exciting roadmap that we are starting to roll out, all centered around driving payment preference. For merchants, we're offering new things like demand gen, working capital, so that they stay in our network and they continue to be advocates for us. Let's move to global. We are a growth company since day one. As we invest for growth, we have been very careful in how we allocate our capital and where we invest, depending on the maturity curve. I'm going to talk about very quickly three different approaches. Approach number one, what we call the near term, is where we enter regions, points of presence, with a small investment.
It's either an acquisition or an acqui-hire of key talent, key founders, and we start to get to know the market, the licensing, and make sure that we can build a robust, sustainable business. As we move to the second phase, we start to invest more capital, enriching the product and platform, providing new services to our customers and merchants. We can expand regionally for a very light incremental OPEX cost. A perfect example is the U.S., where we came in, acquired Quadpay, and we've now moved into Canada and Mexico on the exact same platform with a much lower operating cost basis. We move to the more mature phase, where underpinned by strong unit economics, we start to drive volume. That drives operating leverage, and that drives enterprise value, where we also offer new products to our customers and merchants.
Australia is a perfect example there, which Pete will talk about shortly. Now, two years ago, I fondly remember we were sitting in the Commodore, which is the Zip boardroom in Sydney HQ, with Pete, Tommy, and myself. We saw this phenomena that was happening here and realized this was global. We said, "We've got to go global, and we've got to go global now." The question was the how. We spoke to Tommy Mermelshtayn, our Chief Strategy Officer, who has been the chief architect behind the how we've gone global. He's been the rainmaker and deal maker doing all the corporate development, which has truly been incredible in what you've seen in the last two years. I'd like to hand over to Tommy to take us through that experience.
Thanks, Larry. I'm Tommy. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer here at Zip, and I've been privileged to be driving much of the market expansion activities. As Larry noted, 3 years ago, we identified the growth in buy now, pay later that we saw here in Australia is truly a global phenomenon. In particular, the concept of simple interest-free installments that are easy to sign up to, live at the checkout, are repaid in weeks or months, not years, is the type of credit proposition customers are after, and that is globally applicable. By leveraging technology, a different approach to credit underwriting, partnering with merchants, we've been able to offer a fundamentally different credit proposition. It's leapfrogging credit cards in markets like Australia and will be the way people pay in the future in new and emerging markets, in markets like Mexico. That's the why.
Just as important is the how. If you compare us to our global peers, you'll see our approach to global expansion is very different. We always needed a smart approach. We needed a capital-light model and one that ensures that we have the flexibility to adjust in a highly dynamic environment. We needed the ingredients to succeed, and we needed that flexibility, which is why we have three ways of entering new markets. The first is greenfield. You've seen it in the U.K., Canada, Mexico, and Singapore towards the end of this year. It's a low-cost entry model, and we often focus on markets that are adjacent to our core markets, where there's lots of cross-border trade, global merchants that are looking to take us into those markets. We have significant traction in those markets through those flywheel partners.
We always must have that local presence, the boots on the grounds, and that Coalition of Founders mentality. Next, we move on to the minority investment bucket. We're focused on new regions, but we want to learn about those regions. We have to understand the dynamics in those markets, and we look for businesses and teams that are aligned to our culture and are on the cusp of global scaling and have the same synergies with Zip and that we can deliver real value. We typically start with a minority investment, but we try to negotiate special rights and immediately integrate them into our single merchant interface so we can introduce them to our global merchant base. We also have the plan through those minority investments to plan day one, to think about a path to control.
Our day one looks very different when you've known a business for years. Take Payflex, for example. We've had a relationship with Paul, the founder of that business, for over three years. When we think about integrating that business into the global, we actually know how to do that, and our planning is fundamentally different. It's important to also know how does that evolve when we start to consolidate these assets, and we go into full acquisitions. We have demonstrated we have the playbook. Take the U.S., for example. Quadpay today accounts for more than 50% of our global business. That business has grown over 150% across all key metrics, customers, revenue, TTV. Firstly, global helps us win in our core markets. It's our global proposition that is resonating with retailers in the U.S., in the U.K.
Buy now, pay later is a large and global opportunity in both developed and emerging markets. We're making investments today for the future, and we see ourselves creating significant shareholder value in the medium to longer term through these global expansion activities. In emerging markets like Mexico, the need and the difficulty in accessing credit is even more prevalent. Products that you can sign up to through a smartphone and access at retailer checkouts is the future. You can see through the map that we've been very thoughtful on how we continue to expand our regional footprint, starting with regional hubs that can fan out further. We have gained access to key growth markets. Take the EU. We've started with the Twisto transaction and now are in the process of porting their licensing into additional markets.
In the Middle East, Spotii, huge opportunity and one we've launched with Shein globally. There's a lot of more growth there and some exciting retail partners we expect to launch soon as well. Southeast Asia, another huge growth market. Payments is growing, digitization of payments, and the wallet wars continue. We see huge opportunities in that market as rapid penetration continues, and we'll be live with Singapore before the end of the year. We have fine-tuned the new markets playbook. We're poised to grow quickly in these regions, and importantly, the model is capital light, where we're making thoughtful and strategic investments, and it's the combination of organic and inorganic that is the Zip secret sauce. It's the Coalition of Founders that are building in these markets, which will help us differentiate and win in the years to come.
It's the founders that think about that incremental transaction, delighting that customer at checkout, and building true partnerships with our retailers. Now I'll segue back to Larry to talk more about the U.S.
Thank you, Dr. Tommy. One of those priority regions is, of course, the U.S. It's our biggest focus right now, and it's a big reason that I'm actually here right now in N.Y. with Adam and Brad. On any measure, this market is the biggest. There's over $5 trillion in retail sales. There's an e-commerce market that's going to be hitting $1 trillion in the next couple of years. It's a market where the 6 largest credit card issuers, the Chases, the Citis of the world, are no longer creating products and services that meet the needs of the next generation. This is exactly where Zip can play a role, to be that issuer for the next generation who are going to become some of the largest shoppers and financial customers over the next 10 years. We don't believe this is a winner takes all.
We believe there is enough here for us to build a very, very sizable business. We also believe that we have the ability to win. The guys have done an incredible job at getting the business to this point. If you look at our unique character traits here, our customers have shopped at over 400,000 retailers using our virtual card technology. That's 400,000 merchants that we can start a new commercial relationship with. We've also got an app that is one of the most engaged buy now, pay later apps over here, where the top 10% of customers are transacting over 35 times a year, a super engaged app. As we add more merchants, more customers into that app, we start to see that flywheel evolve.
The other unique piece is that our ability to charge, to generate income, both from merchants and also customers through fair, transparent fees, allows us to go where others can't, into new verticals and new platforms and play in any gross profit category. This is proving to be really, really important. I've joined the team. We've been meeting merchants, I can tell you now that we've got access to some of the biggest merchants here. By leading with product and technology first, by putting merchants at the center, we believe we can really activate a lot of the exciting pipeline. Really, this is the most exciting slide for me. We delivered AUD 5.8 billion in TTV in the last 12 months. If you look at it, Australia, which is probably the most mature, we're about a 1% market share.
Many of the other markets are 0.1, very, very small. If you take the forecast that Worldpay and others are suggesting, which is a AUD 1 trillion by 2025, we estimate that our addressable share is about AUD 800 billion. If we can maintain a similar market share, anywhere from, say, 0.5%-1%, we can generate anywhere from AUD 40 billion-AUD 80 billion in annual TTV, which is between 7x and 14x where we are today. This is why, for us, we are incredibly excited. We're only just getting started. I think what investors and you guys need to realize is that even though we're eight years in, as you can see here, it's just beginning. I'm now going to hand over to Pete, who's going to take us through our performance and also our unit economics.
Thanks, Larry. As mentioned, now it's time to talk performance. We will walk you through unit economics and the metrics that matter. What is it that we score ourselves on? What can you score us on to make sure that we are delivering? As we are touching on, Zip is a growth business. What does this mean? This means we invest for growth and will continue to do so, taking a long-term view on optimization and profit being delivered at scale rather than focusing on near-term profitability. A very key call-out as part of this strategy and this investment for growth is that we never, ever compromise on unit economics. This provides the critical and proven pathway as to how our business model will scale to profitability, and that is what we will talk you through today. What are the metrics that you should score us on?
In terms of measuring our growth, obviously, there are a significant number of metrics that we score ourselves on every day. At a high level, these are the 3 key metrics. All have delivered significant year-on-year growth. You're talking transaction volume. This is the value of transactions our customers make across our platform. We delivered 176% year-on-year growth last financial year. Revenue. This is the amount of income we make for providing our services to our merchants and customers. Over AUD 400 million for the financial year, up 150% year-on-year. Of course, customers, the very centric piece to our business model. We need to continue to deliver customer growth to have more customers accessing our product and services, driving volume across our platform. We finished the financial year at over 7 million customers. That's up 248% year-on-year. What does this growth deliver?
We create a margin from every transaction that we process. A key margin metric that we focus on is our cash transaction margin. We make revenue, as Larry touched on, from a mix of merchant fees, network fees, and customer fees. Our revenue model is differentiated when compared to our peers and significantly more robust. It delivers a higher gross margin as a percentage of transaction volume than our peers, and it provides protection should margin compression on the merchant services fee be a medium-term outcome of increased competition. On the cost side, we have interest costs incurred for the money that we borrow to fund our customer transactions. We have losses, both on credit and fraud, and we have processing costs. This is the largest component of the cost side, largely made up of customer repayment processing costs.
We have significant upside to reduce that cost lever at scale. Our cash transaction margin is our revenue less our cash cost of sales, as outlined here. Breaking down transactions that deliver the margin, here are the drivers that drive this transaction growth. As we touched on, merchants are a critical part of the business model. Merchants drive customer acquisition that form part of that customer number. We have engagement. The effectiveness of our open and closed-loop network is supporting huge engagement. For example, the top 10% of U.S. customers are transacting at over 35 times a year. Similarly, innovation is helping us drive frequency in Australia, with the top 10% of customers now transacting over 55 times a year. There's still significant opportunity here to acquire and deeply engage customers. We're still only early stage into our opportunity. Combined, these metrics drive top-line growth.
In terms of cost, we have an extremely efficient receivable. A receivable is the amount of money our customers owe at any one time. As we mature and change business mix, we need less debt funding to support our transaction growth. As demonstrated on this graph, our receivables are now recycling between every three and four months on a blended basis. It's a very efficient capital recycling. We've also significantly improved the weighted average cost of capital as we have proven our model, scaled, and improved our credit and decision capability. This weighted average cost of capital is effectively the cost for us to borrow the money to lend to our customers. Also, in terms of opportunities that are not shown is reducing our processing costs of our customer repayments. Largely speaking, our customer repayments are made by debit card over scheme rails.
Switching to ACH or lower cost payment processing method delivers significant upside on the cost line. We've invested significantly in our credit and decision technology, and this is a key piece of IP. It is a real differentiator when compared to some of the other buy now, pay later models. Our model has proven extremely resilient through COVID and challenging external periods. We continue to deliver market-leading loss rates in Australia. Another massive benefit of our model is the significant improvement in losses delivered in each market as we mature in that market. This is driven by both improvements to our scorecard, but also increased penetration of transactions being made by known good customers. Existing customers in the U.S., for example, have a 50% lower loss rate than one-off users. As that percentage of existing customers continues to increase, it drives losses down in a more mature market.
Our Australian business provides a clear example of our ability to grow and improve engagement and the lifetime value of our customers. Very important call-out is knowing that the increasing lifetime value of our customers is consistent in all markets. It really does support the business case to continue to invest in growth to acquire those customers. As you can see here on the graphs, the engagement and annual transactions being made in Australia is significantly increasing year on year. Similarly, the cumulative revenue is increasing in terms of velocity of reaching these numbers, and it is increasing significantly over time. There is a huge opportunity to continue to grow this lifetime value as we introduce other products and services, as was touched on by Brad Lindenberg. We have a huge upside at continuing to introduce accretive revenue lines.
This is how we think about investing for growth and measuring our success. The Australian business evidences this sustainability of business model that can be replicated and scaled globally. We have experienced exponential growth in our network over the last four years, driving material transaction volume. Healthy transactions margins, as touched on, are really converting this volume into cash gross profit. Our network effect and business model becomes highly scalable at size, and we're able to deliver on operating leverage to reduce our cash OpEx. Effectively in Australia, since 2018, our cash costs have grown at half the rate of gross profit. In FY 2021, as we reach scale, our Australian business has generated over AUD 8 million in cash EBITDA. This model, where increasing cash EBITDA is delivered at scale over time, will be replicated in other markets.
We really do expect this to continue to grow in Australia. In terms of this profitability question that we receive often, look at Australia as the blueprint of what a global business can deliver once it is more mature. Now I'm just going to hand back to Larry for some brief closing comments before we move into some crunchy Q&A.
Thank you, Pete. That brings to a wrap the formal section before we move on to Q&A. Look, firstly, I want to thank you all for listening and tuning in for the last hour, and also for all your questions and feedback that we've had over the last month or two. We really tried to design the presentation to really drive insights and answer a lot of those questions. I hope what we've showed today is that the market opportunity is significant and this is a once in a lifetime, which is why we are moving at Zip speed. It's why you've seen us move into 13 markets in just over two years. We've got a great team behind us. What we saw today, firstly, the shareholder value. We want to thank each and every one of you for supporting and backing this company.
We want to hopefully see you continue to back us to deliver on this promise, which we are incredibly excited about. The second that you've heard today is really about the flywheel and seeing that the significant investment in product and engineering for our two super important stakeholders, the customer and the merchant, to keep driving that flywheel of customer acquisition through merchants, and then customer engagement to drive that preferred payment choice. We've also spoken about growth and how we enter markets in a very disciplined fashion. The U.S. and Australia are still some of our key markets where we're going to be investing the majority of our capital, but we are incrementally investing in teams that are localized and close to some of the biggest markets, such as Europe, which is AUD 1.1 trillion, and also LATAM.
Underpinning all of this, as Pete has shown, is a discipline focused on unit economics. As we drive that volume and get to some of those big numbers we saw in 2024, we can really drive profitability. I want to thank you again, and we're now going to hand over to Pete to run through some of the questions. Thanks, Pete.
Yeah. Thanks, Larry. As touched on at the opening of the presentation, we've received a significant number of questions as part of the registration process, more than 530 in total. What we've really tried to do is aggregate those into the key thematics so that we can address the topics you want to hear more on the most. Some very topical ones in here and some pretty crunchy ones.
The first question is really related to acquisition. Min and Christos were among 55 separate investors who asked us about acquisition. Specifically, is Zip open to being acquired in a deal similar to Square's acquisition of Afterpay? Or on the flip side, is Zip open to continuing to acquire smaller players to increase its scale? I'm going to share the answers around the panel. I'll throw this one to you, Larry.
Thanks, Pete. Look, as you know, as manager of the business but also as a board of directors, we are always mindful of our fiduciary obligations, which means that if we ever receive an offer, we're going to have to assess it on its merits and if it is in the best interest of shareholders. We've seen obviously a lot of consolidation, if you like, in the last weeks and months. We obviously saw the Square Afterpay deal. We also saw just this week PayPal acquire Paidy for what we believe is north of 40 times revenue. There's obviously a lot going on. As we showed you today, we genuinely believe that this has got a long way to run. This is at an embryonic stage. We are super committed to driving growth.
Having said that, we always present a management case to the board, and they're always going to assess our management case, our ability to execute on this plan and drive shareholder growth against any offers. We are as committed as ever. Also, if you look at some of our smaller acquisitions, they've been incredibly successful. Payflex, Quadpay. If we do see opportunities to enter markets that make sense, that can drive accretive shareholder value, we will always look at that. We think we've got a really good footprint right now and really excited about the road ahead. Over to you.
Okay. Thanks, Larry. The second question, there were lots of questions on differentiation. Obviously, there's a lot of BNPL models in market. It's a very highly competitive landscape currently. Some of the questions framed, including those from Katrina and Angelica, they're keen to understand our competitive advantage over the other providers and how we plan to differentiate and win in the future. I might throw this one to you, Brad.
We've really been forced to be very different since we started the business. When we started Quadpay, it was very obvious to us that we had to support both sides of the network and build a direct-to-consumer business and the merchant business, grow them in tandem. That has really allowed us to scale. That strategy, which we set forward two and a half to three years ago, was quite visionary in that we had to build the app with the direct-to-consumer business where our customers could pay anywhere. That has been a huge point of difference that has really driven a lot of our growth. I would also say that our pricing models are quite unique in the industry. Some of the largest players around the world, and also here in the U.S., are really price sensitive.
Businesses like Mercari and Fanatics and the marketplaces that we are already working with, as well as some of the largest merchants here in the U.S. that we're talking to, a single basis point makes a huge difference. The ability to shift the cost between the merchant and the customer is extremely attractive, and it really helps us drive those deals. I think the last point is just really about our culture of innovation and product focus. As you saw today, we have a great roadmap. It's a real super app ecosystem that we're trying to build. I think all of our customers will love some of these features. As we focus on just the best user experiences, the best product, people will just gravitate to us. That's what's happened.
Over 70% of our users in the U.S. come from the organic and word-of-mouth channels. I think by staying focused on this, we can build a great business.
Awesome. I think one of the things we really liked about you guys in the U.S. when we got to know you was your innovation. I think more broadly as a group, we certainly see ourselves as BNPL pioneers. You guys first to market with virtual card technology, Chrome extension. The app is delivering virality in a way that the competitors just simply are not. As you touched on, I think the revenue differentiation in terms of the robust nature of our model, it gives us protection from margin compression, allows us to play in everyday spend categories will be a critical point in us winning. The third bucket of questions, probably the red hot ones, related to competition. This was the area that we received, unsurprisingly, the most number of queries about.
88 separate questions, in fact, about how Zip will continue to grow, with new entrants such as PayPal, Apple, traditional banks coming to market. Particularly some of those new entrants are very well-funded and have access to capital and resources. I'll throw this one to you, Larry.
Thanks, Pete. It's been incredibly noisy last 6 months. We've seen all the pays, Openpay, StepPay, every other pay come out. We've also seen PayPal obviously enter the race. We've also seen rumors of the Goldman Sachs and Apple relationship. I think first of all, we were peddling for really 8 years to really get to this point. This overall awareness is lifting everyone's understanding of the space. It's driving pipelines faster. We're activating faster. As I touched on earlier, every merchant, every bank, and every financial services company's talking about it right now, which we believe actually opens up opportunities. We've had competition since day 1. Really a lot of the competition is being stolen from the credit card, which is taking up the bulk of the volume, and that's really only just getting started. Very little cannibalization between the players.
I think with all this noise, we are actually very well-placed. We are a product and tech-led organization, and there are many names who we haven't seen in the newspapers who we are talking to, who we believe we can leverage our technology to bring buy now, pay later to, where the ecosystem opens up. We've got, on the one-hand side, all the financial services players that are looking to offer new products and services to their customers. We've also got the merchant interface, which a lot of those players don't have. I think that is the big difference here, is a lot of those players are just pure direct to consumer, and they're trying to innovate. The new customer of tomorrow doesn't live going into a branch or a digital branch. They're living at checkout.
This is where they live in a decentralized banking model, and we are perfectly placed there. We think the increased competition actually creates more opportunity for us. We obviously haven't got the balance sheet of some of the big end of town, but we didn't have that when we started, and we're still talking to a lot of really interesting names. Yeah, competition is part of our lifeblood, but it forces us to innovate, drive new products, and push harder. Over to you.
Yeah, thanks, Larry. I think something that's also probably underappreciated, particularly in Australia, is the sheer size of the market opportunity in a marketplace like the U.S. There's huge runway for growth. I think the call-out is that all BNPL participants are accelerating at exceptional growth rates. Competition is not slowing the growth of any of the BNPLs. It's taking market share of traditional financial services players and credit cards. Another one sort of related to competition and more particularly, I'll again throw this one to you, Larry, about the Afterpay and Square deal. Obviously, a number of questions have come through. It's very topical, including from Anish and Andrew, on what the Square acquisition of Afterpay means for Zip, how we'll compete with them in the future, or does it actually open up merchant or other opportunities in a strategic way for Zip?
Yeah, thanks for that one. I think, first of all, we want to congratulate Nick and Ant on that deal. Great to see Aussie pioneers, Aussie fintech leaders structure such an awesome deal, going from zero to AUD 40 billion in not that many years. I think what we've seen there is a couple of things. I think one is validating the LTV or the lifetime value of a buy now, pay later customer. Even though the revenue per customer is still small and growing for all of us, what that shows is just how valuable these customers are. Arguably, PayPal's acquisition of Paidy at 40 times revenue is showing just that as well.
I think what it also does, that deal, it shows the value of a two-sided ecosystem and how you can bring together customers and banking customers with that sort of buy now, pay later merchant interface. It's very hard to replicate that. It's interesting that Square could have put together a few hundred billion to actually build their own, but they've chosen to spend AUD 40 billion acquiring our good friends. I think with that, when that deal hit the table, I'm sure it was that and the Olympics I think covering the newspaper at the time, and I guarantee you now many banks, players started to think, uh-uh, this has now actually arrived. Which again, brings forward the future. We think for us, it's creating new opportunities. Obviously, many of them we can't share with you today. We're continuously looking for strategic partners.
We think this brings the next wave and acceleration in the buy now, pay later revolution. Over to you, Pete.
The next one's related to profitability. Madura and David were among 20 investors who asked about Zip's pathway to profitability, and when will the focus on creating profits over expanding and how we can ensure we progress profitably in an increasingly competitive landscape. I think we touched on this one a little bit through the presentation. We really are a growth-focused business, in the short to medium term, with optimization for profit coming over the medium to longer term at scale. The critical things to look out for as we invest for growth are the unit economics that we touched on. We really need to continue to grow, delivering cash transaction margin growth so that once we are able to optimize and leverage for scale in a mature market, we are delivering that cash profit, that cash EBITDA that we talked about.
I think it's very important that you do keep an eye on the results, particularly from the Australian business, in a more mature marketplace, so that we have the guiding principle of our model to demonstrate increasing cash being generated by a more mature market. Again, continue to invest in growth. The opportunity is significant now to build a truly global business, with the profit coming in the medium to longer term at scale. All right. The next one's another crunchy one. It's about share price and shorting. A few questions came through on this one, including from Kane and Akash. The question really is related to why Zip is so heavily shorted and any plans to tackle this in the shorter term. I'll throw that one to you again, Larry.
Thanks, Pete. Sending all the tough ones to me, mate. Just a bit of color on the shorting situation. I looked at shortman.com earlier today. We're just north of about 9%. What's really interesting is a couple of things just for you guys to understand. We obviously conducted the convertible note earlier this year, about AUD 400 million, and about 3% was provided as a stock borrow to really facilitate that transaction. Which we saw as a really incredible transaction for Zip, where we were able to borrow AUD 400 million at effectively a 0% coupon rate with a conversion price that was, depending on how you calculate it, but 30%-40% higher than the share price. That only accounts for about three. There's still about six there.
Even I think, at the beginning of COVID, we've always had this 3%-4% number. I think, as you all know, there are hedge funds that sit in their offices, just trying to attack businesses where they tend to go short on players that might not be number one. I'd say good luck to them. When you're up against founders who will do whatever it takes to build great businesses, then. Good luck. Of course, ultimately, the transactions, the business, and our performance is what's going to vindicate us, and that's what we are incredibly committed on doing, keeping to drive growth, find new merchant partners, and drive revenue. I think that's really what will ultimately vindicate us. We're also at a unique time now where Zip is truly global.
We've rebranded to Zip. I think now we'll start to get on the radar of a lot more strategic buy-side institutions, who can come in and start to hear about our story, meet us, and understand where we're going. I think if we continue to do that, if you guys continue to fight for us, we should be able to blow the shorts over time. Over to you, Pete.
All right. We'll mix it up a little bit. Sorry, I beg your pardon. We'll throw this one to you, Adam. We've had a few questions around merchant partnerships, including from Shubhank and Harry. They asked, are we seeing margin or pricing pressures from merchants due to competition in the sector? Also, why aren't we announcing more merchant partnerships?
Yeah, thanks, Pete. To date, we haven't really experienced any downward pressure on margins. I think in the U.S., it's been competitive actually since we started. As we've reported to market, the last number of quarters that we've reported have all been exceptionally strong. They've been stable and, in some respects, market leading. I think in the Australian market, which is a far more mature market as well, they're not experiencing any downward pressure on pricing or merchant fees, which is a really good sign. One thing which is unique about our model, and it's been touched on a little bit earlier, is that the way that we're generating income is not solely from the merchant side, it's also on the consumer side. I think if there is, in future, this pressure, I think we're really going to be well-placed.
It's also placing us well in these categories today which have little margin to play with. Take the likes of grocery, electronics, marketplaces, they need buy now, pay later, but they don't have the ability to absorb the fee, and that's where having this balance of consumer and merchant-covered fees is really supporting us. On the announcement side, look, we're typically announcing to market on a quarterly basis in our quarterly updates some of these new merchants we've onboarded. From time to time, we'll do some direct PR on new businesses that we've onboarded. A good example is Mercari. We onboarded them last week. They're doing exceptionally well, and there was a lot of PR around that. Importantly, we do need to get approval from each of these merchants when we're actually doing a PR push or even announcing them on market.
We also have pilots in place with some of the largest retailers in the U.S., which, of course, we'll only share with the market once they are progressed to a more mature state. I think finally, the ASX is also conscious of us using them as a marketing board. We don't want to, of course, be announcing certain deals unless they're material, and that's why we consolidate them mostly in the quarterly update. Over to you, Pete.
Yeah. Thanks, Adam. As touched on, the ASX looks over these things and passes that materiality test. The bigger we get, the less material any one merchant may become. Although, clearly, there is some strategic and big-sized merchants that would truly be material and very confident in the health of our pipeline and some very exciting announcements coming in the short and medium term. Also, as Adam touched on, margin compression has not really prevailed in Australia despite competitive pressures. Margin compression on the merchant side may shift merchant behavior, it is not actually doing anything to shift consumer behavior to any of the challenging brands. As long as we continue to deliver incrementality and, more importantly, customer referrals to our network, we are well-placed to continue to hold our margin.
Switching back to growth, our long-term vision is an area that a number of investors really want to unpack and hear a little bit more about, so I'll throw this one to you, Tommy. Including Jan, Sashan, and John, who asked specifically about where do we see our business in five or 10 years' time, and what are the greatest threats to us in our ability to achieving those goals?
Thanks, Pete. I think the future's extremely exciting. We have the opportunity to build a truly global buy now, pay later powerhouse. Many others don't have that. A real iconic payments brand, a digital wallet where you have hundreds of millions of consumers logging into their app on a daily basis, spanning the vast majority of their payment needs, deep engagement within that app as our digital wallet matures, and partnering with hundreds of thousands of merchants to really grow their business. That's the future that we've set ourselves out. That's what gets us up in the morning and really excited, and that is the Coalition of Founders mentality. In terms of the risk to our business, I mean, the opportunity's there for us. It's there for the taking. The question is, can we execute?
It's really up to us to take advantage of the opportunity, and we're really excited about it.
Awesome. Thanks, Tommy. All right. Back to you, Larry, and talking share price again and any potential valuation gaps. Again, an area of interest among our retail supporters. Thanks to Tim and Luke, among others, for submitting questions on our valuation, specifically, why is there a perceived valuation gap between ourselves and our peers? What do we think the market is not reflecting in its valuation of our business, and what can we do to address that?
Yeah. Thanks, Pete. Yeah, it's always difficult answering the valuation question directly. I think, and whether we're undervalued or overvalued, I think let's look at a few things. I think first of all, we can look at recent acquisitions, whether it's the Afterpay acquisition or Paidy, or even where the likes of Affirm and others are trading, and they are between 20 and 40 times revenue. Significantly higher than where we are today. Some of that is attributable to being the largest, or in the case of Paidy, where they are the only player, and have signed quite a few of the big merchants, and really there's very little competition. I think for us, there's a couple of factors at play. One is, if we execute and we remain laser-focused on that, the share price does take care of itself over time.
We've seen this in the past, if we bring back up our share price, we traded sideways for quite a number of years, actually, before we started growing. Definitely patience is really important. The day traders are going to struggle. Given the volatility, sometimes you have to hold onto your hats. If we focus on execution as a business, the share price really vindicates what we're doing, and we remain focused on that. The second part, though, is around the investor story. We do have to get out. We have to do these things. We have to talk to you guys. We also now, as we're becoming increasingly global, the U.S. is now going to be attributing the largest share of TTV shortly.
Equally other markets, we have to find investors who understand the business, who look at it slightly differently as well, appreciate the global TAM, the global addressable market, the size of the U.S., and start to bring those onto the register. I think we need to do quite a bit of work as well to get our story out there. We've got that coming up in the next couple of months. We've got quite a few meetings lined up, just to get our story and get people in, and we're confident that we can start to bring the right buy side to really help that story. I think that's really it. You can also look at broker reports, and other comps, transactions, broker reports, and in recent trading.
What we're going to try and do is focus on our key unit economics, drive the transaction growth, and continue to drive revenue and profitability over the long term.
Yeah, thanks, Larry. I think the critical call out is we've called out the investing for growth and the metrics that we're using to measure ourselves. Over time, if we continue to execute and exceed those, it'll look after itself. I'll stay with you, Larry. Rebrand. We've had 10 questions about our fearless new brand. Cameron and Max are asking specifically why we chose to rebrand. Has there been any impact on acquisition or conversion? What are the plans to rebrand Twisto and Spotii to Zip in the future?
Yeah, thanks, guys. Look, I think, as Tommy touched on just a second ago, if we're going to build a truly global brand, and one that's in payments, in particular in financial services, it's incredibly important that we have a single unified brand to build trust, not just with merchants, but also customers. It was always on the cards, whether we grow organically or through acquisition, to really galvanize around a single brand. I think when you look at it in particular, Zip Co in Australia had about a 60% brand awareness. The change has gone relatively smooth, other than the fact that I've had to throw out all my old shirts, which means I need a new wardrobe.
In the U.S., the guys had a great brand that was really purpose-built for pay in full, as we now expand the product set and range into pay in four, the timing made sense to go now. In general, things are going well. We did expect a little bit of conversion down over here in the U.S., but we've got a really big marketing campaign and merchants to really support that. In general, markets like Middle East with Spotii and Twisto over in Central and Eastern Europe, the plan will be to rebrand them. Twisters will become Zipsters. The other big thing that we did with the rebrand was spend a bit more time internally, really about what does it mean to be fearless. It was something that ran really true for our staff globally, our why, our purpose, and really embedding that.
Getting that right internally is what permeates externally and really helps us build a brand that can survive a really long time and drive product and innovation and really set us apart from the competition. It was a lot of heavy lift by the team. We got it out on August 16th. We've now set a fantastic foundation for driving global merchant partners with a single integration, a consistent brand, and consumers that can shop not just in the U.S., for example, but can actually start to shop cross-border in time as well, all under the single payments brand. Thanks, Pete.
All right. I think we've got time for a couple more. I'll take the next one. It's relating to Zip Business. Daniel is asking whether we have plans to roll out Zip Business products in markets outside of the ANZ. Look, I think in short, the answer is yes. We have a fair bit to prove with regards to refining that model in Australia, not dissimilar to how we tackled the opportunity on the consumer side. It's obviously a very logical extension of our products, to be able to extend interest-free lines of credit to small businesses. Clearly, they're in exceptionally challenging circumstances at the moment. We already have global partners that we're able to leverage off as part of any global expansion there. Launch partners of Zip Business in Australia were both eBay and Facebook, and that's almost as big as it gets.
We're starting to build some momentum there. We've recently deployed a Tap and Zip feature for Zip Business customers, and it's immediately gone to the most used way to transact. Obviously, a huge runway for growth to expand that product in Australia, but already receiving significant inbound demand from other jurisdictions, particularly the U.K. Again, in terms of points of differentiation to our business model, a core competency at onboarding risk, not only for consumers, but small business, sees a larger addressable growth opportunity for us. Got time for, I think, one more question. I'll throw this one to you, Tommy. It's again, it's specifically about global expansion. Plans for further global expansion. In particular, keen to understand plans in Europe and Asia, and interested to know how we approach the different cultural requirements in all of our markets.
Of course. I think what you've seen is a lot of activity over the last 12 months. We have made a number of strategic bets, and we're very busy right now building the integration plans, working with those businesses, and then growing those markets. We, at the same time, are opportunistic and looking to build that truly global powerhouse. You will see continued activity from us, but it's the balance and it's the allocation of capital that we work very closely with the board to make sure we're making the right strategic bets. We're also investing most of our energy in our core growth markets like the U.S. In terms of that cultural piece, in the time of COVID, it's really hard.
You can't get on a plane, you can't meet those teams, which is why the founders on the ground and having teams that are culturally aligned are really important, and why we take that staged approach, starting with an investment, getting to know that business, understanding that market, understanding that regulatory context, understanding how consumers shop and behave in those markets, understanding new technologies that are eventuating in those markets, and then consolidating those businesses over time. That's the model we've developed. Again, the proof is in the pudding. We've got the playbook, and we continue to grow from a global basis.
Yeah. Awesome. Just conscious we're coming to the end of our time. Maybe one last question from me to you, Larry. Do you want to give some color on how your trip in the U.S. is going and, any last messages for our passionate and loyal retail investors?
Thanks. Thanks, Peter. First of all, I have to give special thanks to my wife, for letting me leave her and the kids for three months to spend time with Adam and Brad. It's been an awesome trip. There's only so much that you can do over Zoom. Being in a room with these guys, plotting the strategy, talking to merchants, flying around from New York to Orlando to L.A. to Palo Alto, and really meeting everyone in person, investors, merchants, existing, has been really awesome. Has really given me even more excitement about what we've got here on the ground. The team has been phenomenal. I think you can see some of the product roadmap and innovation that's coming through. Really, what I would say is we are just at the beginning here.
We are moving at Zip speed because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Shame on us if we don't grab this with both hands and run fast. Also, just want to say thank you to each and every one of you for backing our company. The reason we're actually doing this is because we're all about leveling the playing field and democratizing access for you guys, as opposed to when we walk into rooms and have meetings with big instos, you guys should have a direct line to us. We want to hear a lot more around how we can make this communication absolutely two-way between us. Also, I think what you've seen today is really a fearless business. We were fearless eight years ago. The guys were fearless coming here five years ago to the U.S. The culture is fearless.
We've got fearless founders, and there is so much for us to do. I want to thank you all for your time. Hopefully, you've learned a little bit more today, and we look forward to continuing the dialogue. Cheers