Hello. Thank you so much for your patience. It's all sorted, and we're set to go. Thank you very much, and apologies. Good to see you all here. I'm Martin Adams. I'm the Head of Invester Relations here at Wise. Thank you so much for joining us here today. Lovely sunny day here in London. Really good to see you all. Thank you. We're also going to be joined today by seven of the leadership team of Wise. We're really looking forward to taking you through why Wise exists and what our vision is, how we're building a network, and how we're creating an exceptional experience for our customers. All of this combined is creating substantial value for you, the owners of Wise. We've got the presentation.
We're going to take a break about halfway through this, and then we will move to a Q&A session at the end. Please do save up all your questions for this session at the very end. With that, let's get started. I'm very pleased to introduce you to Kristo Käärmann, our founder and CEO.
Hello, hello, hello. I propose, so first of all, thanks so much for this wait. What I propose is our audio video team is very stressed at the moment. They managed to pull this through, so let's do a round of applause for them. Thanks, Jack. The rest of it's going to be super smooth. Now I have the chance to actually welcome you. Welcome to our new office space. We've been here for only a couple of weeks in London. I wanted to welcome you to our very first Owners' Day. We've never done this before since the direct listing in London on the London Stock Exchange. I'm very glad that we have so many owners here together. It's kind of a chance for us to do something different to our usual, kind of half-year results reporting agenda.
I'm really happy that we'll have the rest of my team here so that you get to know a bit more of them as well. Many of them have been building Wise for more than 10 years, you'll find out, from when it was then just a promising idea to now being one of the 50 most valuable companies on the London Stock Exchange. I'm also particularly excited today that you'll be hearing from our, quite fresh CFO, Emmanuel, getting to know him a bit more as well. He only joined us six months ago. We have generally a very long-term oriented owner base. A lot of the cap table hasn't actually changed even in the four years in terms of the majority of it.
I wanted to also especially welcome about tens of thousands of new owners who have bought their ownership since we were listed. Welcome to you as well. It is great to see that you are as excited as we are about what we are doing. For me to get going, let me take you back to the beginning. Why did I start Wise in the first place? Why did I start working on this? In an ideal world, Wise should not really even exist. As the market dysfunction, where banks have been hiding their cross-border fees and successfully relying on captured customer base, this has led to decades of underinvestment in technology and led to uncompetitive products for retail customers. It has also led to underinvestment and limited competition in the global correspondent infrastructure maintained by the largest banking brands in the world.
It is no surprise then that this team that you're going to meet here today was able to build an enormous company from scratch in only 14 years. However bad the international banking was when we started, we shouldn't distract ourselves from exploring how good it will be. All we know is we're merely, merely in the beginning of fixing it. As you can see, we move about 5% of all the money that people move around the world. That is about GBP 3 trillion. We move now about 5% of that and about a percent or less, less of a percent for small businesses. In some controlled currencies, there is actually good official tracking. What we're seeing is that in some segments, we're becoming quite meaningful. For example, the Reserve Bank of India tracks the inflow to rupees that come into the country.
It estimates it to be about $100 billion. We know that we're doing about $10 billion of that. That's 10% of all the money going to India. Our volumes to the Philippines make up about 12% of what the central bank estimates in inbound volume from its overseas people. Brazil's central bank meticulously publishes their inflows and outflows to Brazilian real, across banks and non-banks. We have been the largest institution, actually now for a while, for both the number of transactions coming in and going out of Brazil and actually by a margin compared to the banks and everyone else. We're already becoming quite meaningful in, in some, in some of these pockets of this enormous GBP 32 trillion cross-border volume.
I think it's very good to look at the market share in terms of the volume or, kind of the size of the problem that you're fixing. When we talk about the opportunity, we must also look at the revenue or the fees that we're disrupting. Adding together all of the retail fees that are being charged by the banks, mostly in hidden markups, we see a number of GBP 170 billion annually that's being collected from people and small businesses. This is the market dysfunction that I was talking about. That's the immediate opportunity in front of us. I'm putting this up here almost because then I don't need to, I almost don't need to quote this famous founder who said, "Their margins is our opportunity." You know who I'm talking about, and he went to build a multi-trillion dollar company of it.
Let's look deeper into this because it's not just one number. The banks and a few remaining non-banks capture this $170 billion revenue pool in three different ways. Firstly, international wires or simply transfers. That's investments, it's payroll, imports, a few different other use cases. They distract the retail customers with a free or a nominal transaction cost, and then they hide 2-5%, sometimes more, into an inflated exchange rate.
Cards, using bank cards on your holidays or those you travel to on your work travel, when you pay a $1,000 bill at a hotel for a weekend stay, you don't realize that you don't only pay $1,000 to the hotel, but your bank took another $20-$50 from your account in your local currency, which they lump into the bad exchange rate and hope you don't notice. Getting paid internationally, when a small business owner puts their local bank account on their international invoice, they can be sure that their bank will convert any incoming foreign currency into the local one at a marked up exchange rate, and it takes again a 2%-5% fee. That's a reminder of how this $170 billion foreign exchange revenue pool is collected from the retail customers.
Now, you'll hear from my team through today how Wise is becoming an international account for people and for businesses for all of these use cases it serves. When you hear this, please think back to this GBP 170 billion number and the way that the banks capture it today, because it is all going to make a lot of sense comparing to what we're building, comparing to what we're disrupting. We disrupt in price, on transparency, on trust, on experience, and all this is going to be powered by our unique network. You'll hear about this direct payments network we're building, and it will become obvious why the smart retail banks who care about their customer experience, who want to challenge their slower peers, are jumping on Wise's platform. We have gone from nothing 14 years ago to now moving GBP 100 billion and more.
Now we're building the network and the apps for the trillions. We had a great start, but this is merely a start. To summarize, we've methodically invested in the first 14 years. We've created a massive opportunity ahead of us. We have a clear long-term plan that we see is working, and we're doing this profitably. Let's look at this in numbers. Since the listing four years ago, we're now serving two and a half times more customers, moving nearly three times more cross-currency volume. Our customers increasingly prefer to hold ever larger, larger amounts of their money on their Wise Account. They're now keeping GBP 21 billion as the latest estimate, for the year end on their Wise Account.
Yet, as we turn the screws on pricing and we bring down the cross-border fees, our underlying income since listing has grown still faster than the fundamentals at an average 34% every year. Why? Because you'll see, you'll see that today, actually, as well, because our products expand now to cover more of the scope of international banking. Our sources of income also compound and diversify. This income growth also means that we're now investing hugely more into growth. Because when you and I will be looking at these charts again five years from now, the value of Wise will reflect the investments we're making today, and it will be driven by our capacity to invest. That is driven by our economics or how that's expanding and how efficient we are. That is going to be down to our execution.
As we've guided since listing, we will continue to invest behind the coming decades of growth in all of our income streams. The opportunity is getting ever clearer for us, and we can see all of the components of the strategy working. My team now will take us through the investments that we're going to make right now, this year, next year, years to come. This is going to get us to the next few hundred billions of cross-border volume. Really, it's going to take us to the trillions. First up, Diana and Harsh, they're going to take us through this network, how they're building it, the infrastructure that powers this incredible speed and customer experience. You'll hear from Nilan.
Nilan's going to cover all the products and features and how these have assumed such a big scope compared to what it was even five years ago and how these new income sources develop. We'll take a quick break, and then Cian will take us to this incredibly efficient marketing machine behind Wise when Steve picks up on the newest part, which is Wise's platform. We'll have Emmanuel covering the financial discipline and the profitable, profitable growth model that's behind Wise. Thank you so much for coming. I hope you enjoy the day. It's going to be a lot of fun. Over to Diana and Harsh. Thank you.
Thank you, Kristo. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Diana Avila. I am responsible for the international expansion of Wise. I have been at Wise for 10 years already, and I actually came across TransferWise before joining.
I am originally from Colombia. I had moved to London to study a master's degree in loan finance, and I had to start repaying my loan back home. After using the bank to make this transaction, I realized, sorry, one second, this was my phone. I think you can hear me better now. As I was saying, I was paying my loan using my local bank, and I realized how I was overpaying in the FX rate, and it was taking days for the money to arrive. I started reading about this thing that TransferWise was building back then, and I became obsessed with the idea of making sure that these products, that this solution should be present everywhere in the world with the best infrastructure, which is what you're going to hear today from Harsh and I.
I, of course, manage my money with Wise these days, and it's a very useful product, especially in my role traveling, constantly around the world. My favorite feature by far is that I get to send money to my family in Colombia quite very often, and it gets to them instantly.
Hey folks, good to see you all. Some new faces in the room and some old ones. I'm Harsh. I have been with Wise for 10 years, and I lead the technology teams here. Similar to Diana, actually, I faced this problem the first time also as a student. I was moving from India to the US for grad school, and about 20 years ago, so I'm dating myself now. I paid 6% in hidden fees for that first semester tuition that I, when we moved funds from India to the US.
Unfortunately, at that time, Wise did not exist, so I had to use my bank. Over the years, as we've built Wise, obviously, I've traveled and lived across the world quite a bit, and I manage all my finances now with Wise. My favorite feature, I can actually get interest on my USD, GBP, and EUR holdings, which is pretty cool. I can spend that money when I travel all around the world. As Diana said, together we will talk you through, or walk you through the details about the infrastructure we've been building for the past 14 years. We will continue investing in this infrastructure, because we fundamentally believe this is what makes Wise unique. Let's get on with it. You heard Kristo.
We are building a network to move trillions around the world, and we've been making quite a bit of progress on this. Today, we have already over 15 million active customers using Wise directly. That's through our Wise apps and our website. Later on, you'll hear from Steve how we also have over 100 financial institutions integrated into Wise Platform. The key thing here is, as more people and more businesses move and hold money with Wise, our network sees greater flows. With greater flows, we see economies of scale, which leads to better outcomes for everyone using the Wise network. This leads to faster and cheaper and more convenient outcomes for everyone using the Wise network when they're managing their money internationally. All of this is underpinned by the Wise infrastructure. This is what we've been investing in over the last 14 years.
This is what makes Wise so unique and is our main competitive advantage. This infrastructure has four components. You have, let's start with the first one, our licenses, our regulatory authorizations to operate directly and independently in multiple jurisdictions and offer our products to our customers locally. Next, our multiple connections to numerous payment systems and local bank partners around the world. Third, our technology, all developed internally from the ground up, that allows all those local connections and operations to run seamlessly at scale 24/7. Last but not the least, our operations teams, our ability to automate and operate a highly complex infrastructure and flows of information and money in a way that appears simple to our customers. One of the things that I really enjoy when I'm traveling, for work or for even personal travel, is randomly meeting Wise users.
I sometimes wear the Wise t-shirt as I'm at airports and get pulled, pulled aside as like, oh, you work for Wise. When I meet these customers, sometimes they tell me things that don't work, but a lot of times they tell me things that they really love. One word that I've heard that people say a lot of times is, you just made it very, very simple. People are amazed how we've made something that would be a very daunting task of moving money internationally or managing your finances globally to become so simple and an everyday task. This simplicity is thanks to the global Wise infrastructure. For example, let's take the example of a global money movement. In a traditional correspondent setup, you'll have a payment order which is transmitted through multiple correspondent banks in multiple countries.
With Wise, we move payments end to end directly within seconds without numerous correspondence needed. For example, somebody funding a transfer from their bank account in Australia can pay into Wise using the local payment rails, and then we immediately pay out to the other side to the U.K., where they were sending money to the recipient. This money reaches the recipient in less than 20 seconds, and they pay 0.4% in fees. That was unheard of before we created this infrastructure. This simplicity goes way, way beyond just moving money and replacing the inefficient correspondent network. With our infrastructure, we are enabling other things that were unseen before. Here's another example. Here's an example of a Wise Account customer being able to open local account details in the U.S., in U.K., and Australia.
Once they've onboarded to Wise, they can get local account numbers to operate in different local payment systems across the world simply by clicking a button on their app. No flying to another country to get local accounts, no doing physical verification, no re-uploading numerous documents, or worse, managing multiple local accounts at different banks with different applications. We have democratized banking like a local for all, something that was not available at this level of access before Wise. All underpinned by this infrastructure built in multiple countries across the world. This infrastructure is global. Today, we have over 70 licenses across the world. We access payment systems around the world via our direct connections. We've got six live and two more coming soon. Diana's going to talk about them later. Also more than 90 local bank partners. Some of these are the major domestic banks.
Most of these are major domestic banks in multiple countries. We have over 850 engineers working on this cross-border money problem alone. This makes it the largest engineering team dedicated solely to solving this problem. We continue automating and building a global servicing, like automating experiences and have built a global servicing team with 24/7 operations across 20 countries. This strong infrastructure is what powers and makes our four key pillars possible. Some of you who've been with us for a while have seen these. These haven't changed. It is important reinforcing that as we invest and strengthen our infrastructure, these pillars will remain consistent over time. These are the outcomes that we deliver that lead to amazing experiences people using our products have. Let's go through a few highlights. Speed.
Our infrastructure is what enables us to complete more than 65% of payments now instantly, which is less than 20 seconds end to end. I continue to be proud of the other number, which is 95% of the payments on the Wise network are cleared within one day. This is radically different and much, much faster than the correspondent setup, which can still take multiple days to clear payments. We are able to sustainably offer a lower price to our customers. On a blended basis, we are charging 56 basis points. This is because our infrastructure allows us to reduce the underlying costs as we scale volumes. Our infrastructure enables us to process over 2.5 million transactions per day. That is nearly 2,000 transactions per minute everywhere in the world, including weekends.
We do this with the scale that people expect us to have, with high uptimes and 24/7 support. Since we started Wise, we have invested almost GBP 3 billion to build this infrastructure, and we will continue to invest even more as we see more opportunities, opportunities to scale and grow this competitive advantage we have. In fact, over the next two years, we will invest an additional GBP 2 billion into this infrastructure. This is because we fundamentally believe whoever has the best infrastructure in this space will win in the longer run. With that, I'll give it to Diana to take us through direct connections and local licenses. Thank you, Harsh.
Indeed, we strongly believe that it is the best infrastructure what wins in the long run.
The magic of Wise, the magic of this infrastructure is being able to deeply connect in payment systems, to be present independently in countries, and not just in one or in a couple, but everywhere. It's this combination of depth and breadth, the magic behind Wise. We're able to do this. We're able to build this infrastructure not only across Europe and the U.K., but we do it in different regions. We do it all the way from Latin America to Asia Pacific, North America, and also the Middle East and Africa. Let me go deep into, let me go deep into this concept of direct connections and licenses, the two first pillars of our infrastructure. For the past 20 years or so, most jurisdictions, most countries around the world have introduced new payment systems, have improved the way in which money moves domestically.
This is why it is so easy to create and send a payment domestically. Usually, this arrives instantly or very quickly, and it does not cost anything for the consumer or just a very, like a very small amount. It is a reliable network. These payment systems are unique to each jurisdiction. What we are doing at Wise is we are bringing these payment systems together. We are integrating them under our network with the unique goal of moving money across borders, of creating this network for the world's money. We do this through our connections with more than 90 bank providers around the world. These are some of the largest and more established banks that we operate and are connected with. Most exciting and most importantly, we access these payment systems as a direct participant.
This means that when someone is funding a transaction in Australia from their bank account, they create this payment order and it comes to Wise directly with no intermediary in the network. Similarly, when we are doing a payout, we do it directly. We create this order and this goes to any of the other banks participating in the payment system in that country. This is how we get the speed of moving payments of the payment systems, which is instant. We are able to lower the underlying cost of moving each payment. It is a very reliable and strong infrastructure because it depends only on us. There is no intermediary that we are depending on. Building these direct connections, becoming direct participants is not easy. It is not for anyone. It is not for everyone.
In order to get a direct connection, to become a direct participant, usually we start by engaging with regulators, with lawmakers, with policymakers to make sure that the payment systems are not reserved only for banks, that are also available for non-bank financial institutions focused on payments. Once the law allows this, we are of course required to have our own license, our own authorization. These are usually multi-year projects, and this is getting easier, especially when we first engage with the regulator and a lot of them are already using Wise.
Once we get the authorization to operate in the market and to become a direct participant, building these and getting these authorizations to be a direct member requires us to pass the highest and more stringent requirements from an operational, from a technology perspective, because the payment scheme needs to make sure that it continues running safely, smoothly, with a constant uptime for all the participants and all the customers. The benefits of getting these direct connections are exactly those that we get the faster speed of the payment system. We're able to continuously drop the cost of moving payments, and we are creating a very reliable infrastructure. Let me take one concrete example, one of those examples of the direct connections that we have built, the Philippines.
Last year, we went live with our latest direct connection to a payment system, in this case, InstaPay, which is the instant payment system in the Philippines. As you heard from Kristo, our presence in this market is already significant. The Philippines is just one of the few examples where the opportunity is massive. It is one of the largest receivers of remittances of international payments. In 2024, 12% of those payments that were going to the Philippines, international payments, were already powered by Wise, by customers around the world using Wise to send money to the Philippines. Now, becoming a direct participant to InstaPay means that 90% of those payments are completed instantly. Our customers, our Wise Platform partners sending money from the U.K., for example, to the Philippines are arriving instantly.
We were also able to reduce the underlying cost of sending each of these payments by eight times. Now our customers can not only use Wise to send money to the Philippines, but our customers in the Philippines can also access the Wise Account. The Philippines is one of the places where we already have these live direct connections. The first one was in the U.K. back in 2017 when Wise became the first direct participant, the first non-bank direct participant to FPS, the instant payment system here. We also have these already in Europe, in Hungary, in Singapore, in Australia, in the Philippines. We are very excited because this year we will add at least two more. We will be directly connected to the payment system in Brazil. This is FIX. We will also be directly connected to Sengin, the instant payment system in Japan.
Last year, we received authorizations for this. In Japan, for instance, we are the first non-bank to receive this authorization to connect directly, and we are working and investing towards getting ready this connection this year. Through these direct connections, we're very proud because nearly half of all the payments, half of all the transactions that come into Wise and that we process out of Wise are processed on our direct connection to payment systems. This means that, for example, whenever you create a payment from the U.K. all the way to Australia, end to end, this is moving in our own network, in our own direct connection on both sides. Or when our customers need to send money from Australia to the Philippines, this is also powered by our direct connections.
With this, I'm going to pass it back to Harsh to hear about the other two pillars of our infrastructure, technology and operations.
Thanks, Diana. While our direct connections are a key part of what got us here, there are other key components that make the Wise infrastructure very unique. Our technology is one of them. This is fully developed in-house that supports our integrations and makes our infrastructure possible. While most financial institutions and large banks release a few times a month, they release their apps, their products a few times a month, we actually release over 5,000 times a month and get our product in the hands of the customers as quickly as we can. This is just one of the stats that we are proud of.
Along with this velocity of releases and velocity of change, we can continue to remain very highly resilient and keep our uptimes high. I already mentioned the number of engineers working on this problem and the way we continue to invest in bringing the best talent into the company to focus on the cross-border problem. This is the biggest engineering team that is using their days to make sure we continue to solve this problem. As we look forward, we'll continue to focus on investing into this team and build the team that will build this infrastructure for moving money around the world to be the best over the next decade. The other investments, we continue to use our data to make better and efficient decisions.
We have always invested heavily in this space with the use of machine learning models from the earlier days in various parts of our business. We continue to look at new and exciting advancements in LLMs and in the AI space as we invest to make sure we can continue to be more efficient and make better decisions with these new tools. The key here is to make our products much, much better such that we can stop the bad actors faster, but also make it more convenient for good customers to use Wise. Finally, Wise Platform continues to become a bigger and bigger part of our business, and we'll continue to invest into building a great B2B API for Wise Platform partners to integrate into.
We'll continue to add features and new features to our API for these partners, including opening up our card issuance, multicurrency accounts, and more. One of the things that people ask me sometimes is, "Hey, how is this different than a big bank? How have you built the technology stack to be different than a big bank?" One of the key things to call out here is Wise has a single global tech stack. Let me give you an example. If you bank today with a big global bank in the U.K. and then you decide to move to the U.S., for example, you'll actually be using a completely different technology stack.
You'll be using, you'll be going through a new onboarding process, a new KYC process, new account details will be issued to you, new usernames and passwords, new apps to be downloaded, and new cards to be issued to you. With Wise, what we've built is all under this single global tech stack. This means most of our features are built with a global setup, and then we add local customizations as needed. This makes the products on top of this network very powerful. You want to move countries? No worries. Wise operates in that region as if it was your home country. You open a global business, we operate the same way. This is also driven by how we are organized as a team. We organize in our local hubs across Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, where we hire local talent with local in-market expertise.
One of the examples I give my techie friends is, if you're sitting in San Francisco, you have no idea how QR code-based payments are happening and moving in Asia because you're not living and breathing that. For that, you need to live and breathe that local payment system because payments are local. This global local setup really makes Wise infrastructure and the products we build on top of them very unique and special. Last but not the least, the excellent operations. This is a big part of our infrastructure. Moving and managing funds across borders is hard work, and sometimes things do get stuck. When our customers need us, we are there 24/7, 365. We have invested heavily into bringing down contact rates over the years such that customers can help themselves in our product experiences.
When they need to contact us or reach us, we have fast response times. All of this investment in our infrastructure leads to the outcomes of low cost, high speed, and scale, which leads to better experiences for our customers, and that leads to faster growth. Most of this growth continues to come from word of mouth. Just taking a step back, let me look forward for the next 10 years, and I'll leave you with this. I see all roads in cross-border payments leading to the Wise network in the longer run. We have built something unique with this infrastructure, which gives us a massive competitive moat. This competitive advantage comes on cost, on speed with the use of our superior technology, but also no other competitor has invested in the infrastructure like this, and we will continue to invest given the headstart we have.
If you also look at what's happening in the industry, the customer expectations are also continuing to evolve. This idea of 20-second cross-border payments, even five to six years ago, it actually didn't exist. Now it's becoming table stakes, and this is powered by the Wise infrastructure. It was actually brought to this world with the Wise infrastructure. As these expectations evolve for customers, these customers are not only expecting this from Wise, but they're expecting this from their banks. This is where we see Wise Platform continuing to grow because these banks and larger institutions want that same outcomes for their customers because they're demanding it. Once these banks come on, they tend to be sticky, they have larger volumes, and then we can clear payments between two partners through the Wise infrastructure instantly at low cost.
This eventually leads to the flywheel of the Wise network that I showed earlier, continuing to move faster because it brings more volume, more customers, and leads to better outcomes for everybody using this network, eventually making this network, this is the network for the world's money. With that, I'll invite my good friend and the CPO of Wise, Nilan, to the stage to talk about how we continue to build great products for our customers on top of this infrastructure.
I've enjoyed working with for the last 10 years. Hi everybody, I'm Nilan Peiris, I'm Chief Product Officer here at Wise. I've been here for the last 11 years building our products and building the teams that build our products. Looking forward, there's still so much left to do.
Kristo talked about trillions at the beginning of the day, and I'm going to take you through our path to trillions, through how we build, through building and continue to invest in the world's number one cross-border experience, the number one account for people and businesses. Steve Norde will take you through Wise Platform, the world's best correspondent infrastructure. Kicking off with the journey to trillions, 32 trillion, that's how much money moves across borders at the moment today. As you heard from Kristo, a tiny portion on our rails today. We are enhancing and investing in our product to give us a path to move to trillions. In the near term, continue to invest in building out the number one cross-border experience contributes a significant portion of why users continue to switch their volumes from their current providers to us.
In the medium term, we see ourselves hitting our first milestone of a trillion on the Wise network across cross-border and same currency volume, and that really will be delivered by investments in the Wise account. In the longer term, it's the platform that gives us access to trillions, the trillions that are moving between banks and businesses every day. Let's step through these steps and add a bit more color to that journey. Kicking off with the number one cross-border experience. The products we've built help us address ever larger segments of the market. We started with Wise Transfer, but our customers told us they also needed to receive money internationally, to hold money, to spend money. For them, we built the Wise account for people and for businesses. We know that not everybody in the world will download our app.
We know we need to be in the payment flows where they're happening, which is within the world's banks and within other technology platforms. To support them, we built Wise Platform. Wise Platform is a small part of the story today, but over time, will become an increasingly large part of how we achieve our journey to trillions. These products would be nothing without that decade of investment that Harsh and Diana took you through. Those billions that we've invested to date in the licenses, the connections, the technology, and the operations. Without that, we'd just be a pretty UX. We really wouldn't deliver on the customer outcomes that matter. Customers have been pretty consistent over the last 14 years on what the challenges they have with their current cross-border experience. These messages haven't changed. They tell us their current providers are really expensive. They're really slow.
Three to five days is still the benchmark from when I started at Wise 11 years ago to today. A lot of routes aren't available. Even here in the U.K., you can't get access to a bunch of countries within, say, South America. Frankly, the current products are really, really hard to use. What we see as we've invested in building a product that's an order of magnitude better than the incumbents, we've seen users switch to us in ever greater numbers and be increasingly evangelical about the product that they're using now with Wise, which is why we continue to invest behind this. We continue to invest in price. We continue to invest in ever faster speeds. You heard Harsh talk through us hitting the 60% instant milestone, invest in taking Wise to new corridors, and invest in the customer experience.
Let me take you through a little bit more detail on our investments in price. Over the last six months, we had six months of consecutive price drops, which positively impacted our volume growth. Looking just at Q3 2025, we can attribute, we estimate about 4% of the cross-border volume was driven by our price investments. That is only part of the story. When we look at our NPS, our Net Promoter Score, the primary motivator why people recommend Wise continues to be price. Our investments in price are our investments in user growth. In the word of mouth that Cian will take you through is a primary driver of user acquisition for Wise. Finally, as we are able to lower our price, ever larger segments of the market we become more relevant for.
Today, you can access the price of 0.1% on Wise when you're moving more than GBP 100,000, say, between GBP and euro. If you're moving GBP 10 million or GBP 100 million, you'd expect a lower price. That's what we're working to bring these segments onto Wise and to make these segments more attractive. That's relevant for small and medium businesses, but that's critical for our platform partners and the journey we're on there. It's not just about short-term gains. Price is also a strategic long-term investment. There's the word of mouth growth I've covered already. As we drop our price, what happens is we expand our competitive advantage as competitors need to match us on price in order to switch customers. To do that, they'll need to discount by ever larger amounts or cross-subsidize from their net interest margin in order to do so.
Over the longer term, we see access to ever larger parts of the market. Investments in price return over the short, medium, and long term. It is not just price. It is speed, it is corridors, and it is the customer experience. There is no more convenient way to use Wise than through the Wise account. When we started Wise with Wise Transfer, it is an incredible product. As Diana talked you through, it is really cheap, it is really fast. Our customers who are doing maybe hundreds of payments from their bank accounts asked us, could they hold money with Wise? We began building the Wise account. The first feature we launched was enabling customers to hold balances with us. Once they started holding balances with us, they then asked us, maybe could I pay into my account directly? Could I share my account details with my customers?
We started building local account details. These are high-quality local account details in all the markets that we operate with. Once they had the money in the account and the local account details, they wanted to spend the money. We launched this unique multi-currency spending card. The Wise account today is so much more than that. We continue to see opportunities that deliver high returns that we invest behind that enable our customers to spend more and hold more with us. What are the types of current customers that use the account? It's a range. We have some single currency users. They're a small number, and these are people that would use the Wise account. It works just great if you're using one currency, but they do have other alternatives. We have more customers that will use us when they're holidaying, when they're traveling.
That's normally how our customers, a principal way in which customers get introduced to the Wise account today. Say you're a remote worker or a digital nomad. Imagine you're an engineer and you're based in Greece and your customers are in the US and you want to invoice them in USD and spend in euros on your card. There aren't many options available to you that are like the Wise account. If you're relocating and you're moving from one country to the next, that experience that Harsh talked through, it's pretty hard getting a bank account when you move country, when you haven't got, say, in the US, a Social Security number yet or any of the proofs of ID you need. You can get going before you leave with a Wise account. Finally, some of our customers run their businesses on Wise as well.
As we go from left to right, as the international needs of our customers grow, we provide more value to our customers. Our customers on the right are the most valuable customers we have. It is no accident that since we started investing behind the Wise Account, we have seen tremendous adoption. Almost half of our personal customers have now adopted the account and around 60% of our businesses. Whilst our overall income growth has been growing at 34%, Wise Account income growth has been growing at 66%. Most of that income growth has been, a large portion has been driven by the conversion income because there is no more convenient way to convert money across borders. It has been a 49% growth in conversion income. Outstripping that conversion income has been the non-conversion income.
We've had a 93% growth in non-conversion income, which now makes up 30% of our overall income. What is this? It's about a third our card income that we earn from interchange, about a third our interest income, and about a third in other fees. The Wise account overall is operating at a 40%-50% contribution margin. Our vision for the Wise account is to build the world's best account for managing and moving money, domestic or international, by solving the barriers to customers spending and holding more with us. As I've talked through, we've seen really strong returns as we've invested in our products to date. Going forward, we see the potential for strong returns as well as we continue to invest in trust, in local integrations, and in convenience. Investing in trust means many things at Wise. It could mean enhancing our security features.
It could be rolling out assets that our customers trust to generate a return for them in the long run. As customers trust Wise more, they increase their holdings in Wise, and that generates more interest income. Our local integrations, we've heard that banking and payments are uniquely local and we're uniquely set up to deliver on that experience with different payment methods, different verification methods in market that makes us relevant and convenient in the market. As we do that, we increase our user growth and the types of transactions on Wise. Finally, Wise becomes, we're investing in making Wise more convenient. As we become more convenient, we'll see higher activity on the accounts, and that will lead to increased frequency and revenue growth.
I want to talk through an example of how all these things, trust, local integrations, and convenience come together in one product, which is Wise Interest. Wise Interest is an instant access savings product with holdings in government-guaranteed assets. Any of you could open your Wise Account today and push one button and move, say, your balance of GBP 100 into GBP 100 worth of government-guaranteed assets. What that means is you'll be earning a return of about 3.96% if it's a GBP balance through to about 4% if it's a USD balance. We're able to offer that product through our network of broker-dealer licenses. That product is now available in 19 countries around the world, and customers trust their money is safe in this underlying product. What's unique about this product is customers have instant access to their funds. It's really convenient.
I can spend with my card whilst my money is held in this account. It's no accident. As a consequence, we've seen high amounts of customers switching to our assets product from plain cash deposits. Today, we have over around GBP 4 billion in assets. Looking forward, we see many opportunities to continue to invest in the account. All of these opportunities drive returns through customers holding more with us and spending more with us, driving that interest income and that interchange revenue. That is it for the Wise account for people. Our focus is on international people, and we invest in trust, local integrations, and convenience. Let's move on to talk about something I'm really excited about, which is Wise Business. It's a very big room. I think I'll walk over this side and talk over this side on business so you're not left out.
Wise Business, Wise Business is we started Wise Business in 2017, and it's been a significant contributor to our growth. We have 600,000 active businesses on Wise Business. Wise Business contributes 23% of our revenue and 26% of our cross-border volume. It's available in 79 countries, but really, the majority of our customers today are in the U.K., U.S., and Europe. There's a lot of white space, a big opportunity ahead of us. Historically, we were an alternate FX account for businesses, and increasingly, you've seen us invest behind becoming a primary account for business banking. The experience of business banking today isn't great. It's really hard to get a business bank account, especially if you're a small business.
The one that you get as default will not come with multi-currency balances, does not come with employee debit cards that you can issue, or local account details around the world. You can understand why the base features for the Wise Account I have taken you through so far are so relevant for small businesses. They especially love our local account details. If you are a small business in the U.K. and say you have a customer in Australia and you want to invoice the customer, you would put your IBAN on that invoice, you send the invoice off, and five days later, some pounds would turn up in your account and you are never quite sure if it is the right amount.
What would be cool is if you could invoice that customer in Australian dollars and hold those dollars in an Australian balance and maybe pay your suppliers out of that balance as well without having to bring it always back to the U.K. If you wanted to do that, you'd need to fly to Australia, incorporate an entity, then go to a bank, and then they would give you a bank account. With Wise, you can do that in three clicks. It's not just Australian bank account details. It's U.S. account details. It's GBP details. It's euro details. Those debit cards we issue in the Wise account become employee debit cards, debit cards that you can control your spend on. You can add your team to the account with Wise Business, and you can add your accountant. You can run payment approvals, and it syncs with your accounting software.
Over 15 accounting integrations to date. Wise Business is much, much more than that. You can understand why businesses are adopting Wise. Customers like Beehive, a specialist honey exporter, not money exporter, a specialist honey exporter, switched to Wise Business. Beehive is based in the U.K., and it has customers in Europe, and it wants to get paid in euros. It is pretty hard to get paid in euros if you do not have a Wise Account. They switched to us for that. Customers like Pengolia, this is a business in Singapore. It is an e-commerce business, a pet e-commerce company. They use Wise really to get paid from Amazon, where they receive a chunk of their payments from, but also to pay their suppliers who are all around the world. They have also adopted our card and issued that to their employees to control spend.
They've really gone full Wise Business with us. Our strategy to support Wise Business is to continue to invest in features that help our businesses move more of their transaction volume to us and more of their holdings to us, which generate good income growth and good returns. Let me talk you through how our business proposition will evolve. Today, we are used by micro to small and small to medium-sized businesses. As we continue to invest, we see we will see a greater proportion coming from small and medium-sized businesses over time. We invest in three areas to support ever-larger businesses. Number one, in a superior experience. Number two, through localizing better. Number three, through solving for workflow. Let me step you through each of these. The best support experience is one that doesn't really exist.
We've invested heavily over the last few years in our financial crime and regulatory checks. We've developed sophisticated machine learning models, which, combined with our deep regulatory expertise, enable us to help reduce the friction of payments. This here is an example where a customer is receiving a payment here from Akshay, and the payment's paused. The payment's paused because it had a reference on it, which would hit a sanctions engine check. What would normally happen in a bank is this payment would get stuck. At some point, you'd receive an email saying, "We need some more details on this." You go back and forth with an agent. This process could take three or four days, sometimes a week.
We've built a way in which we can collect this information directly from customers within the flow and then run our checks in an automated way to release that payment really quickly with minimal disruption for customers. On to localize better. Business banking is inherently local. I've learned that there are many, many accounting platforms around the world. It's not just QuickBooks and Zero. In fact, almost in every European country, you'll find a slightly different flavor of an accounting platform. And businesses expect their account to work with that platform. With our regional teams that Harsh talked you through, we're uniquely placed to build those integrations, integrations into local tax systems, continue to build out our network of local account details as well as local payment methods. That enables us to build a great business account. Then finally, over the longer term, solving for workflow.
What we've observed is that the payment job, which here is paying for an invoice, is usually part of a much broader workflow within a business, with approvals from multiple parties. The payment step, which is the only part that currently happens on Wise today, is a small part of the journey. In order to capture a greater share of our customers' payments and support them with helping those payments become faster and cheaper and easier, we'll need to integrate into their existing tools or build out our own workflow tools. Let me talk you through what the journey there could look like. Today, we have on Wise Business a multi-currency debit card. You can see us beginning to build the ability for customers to sync their receipts with their accounting platform so that the payments can be approved and reconciled.
Over the longer term, this will look much more something like an expense management platform or we'll be integrating into expense management platforms. Similarly, for SIM money, today, you can already pay over 100 payments at the click of a button through our Batch Pay Tool. We've built a great invoice creation tool. Over the longer term, you'll be able to pay hundreds, thousands of invoices through a bill pay solution that's powered by Wise. We'll be integrating into invoice reconciliation products too. Finally, payment links, one of the fastest growing parts of the Wise ecosystem, where businesses can send a link out and customers can click the link to pay an invoice. We've already rolled out card acceptance, so customers can now pay via card as well as via bank transfers. In the future, that will look something like checkout by Wise.
Putting all these together, you understand how we'll be able to capture a greater share of revenue from businesses and support them with more of their international needs. These are the areas that we'll be investing into over the next few years. That is it for Wise Business. The only account you'll need to scale your business globally, near-term focus on small businesses and investing in a superior experience, localizing and solving for workflow. With that, oh, sorry, one more slide. Remember, none of these products would be possible without our infrastructure. Nobody else has that infrastructure. We are uniquely placed to deliver on this opportunity and step into this market to trillions. With that, I'll hand over to Martin. There you go. Thank you.
Thank you, Nilan. And thank you to our other speakers so far.
You have heard from four of the teams so far, and we have three to go. We are going to take a short break now and come back into the room for a start at about 4:10 P.M. If you need the bathroom, it is out into the left. If you would like a drink, it is out into the right. There is free Wi-Fi if you want to download the Wise Account. The slides are also available on the Owner Relations website now. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, everyone. Okay, we are just over halfway through our presentation. Next up, we have Cian, who is our Chief Marketing Officer, to talk us through how we let even more customers know about Wise. Cian will be followed by Steve Noddy to talk to you about how we are growing through Wise Platform.
Then Emmanuel will step up to talk through the story from a financial perspective as well. With that, over to you, Cian. Thanks.
Thank you, Martin. You got your lapel mic. Hey, everyone. How's it? Wow, it's quite loud. A good break. Enjoyed our drinks. I'm Cian. It's not a great photo of me, but despite that, I'm Chief Marketing Officer at Wise. I've been here for over four years, and I have nearly 25 years' experience in marketing, brand, analytics, and technology. I'm here to talk about the best-in-class marketing engine we've built here at Wise, which powers our mission around the world. I'll cover three things today: our investment approach, the capabilities we've built here, and the three focus areas we have for the rest of the year to help drive our mission.
I've also been a customer for 10 years, and I was going to talk about my favorite feature and talk about interest, but Harsh stole that from me. The feature I've been using most recently are our account details, our local account details. These are like these little magical things inside the Wise app that give you, as a Brit here, a US and European bank account. I recently used it when I was getting a refund from a car hire company who wanted to send me euros to my Barclays account. I said, "No, stop. I have an IBAN. I don't know what an IBAN is, but I have one." I gave it to them. I received my euros. I converted them into pounds, and I saved some money. It's a small victory, but it was still a victory.
I do encourage you, if you do have a Wise account, log in, look at that balance, click, get local account details, and have a go for yourself. Hopefully, I demonstrated a little bit of the word-of-mouth magic because there is a real moment of delight when a customer uses Wise, that moment of magic, which means they just can't help tell their friends about what problem we solve for them. It is this moment, this experience, which drives a high Net Promoter Score. It is these conversations that drive 70% of our new customers to come from a recommendation. This means our customer economics are highly attractive. We deliver a five-times return between the lifetime value of the customers and how much it costs to acquire them. This is low cost, it's profitable, and it's scaling. At the same time, my job title says Marketing Officer.
We invest in marketing, and we continue to increase this investment. As you've seen throughout the day, the TAM is huge as we expand our products around the world. We have the opportunity through marketing to explain our proposition and sell our evolving and more comprehensive product to new audiences. In doing so, we get to accelerate word-of-mouth. Imagine those conversations when I'm trying to explain to my brother about Wise if he's already heard about Wise through some advertising. As a result, we can scale adoption across more regions and segments. How have we done this? We've built a marketing capability that drives growth in a highly efficient way. Me and my team work really hard to spend as much money as we can on attracting new customers so long as it makes sense in terms of the return it delivers for our owners.
We do this with a set of guidelines supported with a few principles. The targets we set ourselves means we deliver a 20% return on our investments. What that effectively means in terms of payback is that for each campaign, we're delivering and targeting less than 15 months' return. We use this framework to maximize our spend across regions and products. This is supported by a bottom-up data-driven budget setting approach. We remain nimble to reallocate spend where we see the best returns. This is supported by an incredibly diversified set of marketing channels we operate in and our in-house strength in execution. All of this is underpinned by a data-driven analytical framework that allows us to make great decisions. Let me dig into that a little bit. We use sophisticated in-house machine learning models to solve two hard marketing problems.
One is how effective is our marketing? What's the true incremental impact of that campaign on driving a new user? How much is that true cost per acquisition? What is that elasticity as we spend more or less? That's only half the problem. We also have to predict the lifetime value of a customer quickly and accurately. These models can predict a 12-month lifetime value, multiple revenue streams, and costs to a 96% accuracy in that period. These underpin the ability for our channels, which we operate across all these markets, to have the data and instrumentation to scale and allows us to unlock new channels and quickly invest as they grow. All of this is supported by a dedicated large marketing analytics team who build these predictive models: lifetime value predictions, churn predictions, propensity to convert.
They help us use our internal data about our customers to optimize these campaigns to focus on returns. We're onboarding AI and LLM technologies to help us automate our workflow and build those strong insights on creative and data. How do we do this? It's pretty complicated. You have to imagine the marketing complexity we face being a truly global product across segments. On just some personal, we advertise in 72 countries, 14 languages. A new campaign will result in thousands of new assets. We operate our marketing engine across the funnel, whether it's raising awareness using television, YouTube, or PR, making us highly relevant in Google or on the podcasts you might have listened to on the way over, or partnering with influencers. When the customer is in market, we're making sure we're there working with affiliates or bidding in paid search.
Marketing is not just about acquiring new users. It's about making the most out of the existing users we have. We want to make sure they know what else they can do with Wise and make sure they have more reasons to recommend us to their friends. We have an advanced CRM capability that allows us to communicate with customers over email and push. I'm not sure how many people are on YouTube and TikTok right now. Hopefully, everyone's listening to this, but we've made some really great strides in unlocking influencer marketing, where you get to partner with trusted voices, especially in Brazil, and reach their audiences. We've captured the way to advertise on vertical video on TikTok, and we're advertising in these expert networks and communities such as Reddit, where we can find our specific audiences with interest targeting. That's just the start.
There are three things we're going to focus on going forward. It's clear that awareness of Wise as a solution to this problem that people face worldwide can be a rate limiter to growth. The more people who know we exist, the more likely they are to consider us. We're investing more in awareness marketing going forward. As you heard from Nilan, Wise Business is a credible primary account for these larger business segments, and we continue to focus on business marketing initiatives to unlock this opportunity. Finally, with so many customers, our customer base is not one segment. My use of Wise, I'm sure, is pretty different to Emmanuel's, and it's pretty different to Steve's. What's clear is that each segment needs a different set of tactics to reach them, whether it's in terms of how they use Wise or based on what country they're in.
We're building these capabilities in the team to tap into these audiences as we grow. On awareness, this is a—I'm a lapsed economist. I'll try to explain this as best I can. Generally, what you face with marketing is, as you spend more on the horizontal axis, returns decrease. You face diminishing returns in the short run. By raising awareness in your audience, who aren't in market now, like I said, but in future, we'll be able to spend more against them, we can increase our spend profile now and into the future within our return constraints. It makes all our marketing and word-of-mouth more effective. This is one example of what we've been doing in Australia. If you've been in Sydney, you might have seen this. I like it a lot when we speak to our customers. It's really resonated with them.
We've told a story about how Wise makes people's lives easier when they're sending money home and what it's like to open many balances. What's really exciting is how effective we've been at raising awareness. You can see there it's nearly 30%. It was only 17% a year ago of people in Australia knew who we were. That's 2 million more Australians now know who Wise is. What's really cool about our approach is we've built a unique approach to understand the true commercial impact of investing in brand, how much it costs, and building a muscle to do more of this. I don't think many other businesses have achieved this.
If we've combined this with the ability to build the best localized creative to really find our audiences in an effective way, we've learned from Australia, and we're scaling this to more markets with real conviction, like I said, how to invest behind brand to drive growth. On business, you've heard the opportunity is massive. Wise Business customers love using us as a primary account. The LTVs are super attractive, and the product, with so many features, can be incredibly sticky. We're using a large number of tactics to approach this segment of small businesses, whether it's lead generation, awareness campaigns, or partnering with VCs. What excites me most about Wise Business and the marketing opportunity is we've built products that truly solve the problems for businesses who are going global.
We've spoken to the owners of these businesses, and we've used their insights to position and sell Wise Business as the best primary account for the business banking. This is what we were running in New York and Texas, where we were sponsoring South by Southwest this year. We supported this campaign, which really highlighted how Wise can bring order to the chaos a small business might face when managing their international finances. This was supported by PR research around the pains that businesses face when expanding globally. Finally, new segments. It's really clear, like I said, we have an audience within the Wise customer base that love to move large amounts of money with us, whether that's one-off or over a period of time. For them, our mission is so relevant, especially on price. To acquire more of these customers, like I mentioned, requires specific tactics.
We have been investing successfully in partnerships with many opportunities here: relocation companies, migration agencies, wealth managers, and more. What has been really exciting is when you pick up the phone to speak to these partners, you discover that almost always someone there is a Wise customer and loves the product and will not hesitate to jump on the opportunity to promote it to their clients. In the last few months, I have been speaking to the stock equity teams at a number of large US-listed companies. Imagine the world's favorite search engine or auction site or e-commerce platform.
When you have these calls with them, the person on the call already uses Wise, loves it, and is happy and has been recommending it anyway to the staff and wants to formally partner with us so that we can be promoted to their staff, and they will want to use us as a brand that their staff can trust their money with. This is super exciting that the advocacy of our product and the strong word-of-mouth is unlocking these partnerships. Actually, on that last note, if anyone sells US stock, I do not know whether it is the right time to be selling US stock. Do use your Wise account and USD account details to receive it in dollars. Do not let anyone else convert those dollars for you and use the Wise account to save money.
To sum up, we've built a best-in-class marketing capability over many regions: brand, performance, CRM. We'll invest in scaling of what we're doing across further brand campaigns. We'll capture more business customers. We'll unlock more segments. In doing so, we'll continue to deliver higher returns on our marketing investment and drive customer growth. On that note, I'm very pleased to hand over to Steve Forest. He's going to tell us all about how he's been scaling Wise Platform. Thank you.
Thank you. Cool. Thank you so much, Cian, for taking us through the marketing. Hi, everyone. My name's Steve. I look after Wise Platform here at Wise. Thanks to everyone for coming today. I've been at Wise, like others you've heard from today, for about a decade.
Like others, Diana and plenty of other people that work here at Wise, I was a customer first. My family is in South Africa. Anyone here that has relatives or friends or family in South Africa and has tried to send money there will know it's been so hard and expensive and painful and slow. I heard about this thing called TransferWise back in the day, used it, and it was incredible. Very quickly realized I wanted to come and help build this. Ten years later, just as excited about the future and particular Wise Platform, of course. You have heard from us today about infrastructure. It's a word we've used a lot and I'll keep using as well because this is really the backbone of Wise. What we're really, really building here is this, the next generation of global payments infrastructure.
Today, this mostly powers the Wise Account and Wise Business, which Nilan took us through, but it's increasingly valuable and increasingly used by many others through Wise Platform. The TAM, the number you've heard today, this massive GBP 32 trillion is enormous. We're not going to access the hundreds of millions of customers and businesses that are making up moving this amount of money by making them all download our app and sign up to Wise. We're going to reach them by taking our infrastructure to the tools, the platforms they're already using through Wise Platform. Today, I want to share a little more about the need for this infrastructure, who's using it, and what is next coming for Platform. To start with, why do companies come and talk to us about this infrastructure today?
A lot of these providers are running solutions and services on existing rails and infrastructure that they already use. We talk to them about the problems they're facing, the things they're trying to solve, and why they're interested in talking to Wise. We see the reasons kind of fall into these three buckets of the problems providers face when trying to provide cross-border payments to their customers today. The first problem is this quite inefficient operations, right? Cross-border payments are hard. They're complicated. Providers struggle with poor visibility, slow payments, and see quite a low, what we call a straight-through processing rate, which is the number or percentage of payments that are made without any human interaction and automatically reach the recipient. Some real world-class leading banks may have 70%-80% straight-through processing rate. I've met banks that have 0%.
Every single payment is processed by a human. All of this manual operations, which is increasing as regulatory expectations increase, more checks, more needs to manage risk, more specialized rules, adds up to a huge amount of manual work for providers today. This huge cost of managing claims, exceptions, et cetera, makes this very expensive. Because the costs are high, this drives prices to be high. A lot of the high pricing that we see in the market aren't driven by insanely high margins. It's driven by a very high cost base. This drives pretty poor customer experience. You know, customers have to contact, they get limited visibility, transparency, and delays on payments, creates a poor experience with quite a low NPS. Providers tell us every day this is driving customer churn and blocking growth that they would like to drive into new segments.
This customer experience is really critical. Swift did some research recently that showed two-thirds of customers and businesses would leave their current provider if they had a failed payment or they had to contact more than once. We see this through the growth of the Wise accounts and Wise businesses. Customers are churning from their current providers and seeking alternatives, as well as providers struggling to access these new growth. I speak to banks all the time who want to support new use cases for their customers. They want to open new markets. They want to do new things, but they're limited by the infrastructure they have today. This is why they come and talk to Wise Platform and more are choosing Wise Platform. These are the pain points that we solve.
You've heard today our infrastructure is incredibly efficient, automated, low-cost, supports those great customer experiences, and drives incredible growth. We have a really good track record of showing what's possible with the infrastructure we've built. This is the goal: to power the world's money through Wise Platform, help the world's largest banks and companies manage their and their customers' money in the lowest cost, most efficient, reliable, and secure way. Our infrastructure is incredibly powerful. You've heard all of the amazing products and features and things that it supports: sending money, receiving money, multi-currency accounts, card issuing. Whilst we expose all of this through Wise Platform, we see the primary and immediate opportunity in the send money space. This is where most of the volume is, most of the demand that we see.
We have had some good early successes in the other areas, but this is where we see that primary and immediate opportunity. Who are our customers? We kind of help explain this. We segment the market into these three broad verticals. These also help show the growth journey we have been on and are going on. We initially started working with large digital banks. We have seen these leaders emerge in certain markets: Monzo in the U.K., banks like N26 and Bank[ Mandiri] in Europe, Nubank, of course, in Brazil, EQ Bank in Canada. We have had pretty proven success here. We have worked with many of these partners for many years, grown with them, scaled with them, and built really strong partnerships with these leading digital players. This segment has driven a lot of that initial growth of Wise Platform.
We power a really large chunk of this market, a large percentage of these leading digital banks. There are not hundreds more at scale around the world yet. Our growth here is really going to come from these partners continuing to grow and us continuing to grow with them. It is really exciting to see in this space some of the world's most innovative, tech-forward, exciting companies choosing Wise Platform. We can move really fast with them. We can get solutions live in weeks, not months or quarters. We then expanded to a pretty broad space that we call online platforms, which is focusing on kind of digital online players in segments where we believe there is a really strong cross-border need. There is a lot of business payments here.
We work with the likes of Brex and Ramp, two mega US fintechs, on global invoice and employee reimbursement use cases, major payroll companies like Deel and Remote on global payroll and global contractor payments, and also travel. We work with Asia's largest travel booking site, Agoda. They're part of the Booking.com group, who use us for a number of use cases. We also help people around the world fund their Interactive Brokers accounts at a much higher speed and low cost than alternatives. There are lots of opportunities and lots of existing flows here, but we're trying to be hyper-focused in these sectors where we see strong cross-border need and great fit. It shows this flexibility of the infrastructure, right? Supporting business payments, consumer payments, high-value payments, low-value payments, send and receive. We can do a lot with the infrastructure that we expose through the platform.
The reality is the vast majority of cross-border volume, about 90% plus in the market, is with the major banks, tier one, tier two banks around the world. This is still where most people and businesses use to move their money. This is the segment at which we're going to scale to that trillions in volume number that Kristo has been talking about. This sector we've been proving out in, let's say, three main steps. Can we convince these banks to run on Wise Platform? Can we get them live and starting to process volume? Can we scale volume with them? We started to see some exciting wins here. We announced, of course, the likes of Morgan Stanley and Standard Chartered partnerships at the end of last year.
Even just last week, we announced our partnership with Banco Itaú, Latin America's largest bank by assets. They have almost 100 million customers in Brazil. We are showing we can get these banks signed and we can get them live and starting to process volume. Now the next stage is showing we can scale the volume from these partners. As you can imagine, we start with an initial use case. We start with kind of a very small first sector of an initial problem that partner's trying to solve, and then look to increase the amount of use cases and flows that we support from that bank over time. As many of you in the room here will know, banks can sometimes be quite large, complicated organizations, multiple entities, different tech systems. Growing this share of wallet is a multi-year journey in most cases.
These initial use cases we're going live with show this power of that infrastructure really well. I just want to step through a few here today. First of all, Nubank, one of the most incredible digital banks in the world, in Brazil and other countries expanding in the region, 100 million customers and a real tech leader. For them, we're powering multi-currency accounts and their international debit card product, helping them take this product they've made in Brazil go truly global. For Standard Chartered, an enormous retail banking brand in many countries in the world, we're going to be powering a remittance product out of a number of countries in Asia and the Middle East, helping retail consumers send money at high speed and low cost. Morgan Stanley, obviously a major name in the US and globally, powering fast corporate payments for some of their largest corporate clients.
Itaú, as I mentioned, the initial use cases supporting payments into U.K. and euros. We have already announced we want to launch 12 more currencies by the end of the year as we continue to expand the use cases that we can support for Itaú and their clients. These are just the initial use cases that we go live with. As you can imagine, there are huge, huge opportunities of flows with each of these partners and many of our others of the ability to increase the amount that we can support for them. Once we are live and have proven and successful with some of these use cases, a lot of that heavy lifting of the technical integration, the governance, the contracting, the commercials, all of the big chunky stuff is done. We frontload a lot of that effort.
Whilst it will take time to scale some of these, a lot of that execution is done upfront. Even these initial use cases can have amazing impact. We helped Bank Mandiri, who are Indonesia's largest bank. They have 35 million customers in Indonesia. We helped them launch a new solution, remittance solution for their retail customers. In the months following this launch, where they were trying to reclaim some of this market share, they saw a 20% month-on-month growth in the volume that their customers were doing with them. Like an incredible success very, very quickly. They saw these very quick signs that by using Wise Platform, they were really solving those customer pain points that had led them to discuss with us in the first place. These use cases really help unlock those conversations on future growth and what more we can do together.
These partners and many, many others are making up this growing global network of partners that run on Wise Platform across all regions globally. It's really exciting that more and more of the best, best companies in the world are running on Wise Platform. This becomes that increasingly powerful network of customers and accounts and partners connected into one network, into one scheme of Wise. Once connected to the network, we can really simplify and improve money movement between, say, a customer of Monzo in the U.K. and a customer of Nubank in Brazil. We can really make those transactions truly instant, always efficient, lower cost, and far more secure, clearing and settling directly through this Wise network. As this network grows and the number of partners grow and the number of connected customers grow, it becomes an increasingly powerful effect.
This is ultimately that next generation of global payments infrastructure that we're building and are talking about. It's growing pretty quickly. We expect Wise Platform to be approximately 10% of Wise's FX volume in the medium term. That's up from approximately 4% today. Long term, we expect this to be the majority of our volume. If we're going to capture a large part of that GBP 32 trillion market, the majority is going to need to come from using this infrastructure in the tools customers are already using in their banks, in their platforms. That is a long-term play, right? Especially to capture that big opportunity of tier one and tier two banks. There's still obviously a very exciting short and medium-term growth that we're going to see. What's driving that and how do we increase that? Firstly, the market is growing.
The market is really growing here. More and more banks and platforms are looking to invest in cross-border. Banks' openness and willingness and technical ability to work with third parties is also changing very fast as they modernize tech stacks and approaches to partnering versus buy versus build start to change, not just for cross-border, but for any solutions they're offering their customers. Our recent announcements show that this is shifting, but it's an ongoing shift, right? It's not a big bang that happens at once. Banks offer hundreds of products to their customers, typically domestic customers and typically domestic-focused products. Cross-border isn't always priority one. It's not always their key focus. It starts to shift as we see the growth cycle drive. This is the really interesting growth cycle.
As we invest in our infrastructure, we make it lower cost, we make it faster, it becomes more efficient. This drives the growth in key markets that Harsh talked about and drives more customers to switch to Wise. Interestingly, this really then drives banks' propensity to invest in cross-border. They see their customers seeking out alternatives, and they see it's the proven Wise infrastructure providing those customers a solution. These banks then starting to invest drive other banks to invest as that network effect gets stronger. We see this allows us to invest back in the network and continue that loop. It drives these more customers, more accounts, and more endpoints connected to this Wise network, helping us build the best correspondent infrastructure in the world.
Really importantly in this conversation, we help banks understand how many of their customers are using Wise today, what for, why they're using it, how they're using it, and also how to get them to switch back to the bank's own solutions once we've helped them build something amazing for their customers. That's a really key number we track on each partnership is how many customers switch back once the bank has built something incredible and that we've built a really good offering. Can we speed up this growth cycle? Of course. Firstly, everything you've heard today that we've discussed about Wise Account, Wise Business, and the investments in marketing help drive this faster. Because of a lot of those investments and the awareness that we drive, we have really strong brand awareness amongst buyers.
Cian said if he picks up the phone to HR teams of major corporates, a lot of them are Wise Account customers already. It is the same with a lot of the banks we talk to. A lot of the decision makers and buyers use Wise in their personal lives and have had that amazing experience with the infrastructure through the Wise Account today. They already know what it can do. It has proven what it can do. It kind of means we punch above our weight quite a lot in awareness with decision makers. We are really ramping up investment in Wise Platform, in awareness of Wise Platform as a solution that Wise offers. It is the newest part of our business. We do this, as Cian said, in a lot of the marketing channels, but through those channels that drive strong and scalable ROI.
It's a pretty relationship-led sale here. There's not that many decision makers in a lot of these organizations, and particularly with banks, it's a fairly small, small community. We are being very intentional about building out this community, creating and cultivating the network and relationships. Not everyone might be buying now, but they are going to be buying in the next few years. We want Wise Platform to be front of mind today and when they're taking those decisions in the years to come. We do some really exciting things like hosting our own flagship conferences in three different regions around the world, where we get hundreds of decision makers from our key target customers to come together, to share learnings, to talk about what we've been up to, and to figure out how we can make this better for customers as a whole.
They come to learn more, and we do this to keep people really engaged through that multi-year sales cycle. We keep this ongoing through other roundtables, smaller forums, and ramping up our presence at major industry events, some of the large payments conferences or relevant conferences for our sectors. How do we increase investing in our presence at these events to always be front of mind for decision makers? We are also really rapidly investing in and scaling our go-to-market and delivery teams. We are going to double this year, hiring across the globe and investing aggressively to meet and drive this growing market opportunity. Not just investing in the team, but the team efficiency and our coverage and footprint globally to have more and more of these conversations.
As this growth cycle drives the market growth, we're going to continue to scale quickly here to meet and drive that too. That org is built on our scalable infrastructure. This is the infrastructure that's key. All of those investments that we've talked about today continue to make it stronger. Excitingly, as this infrastructure gets stronger for ourselves, it equally gets stronger for our partners. Everyone benefits from this moat that we're really building. As we reduce costs, increase speed, expand coverage, our direct customers benefit and our platform customers benefit. Our network continues to get stronger. You've heard this same message today because it's the same underlying foundation to solve this cross-border problem for anyone, anywhere.
Whether that's an individual buying an ice cream on a holiday, a small business paying an invoice, a large bank serving tens of millions of customers, our infrastructure and investments in that will benefit them all. This is how we will reach those hundreds of millions of people and companies around the world with that cross-border need and truly create this money without borders.
Thank you very much. I'd like to hand over now to our CFO, Emmanuel.
Thank you, sir. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you. Thank you for being here today. My name is Emmanuel. In 2024, I've become wiser. Much more wiser. The mic's not on. There you go. Saying wiser, but not connected. Is it better now? Yes. I became wiser. The reason why I became wiser, I joined Wise as a Chief Financial Officer. That was the first reason.
The second one, I moved from the U.K. to Germany and I was on the Wise account. Yes, I was not a Wise user. This one, since then, I only use it. It was made that I do not need a bank account in the U.K. I have all my businesses in the U.K., in Europe, and when I am traveling. Yes, I became wiser. Now, six months in, I have to say that I have the privilege to join this company, but also the management team that basically is supporting Kristo for so long. You heard about decades, and it is a real privilege to join this team. I do not see my slide, so maybe, Jack, you can help me here.
Thank you very much. Listening to my colleagues, you heard about how much has been built over the last 14 years.
Chris, the fantastic infrastructure, the innovative product backed by a brand that customers love. This company continues building a unique network to move trillions in volumes across borders while being highly profitable. I am very grateful and proud to be part of this journey. Before exploring our financial expectations for the coming years, I'd like to start with the financial year 2025 on the next slide. As a good CFO, please keep in mind that these numbers are preliminary, and they are pending to our year-end growth process. We are very, very pleased with our performance last year, continued double-digit growth and high margin. This is a result of our investments and hard work from our teams that we see strong growth in across active customers in volumes, but also in balance. All this is driving our strong underlying income and attractive margins.
This is the result of more people and more businesses joining Wise, using us more, and staying with us longer. With 25% year on year, our growth of active customers remains healthy and is driven by trust in our low-cost, fast, and reliable products that basically delight our customers. Customers' holdings grew by more than 30% year on year, including money that they held in their balance, but also in our assets products that are so popular. Cross-border volume grew by 22%. These both metrics continue to scale as our people and businesses move money with us. Our underlying BPT is expecting to come around 20% while continuing to reinvest significantly in our products, in our infrastructure, in marketing, but also in services and price. This is pretty amazing to continue to generate this margin as we continue to invest so massively.
As Kristo mentioned, our reporting BPT will be slightly above GBP 500,000 for 2025. More will be announced in June 2025 about the financial results and the publication of it. Now let's look at the impact of our vision on our financials. We are highly confident that our proven business model is going to drive strong and long-term shareholder value. This will only compound over time as we progress on our vision, money without borders. Since Wise was started, we are following the same principle, the same financial principle to drive sustainable value. We are disciplined and return-led in our investments. We are constantly investing, and through this, we drive down our cost. We drive down our cost. We are down, and this is deep in our moat and also driving strong growth and at attractive margin.
We expect this growth to continue for the long term because the total addressable market, the so-called TAM, is so huge. You heard it already from my colleagues, how exciting we are for the years ahead. The opportunity is not only huge, it's growing. Today, our cross-border volume is equal to GBP 145 billion. This is a drop in the ocean when you compare it to the GBP 32 trillion that we're talking about and tomorrow, the GBP 38 trillion. As importantly, the Wise Platform business grows and significantly more of this, we will access more of this as the TAM is accessible to us. Again, a massive opportunity ahead of us. Now let's look at how we have grown this opportunity over the recent years. Compared to four years ago, we are now serving 2.5 times more customers and moving over 2.5 times more volume.
Our customers are trusting us with six more times of their deposits and their investments. We have grown our underlying income faster than the cross-border volume, reflecting, one, our continuing investments, as we discussed before, but also in lowering prices and also because of the growth of income generated through the Wise account that we discussed before. This is a proof that our investments are making the difference to our customers and drive value for our owners and our customers' lovers. They love our products, and we're really proud of it. They are evangelical of it. This is also what drives our growth. We are proud of our NPS score, and we are still hungry to have it higher. Because we delight our customers with great products and experiences, they recommend us to others.
This is by far the best way to attract and retain them. This is true across the globe. Our active customers are growing strongly across all regions. We either are a newer market that actually are obviously going faster than the most mature market like the U.K. Once they join, they stay with us. Our cohorts are the best evidence of our success. Our customers love our products, and they are sticky and grow with us over time. Every year, we are adding a new cohort, a new one. The cohorts data show strong and consistent retention across both personal and business customers. All combined, the growth and diversity, this is driving our growth and diversity of our income. Our income is highly diversified, with almost a quarter coming from business customers.
Our geographic footprint is also very diversified, limiting the impact of any specific political event. This footprint gives us a broad base to grow. As you heard from Nilan, looking at the first graphic, we see how the Wise account has significantly diversified our business. Today, the Wise account makes up to 40% of our underlying income. This should drive our medium-term growth, as we will cover with the next slides. We continue to expect an underlying income growth by 15%-20% over the medium term, and this net of investments in price. The key drivers for this are the growth of our active customers, the impact of a Wise account on customers' activities, but also on their holdings, driving more underlying interest income, and last but not least, the scaling of our Wise Platform that we saw just now with Steve.
Now, let's take a closer look at each of these pillars, starting with our customer growth. In line with our growth that we've seen over the past years, we expect the numbers of new personal and business customers to grow. Customers are choosing us, are choosing Wise today for the quality of the product, for the strong brand, and the transparency of our attractive pricing. This is all based on a resilient and efficient global infrastructure, as Diana and Harsh presented previously. Since the launch of our Wise Account, we see also an acceleration of the income diversification. As customers adopt the Wise Account, they use it more and more, offer products leading to increased account activity and retention, and solidifying our cohorts. Furthermore, we have seen that the adoption continues to drive very strong card revenue growth.
Obviously, today, in order to use the card, customers need to hold money with us. With the adoption of the Wise Account by both personal and business customers, we see a dramatic increase of almost 50% over the past five years in deposit. Customers now hold more than GBP 17 billion with Wise. Some of these customers also decide to invest part of their holding balance in our assets product. From zero five years ago, assets now stand for more than GBP 4 billion. As a result, in combination, our customers trust us with over GBP 21 billion of their money. Alongside serving more customers directly, we also expect Wise Platform increasingly to contribute to the underlying income growth. As you heard from Steve, increasingly more banks and more online platforms are outsourcing part of their service to Wise.
This volume represents today circa 4% of our cross-border volume today. Over the medium term, we will continue to onboard new partners, but also ramp up the volume of the existing one. As a result, Wise Platform is expected to represent 10% of the cross-border volume midterm. In the longer term, Wise is expecting to generate the majority of our transfer volume via our Wise Platform partner. Price is surely continuing to be a weapon to gain market share in the future. You've seen this slide already with Nilan before. Investments in lowering price are a driver for our growth. In the short term, we see a response for price-sensitive customers. It's also an investment in our brand, fostering the advocacy and also encouraging our customers to stay with us because in the knowledge that they will always, always get the lowest price possible.
Over time, our investors' reduction of unit cost and price will make it harder to compete with us, to compete with Wise. This, in turn, will make it increasingly logical to partner with us as the best infrastructure available for moving money around the world. Lastly, the sixth pillar represents the foundation of our medium-term growth. The growth you see in our customers and partners using Wise is a function of many years of investments in our infrastructure, products, marketing, and services. We plan to scale our availability to invest behind everything that you heard today to fuel for many years of growth. Over the medium term, this would approximately represent a doubling of our annual spend into the running and growing of Wise.
This will include the tripling of investments in marketing, increased hiring into our products and engineering teams, particularly to support initiatives across Wise Business and Wise Platform that you heard about today from Steve, Harsh, and also Nilan. Of course, the investments need to support a larger business with an active customer base that will be twice the size of the 15 million that we serve today. It is our intention to grow into the TAM as much as possible, and this requires from us to focus on investing quickly and effectively. Our investments fuel growth and efficiency in a virtuous circle. While we may start by targeting an underlying BPT margin of 13%-16%, this soon rises as a positive result from previous investments, but also from our cost, from our cost as well as operation efficiencies.
We then reinvest this incremental margin into everything that we heard before, relevant investments such like enhanced products, a more even powerful infrastructure. We increase our marketing, effective services, and also lower prices. Today, we feel comfortable to reiterate our medium-term guidance. Underlying income is expected to grow at 15%-20%, driven by continuing investments. Underlying profit before tax margin is targeted at 13%-16%. However, for the upcoming fiscal year 2026, we expect our underlying BPT to be around the top of the guidance. Thank you. As we expect the ramp-up of our investments. How does the underlying BPT convert in free cash flow? Over the last five years, our capital-efficient business model leads to high cash generation and a free cash flow conversion of over 100%. Due to our strong business performance, Wise is and will continue to generate excess capacities.
As a result, we have defined a capital allocation framework on the next page. We follow a disciplined capital allocation framework built on three pillars. The first one, we maintain a strong capital position to ensure resilience and also flexibility, but also to meet all requirements from regulators. Also, as part of our corporate strategy, we recently underwent a credit scoring process. Today, we are pleased to announce that Wise received an investment grade triple B from both S&P and Fitch. This will allow us to optimize the funding of our working capital. Also, today, we initiated an additional share purchase program of circa 25 million shares starting in this year, the fiscal year 2026. This will ensure that the employees' benefit trust is fully funded from all historic unexercised options.
To also ensure that no shareholder dilution occurs as a result of this employee stock program. As of today's share price, depending on how the market is evolving today, this will represent around GBP 250 million of capital being used for this purpose. Yeah, and this is on top of our ongoing annual repurchase program, which we saw so far this year, we repurchased 9 million shares. We put our focus on all organic investment opportunities. However, we will also consider selective bolt-on M&A to complement our growth strategy and also strengthen our market position. To sum up our financial key takeaway, the first one, we have strong long-term potential for sustained customer growth. Our business is evolving, bringing high-value customers. A profitable business model supports growth investments at attractive return and margin delivery.
We generate strong cash to fund growth, but also we will follow a disciplined capital allocation by focusing on long-term shareholder value. With that, let me return the mic to Kristo for some final words.
Thanks so much. It is really only going to be a few words before we launch into the Q&A. Started a bit later, so thanks for bearing with us. I want to just say a few things at the back of all of my team. We have every reason to be enthusiastic about this relentless expansion that Harsh and Diana talked us through, and this geographic reach, these improvements in cost and speed through infrastructure and the direct network build-out, it's increasing adoption through marketing that Cian talked about, it's benefits of scale that play through to the financials and more. It's a really good time to be here.
We are not in this position by accident. It is the result of over a decade taking the hard options over the easy ones. It's building infrastructure over gimmicks. It's avoiding distractions, embracing local laws and regulations, financial prudence, and steady prioritization of customer outcomes. The success that we talked about today, it did not really come overnight. It came over a long term. It comes through us maintaining our focus on this mission. I think the next 10 years are not going to be easier than the last 14. They will demand no less discipline in adhering to our principles. You own a company like no other in recent history, one that has set the foundations to eventually fix how money works across borders, across national borders for people, for businesses.
It is your support as owners who will keep our focus on becoming the network for the world's money. This will be at the point where the point at which both customer and shareholder value are at the greatest and the most aligned. I would like to thank you for the time today. Everyone who traveled, we have one of our first board members here, our current board members here. We will have a lot of owners in the room, quite a lot of people on the Zoom. Thank you for coming. We are now open to questions. I will invite Martin here because Martin will kind of facilitate the questions and my team back as well. Thank you.
Thanks, Kristo. Okay, we have 45 minutes for Q&A. What we will do is we will start in the room before moving online for some of the questions.
We've got a couple of mics that will be passed around. If I could please ask you to introduce yourself and the company you're representing, please do limit yourself to a maximum of two questions, please, so that we can get around to everybody because I can already see a lot of hands in the air, a lot of questions we'd like to be asked. Once you've asked your question or questions, please do hand back the microphone so we can get it to the next person and keep things moving. Thank you. If we could just start at the front here with Hannes, please. Thanks.
Do you hear me? Yes. Hannes Leitner from Jefferies. I got two questions. The first one maybe on Wise Platform. Can you, where is he sitting here?
Can you maybe talk a little bit about the current costs associated and the people working in the projects and as it scales, how the funding is working? The second question is on to Kristo. As we have talked today, thank you for the presentation, especially on Wise Platform. When you think about the personal business, you pitched that basically you are going now to the banks to enable them that they can compete with a better infrastructure. How should we think about the trajectory of the core business up to today? How does that continue to grow and how you will service that without cannibalizing it?
Very cool. Let's start with Steve. Cool.
I can start. Is this microphone, is it working? Yeah, you can hear me.
We have a global team who work with talking to the partners, delivering the solutions, working with their engineers, their product teams, helping them build an amazing product. This is, you know, the sales and delivery functions that I mentioned we're doubling in this year. This growth and investment is based on the growth that we see in the demand. We have a lot more partners wanting to talk with us, as I shared, a lot more banks particularly looking to invest in this space. As we see this demand, we'll continue to grow these teams out of Singapore and Asia-Pacific, out of London and Europe, and out of Austin and New York in the US to serve our clients in the markets they're in.
As this continues to grow, we'll keep hiring and scaling in this space and building this team out to support that number of partners that we have. Yes, we charge, obviously, our partners for using the service. We can charge based on the costs that we incur. Thankfully, with platform, we have a lot lower costs than we do on a direct business. The costs of customer acquisition, the costs of onboarding and servicing, we do not always incur. That means we can give our partners a good low cost for the service that they are buying from Wise. We still need to make a good contribution margin and run it at the same contribution margin as the rest of the business.
I'll take the second one on the really direct-to-consumer businesses.
Actually, that was still quite a bit of most of almost what you talked about. We're building both for people, for businesses, for banks, for platform, but it's all leveraging the same infrastructure. I think one kind of frame to keep in mind is a lot of our investment goes into what Diana and Harsh were talking about and the kind of the other infrastructure around this. Every time we add a kind of a new segment or a new go-to-market, it kind of gives more leverage to the investment that we're making. We kind of see more payback on the things that we've already invested in. This is not going anywhere. We see that it actually works quite well with the platform business together.
Thank you. Kristo. Hi. Thank you for the presentation. More from Goldman.
One for Steve and then one for Kristo and maybe Emmanuel as well. Steve, just on the platforms, you talked about the contribution sort of now rising from 4% to 10% of medium term, suggesting you're going to grow twice as fast or more than the group. How much of that growth is kind of covered by perhaps some of the recent scale wins? If we sort of start to see more references, would that be just simply on top? I just want to understand that visibility and how much of sort of this growth is obviously not all in your control because it's down to how quickly you can integrate. You talked about some of the antiquated versus the modern systems. Obviously the customer's choice to use different kind of products as well. Maybe help us kind of understand those moving parts.
Then the one for kind of Kristo and Emmanuel is obviously you talk about a sizable TAM still in front of you. Absolutely makes sense to keep investing back in the business, but we're already seeing some of the operational leverage and sort of perhaps the short-term overshoot in the margin. At what point do you sort of, you know, have the decision to make around perhaps letting some of that operating leverage drop through? Or maybe Kristo, are there any other areas of investment that we're missing? Thank you.
Does anything else start with Steve?
Yeah, I can kick off. I think if you look at the partner base we have today, the map of the logos, we work with a number of really, really exciting businesses and partners.
Some of them very fast-growing themselves, which of course will drive a lot of growth in the short and medium term. Then some of those much larger logos, the Standard Chartered, the Morgan Stanley, where we will see that ramp up, which will take kind of over that medium-term time frame. Of course, we have partners at every stage of the pipeline from ones that have just launched and announced the ITOs. We announced partnerships with Spendesk last week and Zempla Bank in the U.K. They will continue to ramp up. There is a lot of growth from this existing customer base as well as that pipeline continuing to move through.
Moving outside and over to Emmanuel. From our perspective, I hope this came across a little bit today, but the opportunity is so obvious today that we are investing behind.
Can we do a little bit of a return analysis or ROI kind of analysis? On behalf of shareholders, we kind of have to invest behind them. At this point, that's kind of looking at the medium to medium term. We have struck this balance of like we invest everything we can, but we still keep a really good, profitable business that's growing its balance sheet, that's becoming very attractive for credit rating agencies. I think we have a really good balance of capturing that future growth and at the same time being a really, really sound, profitable business.
I think the key one, Kristo, I mean, we've seen the massive opportunity in front of us. We are investing while we're still, you know, generating quite sizable profit. You know, we guide the market 13%-16% midterm.
We already announced today that 2026, we are around the top of the range. As we ramp up the investment, as we see these investments paying off and it's a good return, I think for the foreseeable future, like midterm, we continue to invest while generating this profit for 13%-16%.
Thank you very much. Alexandre Faure with [Exane ]. Thank you so much for thank you so much for doing this today. A couple of questions, one on personal, one on business. I think on personal, you showed that slide and you commented that basically the typical Wise users on the left of the slide were maybe less profitable than heavier users on the right of the slide. I suppose you want to focus on expatriates as you used to and price modification sort of indicate that.
I mean, from that standpoint, should we really still care about personal net adds that you continue to disclose or do you want to supplement that with other sort of disclosure around higher amount users or anything like that we should expect from you? On business, I think you also talked about maybe moving up the ladder, addressing slightly bigger SMEs. Do you think you need to complement what you provide with maybe FX hedging services? Is it something you would consider? You do not want to go there. You know, how should we think about that? I think I had quite a few product questions for maybe Nilan, and then there is a bit of a disclosure of like, what do we close and disclose a new ad?
Thanks for the question.
Yeah, the slide that showed the range of customer segments, I didn't, I didn't, they're all, we don't, we don't have, I didn't, I didn't comment on the profitability of the segments. I commented on the value, valuable value of the segments. We strive to serve all our customers profitably. As I said, our Wise Account customers now are operating at a 40-50% contribution margin, and that's with no conversion income. Am I on? I thought I was on. I'm on. Okay. Sorry. Hello. Hello. Hello. Yeah. At a 40-50% contribution margin. That's point number one.
And then onto business, and then I'll come back to, oh sorry, on the high value segments, we continue to see, as our price drops, we continue to see customers moving ever larger amounts with us as we become more relevant for that customer base. I'll hand over to Emmanuel in a minute to talk about disclosures around that. Your question around business remind me was around hedging. Yeah. We already offer pretty good getting started product, which is our guaranteed rate product. When you come to Wise, you can guarantee the rates. We don't yet see actually that much demand for hedging yet from our current business base. Even from our platform customers, it's not yet, it's not yet a requirement. They use hedging solutions alongside Wise. At this stage, no, no plans.
Over to you, to Emmanuel, to talk about disclosure.
What was the question? Sorry, can you repeat the question on disclosure?
I think changing the disclosure because maybe personal data does not really matter like you.
No, at this moment, we do not foresee to change disclosure, but you know, it might change in the future, but right now, we do not think so.
Yeah, thank you.
Yanis, thank you.
Thank you. Hello. Hi, Yanis from Aperture Investors. Thank you, everyone, for your presentation. Two quick questions. The first one is on the financial targets. On the margin where you have guided to 13-16% over the medium term underlying PBT, today you are at 20%. You had the slide saying point, you know, 0.1, 30-60%, 0.2 margin expansion. Today you are already above 13-16%.
Just in terms of the shape of that margin over the next five years, as you ramp investments, would you expect it to come down to the 13-16% window, but then maybe five years from now be back up to 20%? Or would you expect a steady state after you're through the phase of investments to be even higher than 20%? Also bearing in mind that I guess Wise Platform has a higher operating leverage because you're not acquiring thousands of consumers, you're acquiring, you know, 10 big banks. That's the first question on the financials. I'll pause there.
Yeah, concerning the margin, I mean, like we report 22% half year, you know, we end up the year at 20%.
You can already see that the investments we continue to do are paying off in terms of, you know, we are able to invest. We guide the market midterm for 13-16%. However, already for next year, we already announced that, you know, we would be at around the top of the range. It will depend on our capacity to invest. We see that we have the capacity. We announced today that we invest year to date $3 billion in our products and we will accelerate the investment. This is also what we announced. Hence, we feel comfortable to guide the market with this midterm guidance. Long term, it will depend on our capacity to invest and also how much of the time we have been getting or market share we've been getting.
I think long term, I will not pronounce myself on the margin. It will really depend on our capacity to invest at a good return. I mean, that's obviously important. I mean, I mentioned several times today the good, the discipline, the framework that we are using and that you could consider that we will continue to do so.
Okay. Understood. Thank you. The second question is on understanding your cost differentiation and scale leadership. You were saying how the bigger the network, the greater the cost differentiation. Just to understand, is it, you know, it's, it's, is it a kind of asymptotic curve until you hit the spot FX rate? I'm wondering if in certain corridors where you have enough liquidity pools to not use the correspondent banking system, it's essentially zero cost.
Is it the cost curve that you're riding down, is it more of a binary question? In this currency corridor, you have enough liquidity pools to not need to use the correspondent banking system at all. In another corridor, you do not. In that case, are you riding down a cost curve after a certain point or is it just a kind of, is it a binary after a certain level of liquidity you're there and it's kind of as good as it gets cost-wise for that corridor?
It's quite a numerical question, but it's maybe either Diana or Harsh, you want to kind of think about how do you think about costs?
Yeah, I can get started and Harsh might add. When we think about the underlying cost, it's not only the FX, it's also the cost of moving payments.
This is what we continuously are able to drop. On one hand, from the FX perspective, as we are present in more markets, we have the ability to keep liquidity in these markets. We also have our own treasury system that enables us to predict how much money needs to be in every market to complete payments instantly. The faster that we can move these payments also means that we are maintaining FX risk very controlled. The other bit is whenever a customer initiates a payment or whenever we are initiating a payment to move money to another bank account, this has an underlying cost. As we replace intermediaries with our direct connection, the cost drops, becoming almost zero, which is the underlying cost of moving this payment in the national payment system.
I think Diana covered most of it.
I think the key to think about and what we try to communicate, if you think longer term about as we talk about moving trillions and becoming the network for the world's money, eventually as these nodes, as we get more users, more of Steve and team's work comes on with live on the network with more bank partners and the financial institutions, eventually the closed loop nature of the network should even drive that cost further down, right? Because eventually if you're onboarded to the Wise network on both sides, then the cost of moving that transaction is very, very minimal, right? That should then in the longer run drive that cost curve much further down.
Hi, Alex Rohr with Emmett Partners, one for Kristo.
If underlying income growth before any pricing activity over the next few years is 15%-20%, would you still look to cut the cross-border FX take rate even if it takes you below the target underlying income growth range?
We do not, we do not really guide gross or what is before. We guide to 15%-20% in midterm. That already expects that we will make also progress in tightening the screws in pricing. That is already kind of part of the assumption.
Understood. On the buyback, obviously it is very encouraging to see that the incremental buyback intention, we just love a little bit more context, you know, why now is GBP 1.3 billion just a number that you sort of had in your head that, you know, we have real flexibility to deploy capital because obviously you are generating so much cash every single year.
Just what's going to happen with all that cash and what's going to happen to that? I think this works now.
Okay. The capital buyback that we announced today is one step. We announced it's one step to share buyback that we do today. It doesn't exclude you to do further down the road with the excess capacities that we need to generate. Keep in mind that, you know, this is 25 million shares that we are talking about, plus 9 million shares that we buy back already per year. That's around 3% of our total shares that we are buying back that we announced today. After this one, we'll see what we do, but we felt comfortable to announce the first step first.
Hi, Sven McPhom Barclays. Thank you very much for the presentation today. I have two questions on platform, actually.
Maybe first, I'm interested to have your perspective on what the financial incentive really is for banks to partner with you. Obviously, we heard in the beginning they have very high fees and if they partner with you, they potentially cannibalize their own business. Just interested to hear what you think, how you can overcome that and how you can make the financial model attractive for them. Secondly, if we think about the very long term, you're obviously aiming to get the majority of your volumes from the platform business. What other obstacles do you might need to overcome besides these financial incentives to get to that figure?
Cool. Thanks for the question. On the financial incentives, I would look at this from more the cost angle than the fee to customer angle.
If you're a bank, you look at how much is it costing you to serve this segment today, right? You have all of the costs I've kind of touched on of these payment contacts. You have operational teams trying to answer customer questions, figure out where money has maybe got stuck or is missing and why it hasn't arrived. This is operationally expensive and painful. If Wise Platform can come and help and say, we know where that money is every step of the way, more than 60% of it arrives instantly in 20 seconds, that drives a significant reduction in customer contacts in these kind of where is my money questions because it's already arrived.
If you can take a lot of that cost out for the bank and for our partners, which is of course what we aim to do, that provider then has flexibility on their commercial model, right? They could look to expand their margin, they could look to reduce their take rate and pass some of those savings on and be more competitive, which is their commercial decision I would not comment on. Our goal is to help make this more efficient, a better experience, drive that customer growth, reacquisition, prevent the churn and lower that cost base for the partner. If we can do that, you can get a pretty compelling business case and financial model together. In terms of the long-term scaling, I think it is all the things that we have touched on today.
I don't think it's much else that we need to keep investing in that infrastructure, in the direct connections to schemes, in more efficient operations and scalability and automations, in growing and expanding our treasury and the technical infrastructure. All of these things we're continuing to do will keep making this infrastructure the most scalable, efficient, low-cost and effective, secure way to move money.
Yeah, I don't know if you'll... Can I add that just a little bit? Just to think about it from the, let's take a traditional bank from their perspective. In many countries, they now have pretty formidable challengers as well. Steve already serves these challengers and the customers that are using the challengers get like instant cross-border payments at a very low fee.
The one, the smart way that many traditional banks think is, you know, they do not want their customers to go onto the challenger. They would rather be the challengers to themselves, to their maybe slightly more sleepy peers. I think the other dynamic that, you know, we should not ignore is just the competitive dynamic for banks, not just in cross-border payments, but for bank accounts.
Hey everybody. My name is Grant Rhodes. Thank you for the wonderful presentation, all of you. I think I am sorry to pick on you, Steve. This one is going to be for you again, but also maybe it is a bit of Harsh, a bit of Diana too. What makes your offering different from Visa Direct? What makes your offering different from JP Morgan Chase and Citi? Love to hear. Thank you.
I'll actually pass this one more to Harsh and Diana because the way I would answer this is just a tee-up answer and then you can jump in. We fundamentally believe the winner in this space over time will be the player with the best quality infrastructure. The word we use with our partners a lot is look at that infrastructure quality, right? Not just the headline numbers on how many countries you can send to and how many current, like these are nice, but what is driving that behind the scenes? How the straight-through processing rates, the effectiveness and efficiency of that infrastructure. This is Harsh and Diana's piece on what we're building there to make that the most highest quality infrastructure.
Let me... Yeah, I mean, look, this is a space where we have different operators.
Like you named, like you know, Visa is obviously deployed in a lot of... The one thing I see about Visa is like they've got a lot of good distribution, right? And great relationships. You know, this is one part of the larger business. Like if you're going, if you're in Visa, like you're looking at issuance, it's the behemoth that always gets all the focus. And then these are side businesses, right? They'll grow and we'll see how they'll do. If I were to compare directly, I would say if you look at our infrastructure connections and like how many we have already and the headstart we've had, all the investments we've made in the last 14 years, I think we are already ahead on direct connections than like you know, Currencycloud, right? We'll continue to invest in assets today.
JPM, great team. We work with them across the world too. One of the things that sometimes I think people do not realize is what makes Wise Platform better is the fact that we build a consumer business first. If you are just running a B2B business, you are giving an API to somebody else and say, "Here, as Steve said, like there is a number of connections in different countries. We can do that for you too." They have actually not figured out how many RFIs happen every day on that network. How do you make that loop faster? How do you serve a guaranteed rate that nobody else did before Wise came around? We said, you know, we will give you a guaranteed rate for 24 hours. Nobody does that, right? How did we figure that out? There is a big liquidity model behind this.
How do we manage FX risk? All of this, if you're just connecting to a B2B provider with an API, it's fronted to the bank, right? This is what makes this product really powerful. We have done things like the data models we run on delivery estimates. Like how do we get to the point, like Kristo said, like Wise should not have existed, right? Somehow we figured out a way to get money from one point to the other side of the planet in 20 seconds. With the liquidity being there and the fraud checks being there, all of these processing, it was because we built it first for our customers and saw the pain points. They call us, they tell us where the money's stuck, what's going on. Those learnings are now all packaged in this API.
That I think, and it's not like we had this vision. I would say like it is like incremental learnings as you go along and you build a business. That's I think a pretty big moat for us.
Thanks.
Alex Short from Berenberg. Just to follow up to that, does all the hard work that you've done in getting these direct connections that you're up to eight now reduce the barriers to entry for your competitors in doing the same thing? If not, why not? Why would they not take that same approach given all the benefits that you've told us about? Then secondly, in terms of the U.S., getting a direct connection there, has the new US administration or indeed the deal with Morgan Stanley provided any opportunity or changed the state of play there in any way? Yeah.
Sorry, just, how much do you think that would move the needle in terms of being able to share operational and scale efficiencies with your customers?
The first part of the question about whether the progress that we make in these direct connections, is this making it easier for newcomers? The answer is yes and no. Yes in the sense that all our efforts with policymakers, with the regulators at the G20 level as well, are making progress towards removing this barrier to entry to the payment systems that traditionally was reserved only to banks. Of course, when the regulation changes, when the law changes, it changes for everyone. It changes for everyone that has then the ability to get this authorization. As I was explaining, it is not for everyone. It is not for every non-bank financially regulated institution.
That is the first step, getting this license. Once this license comes in, it goes, we go through a process with a payment network that requires really high standards from a technology, from an operational perspective, requirements around the type of servers or cloud-based around our resilience, our business continuity plans. It does not mean that the fact that the law changed and that we were the first non-bank to do it, others will follow. Whether others might follow, they might. Also, the difference is we already have a very strong head start. We have done this in six countries. We are about to go live in two more. We have proven that we are getting faster at doing this. We are able to do it in parallel.
I think it's a very good example that this year we are delivering to one in Brazil and the other one all the way in Japan. It's the scale of building this.
I'll just add one more thing to that. Sometimes we tend to forget like all of this is also driven by the profitable business model that Manuel talked about, right? You need to generate that free cash flow and you need to generate that ability to then invest back, right? And run these teams in parallel. Like you know, Diana's team is out there in multiple countries changing laws and doing this thing. It has, you have to have the longer-term vision and the ability to invest that much money and have this financial model that's running and kicking off the ability to then invest.
Like you know, we're talking about investing GBP 2 billion in the next two years. Like I don't think there's a lot of providers with this level of focus to just in cross-border to do this, right? I think that I think I answered your question. The U.S., thank you. Thanks for the reminder. U.S. obviously is one of the big markets we focused on, which is not directly connected. I won't comment too much in the politics of it, but we'll see how it goes. Obviously, there's some interesting changes and desire to show that the U.S. is being more innovative. We are very heavily engaged. I was in D.C. yesterday. The point here is I think there might be an opportunity where the lawmakers are actually looking to open up to more innovative ideas. I'll leave it at that.
It is a big market for us, of course. We do a large part of our business is USD clearing.
Great,
thank you. If you'd like to raise your hand just so I can get a sense of how many more questions in the room. If you're joining via Zoom, if you want to digitally raise your hand as well, that would be great. If we could just go to the back initially here, thank you.
Hi, thank you. [Celia Duncan from Metis]. It follows on from the last two questions. Is there anyone you see who is following you and doing a good job of it? In competition that you that bothers you. In particular, particularly in the platform side or everywhere?
Everyone.
I mean, I am trying to try to kind of paint a picture.
We're now the kind of one of the 50 largest companies in the U.K. We're very profitable. We're doing well. There's a lot of people who are kind of trying to see is could they do this as well? Of course they can. I mean, we did it. It can be done. It's clear. We don't really see that much following. I think if you look at niches, if you look at some countries, and if you look at Nilan, so Nilan had these different use cases across the top of who we serve. I think we will see in different use cases, competitors emerge in different countries or different routes, competitors emerge. I think it's kind of hard to see someone with that breadth of functionality.
I think what's especially unique is, you know, we heard there's these competitors on the platform side that our audience members mentioned, but they won't be competing on the like business banking side, for example. It is quite fascinating that we have kind of that breadth of proposition. Of course, we'll have competitors in each of those, but I don't see anyone coming at that scale.
I'm going to pick on Steve again, I'm afraid, and also one for Cian. Steve, if you were to take all of your platform customers today and consider the addressable FX volumes at those customers, can you give us a sense of how big they are? Cian, you're talking about investing more in brand marketing. Do you mind talking us through the framework for how you analyze the returns on that part of the spend?
Yeah, so I think if you, I mean, if you look at the list of names and logos, you can start to back calculate to the TAM potentially a little bit. So you know, what is Morgan Stanley's share of corporate customers in the U.S.? What is Standard Chartered's retail bank market share? If you assume these have a like relatively even distribution of the cross-border need and the cross-border market, which I think is a fair assumption, you can start to get a feel for what share of the TAM that might be. Obviously, like I said, we're serving a number of use cases, different initial use cases for these partners today. There's a huge amount of scaling we can do with all the partners that we have, particularly those bigger banks and bigger logos.
There is a massive opportunity with a huge number of these partners, as well as continuing to bring more through the pipeline.
I guess I was also thinking though, for us, is all of their volume addressable or is there something that is never addressable?
I would not say anything is never addressable. You know, there are always segments that perhaps we are still working towards serving. There are certain corridors perhaps we are not live with yet that we will be launching and bringing online. Again, as we improve and deepen that infrastructure and expand the use cases, expand the markets we operate in, unlock more and more of that coverage, the addressable percentage of that increases a lot. If you look at the 160 plus countries we send to today, we can address a huge chunk of this volume already.
I think often people say it's impossible to understand the impact of brand marketing and it's, you have to just trust it. The way we approached it was fairly scientific. For example, in Australia, we split the country up into various test cells. We held for nearly a year now the activity we're doing in half the region and we exposed the other half to the advertising you saw. We were able to see awareness lifting to start with and then emerging this lift in new registrations, which then held even after we stopped the activity. We started to triangulate this relationship between awareness, this type of marketing, and then the long-term effects it can have on growth.
We can then square that back to the cost of investment, as well as being able to isolate some of the different activities we tried, such as television versus out of home, and build this framework of how to test next. I think that bottom-up approach allows us not to fall in the trap of having to say, half of my marketing isn't working. I don't know which half. I don't think we have to be bound to that.
Those awareness stats show, were they for the part that have seen the brand tattoo with that, the whole company?
Yes, so where we exposed, we saw that lift.
Great, thanks Cian. We're just coming to the front here. Yep. We'll pass the microphone over to the left. Thank you.
Thank you. David Hampton, thanks again for this presentation. It's been very good.
I'm sorry, Steve, this may be for you. I'm not sure, maybe not. If it makes sense that to get to trillions, you'll have to work with the banks. That makes sense. Surely if you look through those banks to why they're moving trillions, it's got to be large corporates for a lot of that. I guess I'm just curious, why isn't that an available business for you? I mean, I understand they probably have their own treasury department, but they can't be as sophisticated as you are. Just like you built a billion-dollar consumer business as an app, you said, for banks. Your own business serves as a global business where you know nobody can be as sophisticated as you. I would have to think some tech companies that are global would be open to working with you directly.
Maybe actually Nilan, you should start answering this from a Wise Business perspective on the corporate segment and then I can come back to the banks piece.
No worries. I'll hit it hard on the platform as well. Help you out with some of the platform questions, Steve. If you think about onboarding a corporate as opposed to onboarding a business, just picking up from where Steve said, the banks go through the process of onboarding a corporate, which is similar to onboarding a business from a KYC perspective. Then you just think through the infrastructure you'll need to build out to support onboarding that corporate. That's not just from supporting their organization, but also what kind of features would they need? What kind of FX products would they need?
The bit that becomes the pinch point is how much, how large are the flows they're moving, and what are the fees they're currently paying their current provider? When I talk through, as we drop our price, we become more relevant to ever larger segments. These are the types of segments I was talking to.
The only thing I'd add there as well is when we talk to banks that serve in corporate clients, there's a lot of stickiness in the wider relationship and those workflows, which Nilan touched on, right? It's not just a case of this corporate is someone is wanting to send a million-dollar payment and they're kind of clicking through. They've built automations, workflows, their users, their processes.
Sometimes it's quite deeply connected or have very specific use cases and flows that couple those corporates and some of their cross-border flows to that bank. That's the segment where platform really serves well, where all of that is set up and working today. We can kind of sit on the back end managing that cross-border flow. As the business account grows and expands and we support more of those workflows and features, yeah, we can start serving more of them directly as well. Yeah, you let Martin.
Thank you. Richard from Inflection Point. First question, maybe just on M&A. I understand it's just a slight change in posture, but obviously of historical ground organically. Why change now and what type of acquisitions would you make? Was it to acquire licenses, just accelerate growth? It's the first one.
Second one is there was a brief mention of Wise checkouts. I understand it's a long-term project, but obviously you're a late comer in this area. Could be quite a big opportunity, but like what's your vision for the unique value proposition that Wise is going to offer to merchants down the line?
The thing let's try and do this. Diana has been buying companies here, so she's done the M&A. Maybe I mean you've been buying lots of companies in the previous life and then maybe you're coming to the checkout, so let's do this.
Yes. When it comes to M&A, you're right, we have done our expansion and our deepening of infrastructure organically. Primarily, we have bought one small company in India to acquire a license. Would there be other opportunities like this?
Maybe from a speed, from a building relationship with the regulator, explaining our business plan, there's not dramatically, it doesn't get faster. We've done it and we might continue evaluating potential targets, at least on the expansion area.
I think, like, I hope you can hear, there's no concrete plan on M&A. This is something that we want to consider for sure. There's also no, I would say, track record or legacy and knowledge that we have. We want to start to understand, is there an M&A out there that would be interesting for us? There is no concrete plan in the short term. That's something that I think we should look at the company. Cool. Is it one of the capital location framework that you, I mean, one of the part of the capital location framework?
Clearly, we concentrate, as I said before, on organic investments, but why not considering M&A potentially? We would be very careful before doing one because I know the price to pay in terms of integration efforts, in terms of distractions. That is something that we would be looking at in a very solid manner, despite the due diligence and everything. The integration is, the success of an M&A is the quality of the integration. For that, you have to build knowledge teams before you start to do M&A. No, Nilan.
Yeah, the Wise checkout example was kind of illustrative of how within Wise, we've got the building blocks for building standalone products. Those standalone products could be in the future, things like expense management or things like checkout.
Today, you can send a link to somebody to get paid, and they can pay you from their Wise account. They can pay you from their card as well. Over time, merchants are already asking us, well, can I embed this directly on my platform? Now, that is quite a big step up from where we are today, and we will look at how we build towards that over time. People would choose us only where our infrastructure enables us to differentiate. Where merchants have a significant cross-border volume and cross-border customer base, we should and we can offer those settling of those payments much cheaper than anyone else in the market. Any further questions in the room? Have we got Adrian right in the far corner? Thanks, Kathy.
Just a quick reminder while we're getting the mic over, if you are joining via Zoom and you want to ask a question, please raise your hand.
Thank you. Perfect. Thank you. Adam Wood from Morgan Stanley. I think they're both kind of two follow-ups. Maybe just on that one, really interesting to see the broader vision for Wise Business. I guess as SMBs digitize, there's a lot of opportunities for more modern companies to improve the services they get. What you're looking at starts to move into what accounting software providers are delivering. We just talked about acquiring there. I guess there's vertical SaaS companies in there as well. How broad is the vision and what would you want to do in that SMB world as you go forward over the next few years?
Are there areas that you would kind of draw the line and say, no, no, we wouldn't go into that space? Just secondly, going back to the large enterprise opportunity, I think at Direct Listing, the idea was that it was difficult to compete in large enterprise because what they were paying for FX transfers just wasn't very big, and the opportunity was more with personal and with SMBs. I guess the platform solves the distribution challenge for you, but from the point of view of being able to execute at lower cost than the big banks and then being able to manage much higher scale transactions on your treasury platform, how do you think about that? Is it what's making the difference now for you to go after that opportunity much more aggressively?
Cool. Thank you.
I'll start with business and then tuck it as I do want to.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the only thing before Nilan starts on business, I kind of like your question because you're right that the small business, interestingly, has been, I think, the most underserved by traditional banks because they kind of get the slightly worse version of the personal product. I think that's also not just from foreign transfers or international banking perspective. I think this is just like business banking opportunity there and technology or the more digital solutions can help there. I think the question is very valid and I think Nilan's not hesitating on the scope of that. Yeah, let's start there. The metric we look at is how much of that business's revenue have we captured?
That really is a measure of how much are we able to help that business in managing and moving its payments. That breaks down to accounts payable and receivable. As you start to work through that, you start to understand, you know, what are the edges of what we need to support? Simply enabling a business to receive a payment we've learned isn't enough. We need to support the invoice creation flow, and that needs to be able to reconcile back to the accounting system. Similarly, when they're making payments with their debit cards, they need to be able to reconcile that back. As you work through each of the transaction types, we will build out the start off with the minimal infrastructure needed in order to switch that volume to us.
In places that may be partnering with and embedding ourselves in the tools business are using already, and in other areas, it may be building out our own workflow in order to capture it. Quite simply, we'll be prioritizing behind the next incremental volume of business revenue that we can switch to us. On to your question on corporates, I'll start and maybe chuck it to Harsh and Diana. Overall, I think you were just re-paraphrasing what Harsh and Diana already covered. What we've proven as our prices dropped from when we was like over 0.65% down all the way down over the last few years. Today you can get 0.1% moving GBP 100,000 and a GBP-EUR payment. What we didn't cover was how we did that.
When you look at our, when you look at the costs within Wise, it breaks down to servicing costs, the cost of risk, which is principally FX and fraud, our COGS, our bank fees. We have velocity on all three of these costs. Every year we invest in bringing these costs down. The way I think about this is as long as we deploy more capital than anybody else in the market and we execute better than anyone else in the market, we'll drive the cost down faster. Hence we'll get to the point where that next marginal segment, because that all it becomes is a cost play or a distribution acquisition challenge from a platform perspective to switch the volume to us.
I love how everyone's getting excited about enterprise, but I think the message we're trying to get across is like it's not easy.
Banks, like the big banks who serve Shell and all these, what, national corporates, it's not an easy job either. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Okay, we've got time for about two more questions. [Alejandro first, please. Just at the front, thanks, Kevin]. Hi, thanks very much for the presentation. Just a question on the hiring pace that, I mean, you're going to accelerate hiring again. You did quite a bit of hiring in the last few years. I'm curious about your ability to retain the talent that you brought into the organization. Yeah, basically, what type of churn do you have and what is the return on that investment?
I can answer that. We don't have people officers in the audience. We have an amazing attrition rate. It's very good.
I do not want to say what it is to lead you off, but trust me, it is very low. The challenge, I think you will find that we are very. We do not kind of pivot. We take something on and then we execute on it. Same with people. We do not really hire people and kind of remove or kind of change the people too often. Therefore, we take the care when we hire. We hire slower if needed, but we also retain amazingly well. Thanks for the question.
I am afraid we are actually up on time. That was the last question for today. Any final words, Kristo?
For me, really big thanks for coming over. Really enjoyed the questions. Very thoughtful. I think Steve enjoyed most of the questions, but we all loved it. Thanks so much. Thanks for coming. And one word.