Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday morning. For those that don't know me, my name's Matt Briers. I'm the CFO here at Wise, and I'm going to give you an update on our Q1 of the year. What's going to happen is I'll give you a quick update on what's happened, how we've done, and then we'll hand over to some Q&A afterwards. We'll race through the logistics for that, but basically, we're trying this new fancy Zoom format, so please just raise your hand, and Martin here will read out your question or you can read out your question.
What you can see for those that have already seen our results and what will just follow is we've made great progress in this quarter on our mission, and you can see evidence around the strong fundamentals of what Wise is about. What are those? First, as you know, we're disrupting a massive market. People and businesses pay GBP 2 trillion move GBP 2 trillion and GBP 9 trillion around the world. They pay a huge fee, it's incredibly slow, and it's incredibly painful. We've been disrupting that since we got started. What you can see now in our results is we moved over GBP 24 billion in the quarter, which is up 49% on the previous year. If you think about that's almost GBP 100 billion of run rate of volume.
On the one hand, that's a huge amount of volume. It's actually more than nearly every other player that does this. We're a market leader. On the other hand, it's still tiny. There's still trillions to move and hundreds of millions of people to help. It is working. We are disrupting it. How do we do this? The second thing is, we do this with amazing products. It's way more than just sending money now, way more than just TransferWise. Our Wise Account and our Wise Business product are helping millions of people and hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world. Yet they don't just spend, they receive money with us. They hold the money, they spend the money on our cards, and they can even invest that money now in the UK.
We've seen our active customer base in the quarter grow 36% year-over-year. Actually, that growth has actually accelerated in some areas. These products can't just work on their own. These products work on our infrastructure. The third key thing is all of these products and what we do is fundamentally dependent on the infrastructure that we've built, which is radically better than what anyone else has got. We've rebuilt the way money moves around the world. What does this help us do? Well, amazingly, for the first time, we can say that more than half of our payments were instant.
That means that actually, if you make the payment, you look at your phone, the payment is within 20 seconds available in the recipient's account to use, which is totally unthinkable versus what we started, entirely unthinkable versus what you might get from your bank. Customers absolutely love this. This is what drives the Net Promoter Score above 70%. This is therefore what drives two-thirds of our customers to come through referral. That fundamentally means that we can grow our business radically more efficiently than anyone else. We do all of these things, these huge investments in our long-term infrastructure, but we do it profitably. We're able to offer a radically lower price to our customers while running a profitable model, which is quite rare. Actually, as you know, our goal is to push those prices down.
It's long known that actually the industry and the market we operate in is ripe for disruption around price, not just the level that you offer, but the transparency through which you offer this. Our prices over the years have come down. You can see how hard it is, how much investment is needed to do that. What's also clear is while we have a radically lower price, we're able to invest significant funds in our product, which grows our infrastructure, which enables these products, and also invest in marketing. These investments are incredibly efficient. The payback on our marketing and the IRR on our product spend are very healthy and very high, but we constrain that while still offering a 20% profit margin. In summary, if you think back, y es, we're disrupting a massive market.
We're m oving an awful lot of volume, but actually we're still small. We do that thanks to these better products. This all depends on our infrastructure, and we're doing this in a profitable model. Let me just give you a bit more on the financials and the growth, and then I'll move to some Q&A. I said we've moved GBP 24.4 billion, growing 49% year-on-year. We had 5 million active customers, with both personal and business customer active rates growing in the mid-30%. Actually, the personal growth has accelerated over some of the quarters we saw last year. The amount of volume that customers move has also grown, but this particularly with businesses. We see the VPC growing very healthy with this is driven by a couple of things. One is our product is getting much better.
Both Wise Account for people and our Wise Business product actually mean when people use that versus the send money product, they move more money, they stay with us for longer, and we have a much wider set of fee income that they pay us. They don't just pay us for converting money. They might pay us an account fee. They might pay us for making domestic payments. We also get interchange income. There's also an element here due to the environment. We're in an inflationary environment, we know. That's helping, we see that businesses are paying. Their supply chain costs have gone up, and we're maybe seeing it at VPCs as well. Also, when you see FX volatility, there's no doubt that people want to move money when they see the rate move.
Maybe we're seeing some of the volume come forward. Either way, it's just one quarter out of many years. Just shows good progress. Finally, what's happened on revenue? Our take rates have stayed relatively flat over this period. Actually increased Q-on-Q. We've seen the conversion price stay relatively stable, but we've just seen an increase in other fees. As people using their card more, and maybe this is where we're seeing people more traveling a lot more as the world's starting to open up.
Overall, we're very proud of these results, but they're just one data point in the longer picture of Wise, of how we're disrupting this market, building amazing products, helping people shift to us from their bank, fully reliant on our amazing infrastructure which we're building over the next decade, while doing this profitably and making super highly efficient investments in our future growth. I'm going to pause there, and I look forward to taking a few questions.
Excellent. Thank you, Matt. Just to reiterate, for anybody that would like to ask a question, if you could just please raise your hand through the Zoom function. Our first question comes from the line of Mohammed Moawalla at Goldman Sachs.
Hey, Mo. Don't know if you can read the question out loud or
Great. Can you hear me now, Matt?
Got you. Thanks, Mo.
Hey. I had two, if I may. Firstly, you've obviously been investing quite significantly in the business over the past 12 months. How much of the sort of acceleration can you attribute to the investments that you're making? Or is it also just the structural growth that you're seeing? Secondly, Wise Account obviously seems to be gaining pretty strong traction. J ust curious to understand penetration levels across both the personal and the business side and sort of the attach rate to that, because obviously we're now starting to see some of that in the take rate as well. C urious to get your thoughts on that as well.
Okay, great. You'll have to apologize. We're in the startup builder land of Shoreditch, and it sounds like they're building a company next door. The questions were, just to repeat, why is this growth happening? How much of that do we attribute to the investments we've been making just now? And then the second Wise account, essentially, what do we see from the penetration of that and the attach rates? H ow does that progress? I hope I've got that right, Mo.
Yes.
No doubt our growth at the minute is strongly driven by adoption of the Wise Account. As people, instead of using us just to send money, using us to hold, receive, spend. We showed in our results that, just only a couple of weeks ago, that about 20% of our customers are using the Wise Account. Now, that's growing at the rate, you can see. Actually, you can see the deposit base growing by about 80%. You can see the increasing adoption of Wise Account in our product. Now, businesses around half our businesses are using the Wise Accounts, when they're active. Again, these things are just fundamental, positive, intrinsic drivers of the growth in the business. We're seeing these cohorts in the product. We see less churn. We've been investing in...
To answer your question, Mo, we've been investing in this product four or five years, I can't say the growth we're seeing today is a function of the things we built last quarter, but rather this takes time to build this account and get adoption. What I can tell you is we're still investing in things in this product which we look at high return investments. Actually, as we roll the Wise Account out over our base, for example, we launched it in Brazil, we launched it in Malaysia, but actually not those markets. Rather, we have this runway of investments and returns for the longer term. I talked to some of the attach rates there and the take rates.
You see that actually these customers a lot more money with us, but they do a lot more things. You can see the other revenues that are coming through. Some of this is interchange revenue, some of this is payments for domestic payments. S ome of this in the future will be maybe as we move into more international banking is going to be the asset feature that we see in the UK. But you can see that actually those 20% of customers are contributing quite a big chunk of our fees already, as a business. That will continue to grow.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mo.
Second question comes from the line of Kim Bergo at Numis Securities.
Good morning, Kim.
Morning. Thanks very much, Matt. A couple of questions from me. One, and I think that links into the Wise Account, how should we now be thinking about interest rate sensitivity at Wise? The second question about the growth, where are your new customers? You're onboarding a lot of new customers. Can you say anything sort of general about where they're coming from? Is it still customers that used to be with banks that are now going to you or where are you taking customers from? Thanks.
Right. Interest rate sensitivity. A question that a lot of folks are asking at the minute is will we start to get economic benefit or interest income from the balance that we hold for our customers? We hold many billions of customers' balances, and this is growing. We will start to see. At the moment, we're still paying interest. We're waiting for the ECB to make this move and stop charging people for holding money. It's likely to happen soon. Then we 're starting to see interest rates rise, as you know, whether it's in the U.K. or in the U.S., where we also hold balances.
We will start to see an income interest benefit. Now, for those just so that interest cost or net interest cost sits below. It is not in our revenue, basically. You'll start to see that in the P&L above EBITDA, but not in our revenue. The first thing that will happen is when we see the interest rates maybe go to zero in the Eurozone, we'll stop charging our customers. At the moment, we charge our customers over a certain balance for holding money with us. We'll happily stop that. Our customers should ask us why we keep charging. Then the question is what do we do when we start to accumulate interest income?
Because it will come on board, but it will come on relatively slowly because we hold a bunch of the deposits in bond contracts which will roll off over time. Also some of the money has to be held operationally, which means it moves quite quickly. We don't always earn the interest on it. With the interest that we do earn, we can do one of three things. We can't pay our customers the interest directly. We're not allowed to. We can offer lower prices, because at the moment, in some markets, we offer higher prices to subsidize the interest costs that we have, for example, in the Eurozone.
We can use that, like any source of value that we generate from the product as well to fund our investments. If you think about the Wise Account, actually Mo's question just now, we actually have quite a basket now of income, which gives us a growth margin of our product. Before, we were purely dependent on conversion income. Now, if you think about it, we have a relatively stable take rate whilst we have a reducing conversion cost whilst making a lot of investments. The reason we can do that is because we've got different sources of income. People ask how we get our conversion costs down, let alone getting to zero, is through building a broader set of income in the product. Then the third thing is obviously it could go to margin.
Actually, given the investments that we're making in our product and the return that we see on these investments and the investments that we can make on marketing and the very short payback and high ROI there we see, actually, definitely will help t his will help fund our investments. Of course, this is a way to make our product much more competitive. We can drive down this price and continue to disrupt this market while actually maintaining very, very healthy economics over the medium to long term. If you think about us building a super valuable cash-generating business over the medium to long- term, we're already cash generating today. It's continuing to make these investments in our product, in our marketing, and also in our pricing.
We'll see. You're right, Kim. We will start to see this come through in the coming months. Okay. It's going to give us competitive advantage. The second question is where are these customers coming from? I thought you were going to ask by geographies, but actually it's a really cool question on which source do they come from. In terms of geographies, part of Kim asking this, we have launched products in Malaysia, in Brazil. Anyone following app downloads, you'll see significant uptake of these products. Actually that's not flowing through to volume yet. We're also seeing new customer growth in some of our biggest markets, like the U.S. We've got real traction, really good product market fit, which is actually driving word-of-mouth driven growth in all of these markets.
Actually, in order to find 1 million customers on a quarterly basis, you have to be growing these large markets, including the UK. Then where do they come from? Well, they continue to come from banks. We continue to see people come across. They might also come from PayPal. But I doubt they're really coming from any of the remittance players. You can see that actually, as our volume has gone from zero to, you know, GBP 100 billion run rates, actually, we've overtaken Western Union now. We send more money than Western Union. But I doubt that much volume has actually come from Western Union. I think rather this has come from banks, where this problem is most hidden and at the greatest scale.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thanks for the question.
Question's good. Okay, the next question comes from the line of James Goodman at Barclays.
Good morning, James.
Morning, Matt. Thanks for taking the question. For me, just digging in really to some of the numbers that we've seen for the quarter. I know, as you said, it's only one quarter, but just to understand some of the moving parts. I mean, have you done any analysis in terms of the sequential volume increase we saw this quarter, GBP 3 billion? It was a record sequential increase in volume. About how much you'd attribute to travel specifically or to any other factors. I'm also wondering if you can make a comment on the platform business. I think at IPO, it was about 2% of volumes. Wondering whether that's become more meaningful and is starting to make a bigger contribution to the growth. That's the first area of question.
The second is just around the take rate. Y ou mentioned it up year- on- year slightly, for the quarter as well sequentially. I think the first time in about five quarters. Is that primarily coming back to travel again, in terms of is it really interchange revenues that's driving that? What are your expectations for the rest of the year? Do you think that the take rate should moderate or it structurally stay around this level? Thank you.
Thanks, James, for the questions. Where's the sequential volume come from? As you can see in here, it is a big sequential jump in volume Q2. It's come proportionately, as you can see, across both our personal and our small business businesses. Now, the question is why is that? Well, you can see that actually for people, it's just very solid active customer growth. This is a couple of things. Yes, we're onboarding a lot of new customers, but actually, the scale at which our base is with the many millions of customers we have, in order to grow that is we're seeing actually when people move to the Wise Account, they become more active.
You see that typically looks like lower churn, but frankly, we're giving to our existing base a product that they can use more often. Instead of maybe using us once a year or less often, we get a greater share of what they do in their international transactions, and it means we have a greater, more higher activity in the base. This is a primary driver of why we're investing in our Wise Account, because we know it just improves these fundamentals. Builds better for our customers, which naturally turns out better for us. On the business, the incremental volume is actually coming from active customer growth, but also increases in VPC. Volume per customer, increasing maybe as inflationary products.
Also, there's an element Q- on- Q of we're seeing, i f you follow volatility in the currency markets, this has increased. It's been relatively benign for a year. No doubt this drives people's decision of when they might move. If they have a discretionary choice whether to move money this quarter or next quarter, they might pull that forward to this quarter. Your question around the platform business, you're right, we did disclose that at listing. We're not disclosing this. This is a long-term investment that we're making in our platform. We really think about that as a start scale up within a high growth business. That has a couple of consequences. It's we're making great progress.
We're seeing awesome traction with not just neobanks, which you've seen in the past, but other types of platforms, people that might manage payroll, people that manage invoices for small businesses or accounting platforms. We don't disclose it. It's still growing fast. We may talk about this from time to time, but now this is a long-term investment we're making, and we're seeing really good traction with all types of institutions. The second question then, James, was around take rate. Yes, you're right, it did increase. Coming back to that travel, no doubt that travel has had an impact in our business over the last quarter. Y ou can see the world. While economically there's many challenges going on, and that's going to maybe intensify. People are traveling more.
Really, that doesn't drive so much of our volume. It drives an element of our volume, but it definitely drives the other income, and it drives interchange income. We've seen that grow for a number of reasons, but travel is going to be one of those over the last quarter, which drives revenue growing 51% year-over-year and 21% Q-on-Q. Quite a significant jump quarter-on-quarter. It's a function of good fundamentals, FX volatility and this uptick in travel.
Understood. Thanks, Matthew.
Next question comes from the line of Omar Keenan.
Morning, Omar. Should we try another one?
Hello. Can you hear me now?
Got you.
Hi again. Sorry about that, I was on mute. C ongratulations on a good quarter. Lots of the trends look really encouraging. I was hoping perhaps to dig in a little bit into the revenue guidance, and I was hoping you could help us with some of the drivers around the 30%-35% assumption. I appreciate what you said about the possibility that some volumes were brought forward because of the FX volatility, but from what you're saying, it sounds like they're really positive underlying long-term developments in the business this quarter. Unless we see a deceleration later on in the year, it would imply upside to the guidance because of those developments. Just wondering if you could help us with that. Thank you.
Yes. Thanks for the question. I was asked, obviously, we were challenged a few weeks ago on why be so confident in the guidance that we've put out and so bullish versus what many other companies are seeing. I think you see evidence in our numbers of just the fundamental positive trends we have in our business. Some of which are driven by macro, some of which might be definitely short-term macro as well, in that they could go forwards or backwards. Some are fundamentals of what we've been investing in our products, in our infrastructure, in this market that are seeing really healthy growth.
That said, throughout the years that we've been operating and looking at quarters, this volatility can drive a very strong quarter and can pull volume forward and be followed by a lower quarter. Really, we've got to look through those quarters and look at the years, the many years ahead. T his gives us huge confidence around this range for this quarter. W e give that to the market, but also we use that to manage and meter our own investments in our product to make sure we continue to make these investments that are super high return while managing a very healthy level of credibility.
Of course, we're investing in growing this business as fast as we can at this profitable level. Actually this is the range we've got confidence with, given, yes, there's volatility in the market today. Yes, there's uncertainty over the coming year. We'll continue to update you on a quarterly basis.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Alastair Nolan at Morgan Stanley.
Good morning, Alastair.
Sorry, just unmuting. Morning, Matt.
Hello.
Just a couple from me. You mentioned the US and some progress there. I think you've added some local account details, and they're getting good product market fit. Just keen to hear a little bit more about the traction that you are seeing there and if there's any particular products that are resonating. Secondly, on the wider product roadmap, is there anything we should be aware of in terms of the upcoming horizon and roadmap there? Obviously, my understanding is you'll be rolling out the product set that is in the UK to other regions, but any new areas of focus? Just finally, you've mentioned FX volatility quite a bit.
Just keen to hear a little bit more about how Wise actually deals with that and, perhaps if at all possible to quantify the impact that you've seen on the take rate, but just really keen to hear how Wise specifically deals with that volatility internally. Thank you.
Yes. Great. Thanks for the questions. Let me answer the first one. U.S., what's happening there? You're right, we have great product market fit. This builds over time. R arely. If you followed our mission updates, you'll see that actually we make huge investments in our product. Now what does that mean? A s a user, if you just look at the U.S. products, it may not be radically different. Rather a lot of these investments are fixing the plumbing. The U.S. payment system is not the fastest in the world by a long shot relative to what we're seeing in the U.K. or in the U.S.
Actually you have to work really hard to drive a convenient way to get your money to Wise and then onto our platform. It's hard work. Actually we've done a lot of hard work behind the scenes or in the infrastructure to make that work super efficiently at a low cost. Those things just build up a much better product over time. They drive our NPS, and then therefore they drive word-of-mouth growth, and we support that with really high payback marketing. Nothing radically has changed. We've changed how our product looks, yes. We've changed the Wise account is getting more useful and we're seeing great traction with that.
Really what we're seeing is we're just seeing payback on years of investments continue to make this product better and better for U.S. citizens who want to send money around the world. That's going to continue. There's still a lot to build. Actually, if you look at our U.S. product, it's got plenty of things to fix before it's maybe as good as what we see in the U.K. Actually, if you wind the U.K. product back three years, that was the same story. These things are just getting better and better over time. What's on the product roadmap? You're right, actually.
W hat we've done in the UK is, people can send, they can hold, they can receive, they can spend, but then they can also own the money that they hold, they can invest. That's really our full product suite for people at the minute. What we're trying to do is roll that out around the world. You see, we're actually launching a Wise account in some countries where we don't have it. We're improving that by giving local bank details in other markets. How the card works and how the account works, there's lots to build out in these other markets, and we know the payback on that based on what we see in the UK. That gives us high confidence in the investments that we're making.
W e're profitable. We're running at a healthy margin, but keeping it there because we know all these investments that we can make over the next many years. I'm afraid I don't, Alastair, have a one more thing. Here's another product launch for you right now. There's lots we're investing in that we know have got high return. The third question was how we think about FX volatility. Wow, this hits many places. It hits how much money customers move. In periods of volatility, we see customers tend to move a bit more. No doubt we're seeing that at the minute. You also say FX volatility creates risk, and that's kind of good for the market. It creates volatility, creates flow.
We also need to manage that risk. We think about it two ways. Like, how do we avoid bad things happening, like making losses that are too significant? How do we actually manage it to a level that's acceptable and then charge our customers for this? As many of we manage our treasury platform is a core part of the asset that we have here. The ability to move money around the world instantly while managing super low liquidity, all of this speed without flooding with too much liquidity, and then managing the FX exposures is core to the infrastructure that we've built. Those FX exposures are managed with a valid risk model, as you'd expect, where we consciously take an amount of risk.
When I say take risk, we don't take positions, but we'll manage the FX exposures that we have simply by the fact that they are inherent in our products. The more we can manage down that cost of risk, the less we have to charge our customers. Effectively, we recover this. T hese costs are in our COGS, so above our gross margin. When actually last year you saw this volatility reduce and we'd engineered a bunch of this stuff away, we were able to drop our prices. But over time, we'll continue to monitor what's how much we can manage, how much it costs us to manage this risk for our product and for our customers. I f we can manage that risk away, pricing will go continue to go down.
No doubt in the short term, there can be pressures on recovering some of that price. A typical FX company would just include that in the spread and effectively hide that from its customers. We have it quite explicit. If this risk goes down, we'll continue to drop prices. If it goes up, we may see pressures to keep prices where they are or even increase them. Essentially we make sure we cover the cost of this risk.
Brilliant. Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Josh Levin at Autonomous.
Morning, Josh.
C an you hear me? Good morning, everybody.
Yes, got you.
Hey. Two questions. One, you've noted a few times that some of the volume growth during the quarter could be a pull forward due to FX volatility. To what extent could customer growth during the quarter also maybe be due to FX volatility? Then the second question is actually about your annual report. In the annual report, it says that 94%, so a very high percentage of Wise employees are proud to work for Wise, but it also says that only 66% intend to be working at Wise two years from now. I mean, that would suggest that a third of the workforce could turn over within the next two years. How do we reconcile those metrics? I guess why might a third of employees be thinking about maybe not working for Wise two years from now?
Is that just standard for the tech industry, or is there something unusual going on? Thank you.
Cool. Thanks, Josh. The first question is absolutely there could be some of this... People are moving money. Let's say you were thinking of moving money at some point this year, Josh, and you said, "Now is the time." Remember our active data means have you been active on the platform and made a cross-border transfer within that quarter period. If you weren't planning on doing it and you were planning on making this payment in November, but you thought, "Now is the time," you would be active today rather than in the future. We tend to see a balance of this impacting volume per customer, but also active rates. Josh, you're right, it could have some impact on that.
On the question on the data, f undamentally, we have a very healthy and strong culture at Wise, where we attract people who want to work here to impact on our mission and build things that are truly valuable to customers. I believe, and we believe that this shows in our products and everything that we do. We're still hiring. We have lots of open roles. Of course, we don't compare and benchmark this versus other companies in the survey, but the nature of our workforce and the age, I mean, people of course would change roles they play throughout their career.
I couldn't comment on other companies, but th is is not a statistic I would be surprised by or something that we're seeing specific challenges with attrition. I know it's very high in the tech industry today, and it's very challenging, not just in the tech industry, but the professional services industry. But we continue to be able to attract, pull, retain our talent and attract talent at the rate that we want. Who knows what's going to happen over the next year with changes in the funding environment. W e continue to hire. We've got maybe 400 open roles, and we continue to invest in our team.
Thank you very much.
Just as a reminder, if anybody would like to ask a question, please raise your hand. We've got one question, from the line of Aditya at Bank of America.
Hi, Aditya.
Hey, Matt. Thanks for taking my question. Just a couple from my side. I mean, if I look at the product roadmap on the Wise website, you talk about, for example, launching rewards for using the Wise card for, both, I guess, for personal users and even for business users. Could you maybe expand on that? Is that something that's already there, and actually think about the traction for the Wise account and the card. The second question is, you spoke about assets. H ow is it looking in terms of rolling that out to the other markets as you go through this year?
Finally, I mean, there's been a few questions on the full-year guidance on revenues, but I know you didn't really give any specific margin update now in Q1. Given the top-line growth you had in the first quarter and maybe some potential benefits on EBITDA from interest rates, how are you thinking about the opex framework for the rest of the year? Is there anything in particular which would sort of stand out as we go through the remaining part of this year?
Great. Thanks for the question. There were three things in there. First thing, you read in our mission updates talking about rewards on our Wise card. I think the first thing is why do we offer the Wise card? There's lots of businesses around the world that have a customer base and would try and monetize that customer base as much as they can with different products. They see which ones fit, which ones don't. For us, I'd say it's the other way around. Like, we have a core business that we do really, really well, which is helping people manage and move their money around the world.
The question is: What can we build from a product perspective to help them do that better, get more of those people to come and use Wise, save them billions of pounds, and in doing so, fund and build an amazing, valuable business over time? I think it's slightly nuanced versus this, versus this other strategy. Both strategies are credible. The Wise card is actually a feature of our Wise Account, and the Wise Account is what's driving a lot of our growth today. Actually this Wise card, yes, it pays us interchange income, but actually it makes the account way more useful as people open an account, move a lot more money with us. Actually rewards, especially in different interchange environments. Remember, the U.K. is very different to the U.S. for personal customers and business customers different around the world.
Actually, in order to offer this as a really compelling, attractive account, we do get economics from our cards through the form of interchange. Actually, if we can, just like many, it's a well-known thing. I f you've got an incentive, relative incentive to use the card and get rewarded for that, why not? Especially if you think about how we run our business as well, we're going to run this service profitably. We're not. This isn't just an acquisition tool. We'll only offer a service if we can do that actually economically, profitably. We'll look at it.
I t's not going to work necessarily everywhere around the world, but we'll look at doing this where it can help our product become much better for our customers, help them use Wise more, and do so in a profitable, sustainable, manner. Same question on assets. Again, assets is another product that we launch, not because we want to become just launch a share trading platform. Actually, it's because people hold billions of GBP with us. We want to make sure that that's useful. Typically, if you hold that money in your bank, the bank will rent that money out to someone with a mortgage or a loan, but actually typically not reward the people who actually provide the assets, the cash. Actually, our model is, well, we feel customers should get rewarded for this.
The way we can actually do that today directly is by launching our investment products. People can hold equities, and maybe there'll be other assets in the future. We've launched that in the UK, and we're trying to launch that around the world. Now, one thing about Wise, which is quite distinct versus lots of other companies, is very few fintechs have managed to roll out truly globally. It's incredibly hard to get these different licenses around the world, and most fintechs will stop on one or two markets. Actually, Wise, I think we're one of the very few companies who've managed to get that footprint, and we're following that now for assets. It's going to take us a lot of time. Trust that we'll start looking at this in Europe and other jurisdictions around the world.
It's going to take a while. It's very early on assets, but it's going to become a core feature, just like you asked on the Wise card, for the long term as to what is this Wise account. The third question is margin guidance. You're right, we haven't changed any guidance to margin. It's still at or above 20%. Why is that? I'll just reiterate. We have a massive market that we can disrupt with these products and this infrastructure. That takes investment that we know pays back. You can see that in these numbers. These investments are incredibly efficient. Then also, as you onboard 1 million customers a month, that takes a huge effort to onboard customers up front.
We have to grow our teams, invest in our team, build our team to be able to do this sustainably. Actually, we can make all of these investments in our growth because we're generating the growth demand, and then we're generating the capacity to onboard that demand, which helps us grow. We grow profitably and still make all of these investments. We've got a huge runway. The question was asked just like do we just need, Alastair, you asked, do you need to roll out this product around the world? There's a really long runway of things for us to build, of things that we've already defined, and we know they pay back, and we're able to continue to support that with marketing.
Actually, the return we see on these investments is very high and warrants us spending, investing this money whilst holding a very healthy and quite enviable 20% EBITDA margin at the time.
Great. Thanks.
Thank you. We have a next question from the line of Christopher Harwood at Redburn.
Good morning, Chris.
Morning there. Thanks very much for taking my call. Just a quick question on the sort of the macro environment. In your sensitivity to it. On the one hand, you get a positive benefit from increased FX volatility, et cetera. On the other hand, are you able to give us any sense of your sensitivity to an economic slowdown? S ort of a recession in Europe adverse economic scenarios. Do you have a feel for how sensitive you are to GDP growth, that thing? A second question just on your other revenues. Just to clear up in my head. When you generate more other revenue, be that through interchange or whatever it is, do you use that to subsidize customer pricing?
Do you take that revenue, kind of take it below the line, and then invest in engineering away costs and thus reduce customer pricing? I just want to understand, is it a direct o ffset to pricing?
Let me start with that second one quickly. No, we don't subsidize, but actually it, these other revenues will have, some of them we choose the price for, like we choose how much we charge our customers for domestic payments or ATM fees or the like, our account fees. Some of which we don't choose the pricing. We effectively receive interchange income. Largely, we make sure we have a healthy margin on that product. Not excessive. Essentially what it does is it just contributes to the gross margin equivalently. If you think about that from the Wise accounts perspective, people have. We're earning money from people converting with us, Chris, but we're also earning money from the other things they do.
We have a distributed source of gross margin income from our customers over time, which means that actually, in order to fund all these investments, that comes from a broader set. We can actually continue the same, if not increase the level of investing capacity or margin generation capacity, ultimately cash generation capacity. We fundamentally do that while being able to continue to lower prices and put more and more pressure on the industry and pressure on pricing, which makes us more and more competitive at the time.
Okay. Yes. That's great.
The first question was macro pricing. Like what's happening? Yes, there's two sides to this. Definitely FX volatility drives an element of volume in the short term. What about the risks on the downside? When you think about just our customers, think about people and businesses, like what happens to their demand for our services in a downturn? Most of what our people, our customers do, whether personal customers or business customers, is non-discretionary. What I mean by that? They're paying their mortgage, they're paying their rent, they're funding their children, siblings at a university, or they're just managing their bills that they have to pay on their account for people. Businesses, they're paying their suppliers, they're collecting money from their customers. These are all non-discretionary. People don't send money around the world for fun.
There's an element of travel, but it's a small element of the volume that we move. So on the one hand, like, we're not over indexed to like ups and downs in disposable income. No doubt, however, the cost of living crisis is real, and this will impact our customers. Businesses will be challenged, small businesses may suffer. This is what we're seeing at the moment, it's more than countered by, just in small businesses, for example, just the increasing costs of their supply chain. What they're having to fund is increasing. Then also, as things get much more expensive, people get aware of the problem, they're going to seek out the lowest cost provider. Generally, in this industry, if you look at the, I think the remittance data is the clearest.
You will see a slowdown, even a dip in the last recession. W e have a very diverse customer base. Yes, we have people sending low amounts to their family, but a vast majority of our customers are probably people sending dollar to pounds, euro dollar, et cetera, which have just a very different profile of income as well. We haven't been through one of these cycles, so I can't. W e're rightly cautious. It doesn't feel like we're under-damped, sorry, to any swings in GDP.
That's great. That's super helpful. Thank you.
The rates at which we're growing kind of we're growing. We're very, very early in a massive market. We're rather focused on how do we invest for the next five years rather than optimizing for the next one.
Yes. No, of course. Thanks.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Justin Forsythe at Credit Suisse.
Morning, Justin.
Hey, morning, Matt. How's it going? Thanks for doing this. Just a quick one. I wanted to re-hit that point you talked about around the pull forward of demand related to FX volatility , and actually piggyback a little bit on that prior comment that you made around price elasticity. Can you give us any more color around the ability for you to bifurcate those impacts? H ow do you know, I guess, that consumers or users are actually pulling forward potential future spend. Is that something you've seen in the past, kind of in the last, say 10 years or so when there's been FX volatility, where there's been a subsequent drop off? Is there a little bit of uncertainty as to that specific impact and how that would maybe be impacted by some of the macro going forward?
Yes. I mean, it's very hard to. If we weren't growing, I think you'd see us have one big quarter. W e'd have a quarter up, a quarter down, a quarter up, a quarter down. The fact is we're growing the business very healthily. Active customers growing mid-30s%, volumes growing at 50%. Q- on- Q growing very healthily as well. You will see that, for example, in the last quarter of 2021, calendar year, like October, November, December, you saw a big jump, actually. We were curious, we saw some volatility in this quarter around what was going to happen in the next quarter.
Actually, the Q3, so that's Q3, and then Q4 FY 2022 was actually grew marginally Q-on-Q. You can see that the Q-on-Q growth is not consistent. There's an element of seasonality, but there's an element of, as you'll see, this FX volatility. I can't really quantify it. Actually, if you think about how we're investing, if you think about what we're spending our time on, it is and isn't relevant. I would rather encourage you to say, okay, like, what are these fundamentals of the market, the product, our infrastructure, and the way we're investing mean for three, four, five years, rather than this quarter, next quarter? I think we're going to see some of this volatility. Every business around the world is going to see this.
Actually for us, like, it just tells us that we're seeing great momentum. The product is highly relevant for a huge proportion of the world. We're just investing behind that.
Got it.
Very hard to call how much of this is due to this volatility. No doubt it's in there.
All right. That's super helpful, Matt. Thank you. Just one brief follow-up to that around perhaps specifically hitting that price elasticity point. I mean, is that something that sensitive to price moves or volatility moves over time of FX. Is that something that you would say your customer cohorts are subject to as well? Is that something you'd say maybe doesn't impact them to as great of a degree as perhaps some of the other remittance senders?
I think on some routes you'll see more price sensitivity than other routes. Like some of the remittance corridors that Western Union might operate on or other in that market segment. There is a relative sensitivity on, for example, we know sending money to India or Thailand or Philippines, very price sensitive. All you can do there in that situation is make sure that sustainably you can be the lowest cost provider. We send an awful lot of money down those routes, and we do it at a profitable price. Just to be clear, if you see us drop prices, it's never because we're trying to compete on a route. We've never done that. We've never increased prices because we can.
We charge the lowest price we can while generating a very healthy margin. It's really important to understand. Like, yes, some of these customers on these routes are price sensitive, which is exactly why we believe that if in five years we have the lowest unit cost and we're offering a radically lower price than. I mean, if you look at some of the remittance companies that are offering price points that are around 1% or 2% on these rates. It's still very hard to be profitable for them at that price point, whereas we are profitable at a radically lower price point.
You can look at the quarter-to-quarter rate sensitivity to this, or you can look at if you believe in five years, we can offer a price that's three, four, five times cheaper than they can offer today, and we're investing in infrastructure that these companies are not. It's quite clear to see that the long-term price elasticity, if that makes sense, Justin, is almost without doubt in our minds. That's the belief around which we invest in these price changes. Look, you know, we will proudly compare our price against these people on our app. Generally, we do pretty well today, but we're continuing to drive down this price and put pressure on the industry.
Got it. That's clear. Thank you.
Thank you, Matt. We have no more questions.
Oh, we didn't get to 10. Nine questions. Thanks everyone for dialing in. I know it's early to some folks. We're trying to work out how to accommodate everybody. But hopefully it's worth setting your alarm for and getting up if you're in the US and UK. Thanks very much. Enjoy the spring weather. Just to remind you know, this is just one quarter out of many years. We've been going for 10 years, and we've got many decades to go. These four points that I'll come back to. You know, we're very early disrupting a massive market that's got major problems to solve. We're moving over GBP 24 billion a quarter, growing 49%.
There's still, you know, we're really moving significant amounts of money, but there's so much more to do. We're doing that with the great, amazing products of Wise Account, Wise Business. It's this that is really resonating with our customers today. As you know, there's lots more to build, building that product out around the world. We're heads down continuing to build on things that we know will pay back. That's built on this infrastructure, which we think is what, and our customers tell us, is what truly differentiates us, and that's getting stronger and stronger every year, which is going to help us build better and better products in the future. We're doing that properly. We are profitable.
We have a healthy margin, but that's after making significant investments in our growth that are very efficient, and we'll continue to scale those investments as we continue to focus on the very long term. Great quarter, but it's just one proof point out of many, hopefully, that will give you confidence over this. It certainly gives us confidence over this long term. Thanks very much, and I'll speak to you in a quarter.