Good morning. Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us this morning for our half-year FY 2026 results presentation. We have a short presentation from our CEO and founder, Kristo, followed by a presentation by our CFO, Emmanuel Thomassin, and then we will move on to Q&A. We'll start in the room, and then we'll jump over to Zoom. Thank you.
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Being here today with us again. About 70% of people discover Wise because their friends and family tell them about Wise. We've been really proud about this. I've just lost the notes on the back screen, which will come up in a second. Actually, making ads is quite fun in Wise because what we get to do is basically tell the stories that our customers tell their friends, their family, tell these stories again and amplify them with the ads. What you just saw now is a set of ads we're running in the U.S. on TV. They kind of follow the same narrative. This is what our customers are telling their friends. Our update today will show how Wise is yet again serving larger and larger groups of people and businesses, moving more and more.
Cross-border volume, and how we're fixing larger and larger use cases for that. Let's get started. We added 2 million active customers over the year, coming to 13 million people and businesses now using Wise in cross-currency transactions in the last six months. That is either moving or spending money across currencies. Our work on infrastructure and product, the service experience, has led to stronger recommendations. Assisted by advertising, it has led to more new customers, but also stronger affinity to Wise, which means more recommendations, but also staying for longer. These customers are transacting more, with cross-border volumes up 24% to almost GBP 85 billion for this half year. This is quite incredible. This time last year, we took pretty decisive action to reduce our average fees down by almost 15%.
We should not really be surprised that we saw customers react to that. They did not only increase their persistence to recommending Wise to others, but they also voted with their wallet, bringing us more transactions and larger use cases. The volume growth that we have been seeing is especially pronounced in this segment of larger transactions and larger use cases. You have heard us talk about customers shifting from transactions just using Wise transactionally to using the Wise Account for their international banking features. My team can be really proud of actually two things here. First, clearly, the features we have been adding are really resonating, so people and businesses are getting more out of their Wise Accounts. They are using it more. The other dynamic here is how fast the customer confidence is growing.
Our customers are now trusting us with over GBP 25 billion of their cash today, holding this as a deposit or as an investment through the Wise Account. Over this last year, I feel like we have pulled off a pretty incredible feat. We have taken down our price, a price point by about 15%, effectively expanding our economic moat quite incredibly. At the same time, we have boosted the growth of volumes and customer holdings. As a result, recording 13% growth in underlying income. This is really the result of the efficiencies we get from the infrastructure that we are building, but also the product that we are serving. In the last six months, we have been pretty busy shipping more. As we described on Owners' Day, you should expect progress coming to two main categories. One is the infrastructure side, where we go deep in the direct integrations and a lso in the regulatory infrastructure.
Then secondly, you'll see developments for international banking as our customers keep getting more and more out of their Wise Account. A good example maybe here is Brazil, because in the last six months, on the infrastructure side, we went direct really deep with PIX, brought PIX live to our customers and our bank partners. Separately, on the Wise Account, we added interest to both local currency and U.S. dollar holdings. In addition, on the Wise Platform, actually, we brought live this integration with Itaú that we were talking about earlier. We are seeing these investments pay off for our customers and platform clients and quite measurably. When we look at the payment speeds, things people really care about, how fast the money is going to get on the other side, 74% are now instant.
I need to remind you again what instant means. Instant means money leaving your bank in one country and arriving at the recipient's bank on the other side of the world, ready to use in less than 20 seconds. That is now 74% of the payments. After this large investment in our price moat, we have kept the average take rate stable at 52 basis points. Another highlight is coming from our fastest growing segment, Wise Platform, where we see the cross-border volumes now getting to 5% of our volumes. We are on track to get this to about 10% in the medium term. You have heard us recently talk about the really impressive brand names and big banks that we have signed on Wise Platform, but I am actually really excited seeing the volumes growing on integrations that we brought live years ago.
This is where this is the growth that we're enjoying today. Before I hand over to Emmanuel, I just wanted to remind you of the huge opportunity we have ahead of us. Because we're building Wise to move trillions. There is a huge, fast-growing market. The network we've created with our products that customers love. These have been made to build. These have been built to make money work across borders the same as it works at home. Emmanuel, please take us through.
Thank you, Kristo. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to share our financial performance for the first half year 2026. How our disciplined investments continue to drive sustainable and profitable growth. We're making progress across every single key metric. Our active customers are grown by 21% each year over the last two years to now over 13 million active customers for the first half year. The cross-border volume has grown at a similar pace to GBP 85 billion. The customer holdings have exceeded GBP 25 billion. This is growing by 34% each year. Underlying income growth has grown by 16% to annually GBP 750 million. We are delivering underlying profit before tax and at the top of the range. Our range is by 13%-16% of our target margin.
What I want to focus on today is how we achieve this through focus targeting investments that build our competitive moat, but also drive long-term growth. Let's start with our customers because clearly they are the heart of everything we do at Wise. In the first half of the year, over 13 million customers complete international transactions with Wise, experiencing the ease, the transparency, but also the affordability that defines us. Personal customers grew by 18% year- on- year to 12.8 million. Business customers grew by 17% to 613,000. We are particularly pleased to see the acceleration in this business segment. This is the strongest sequel growth in net addition that we have had. The cross-border volume increased by 24% year- on- year to GBP 85 billion. This is a growth of 26% even in custom currency.
This was mainly given by customer growth, but also in addition to that, our existing customers moving higher volumes, a sign of growing trust and deeper engagement. We saw the strong growth in business volumes. As Kristo mentioned before, the scaling of the Wise Platform, which is now 5% of the cross-border volume, means 1% more than in the previous year. In the first six months, we had the pleasure to have major partners like UniCredit or Raiffeisen Bank. We are seeing also strong growth from our existing partners. You surely noticed that the volume grew at a faster pace than our cross-border revenue. This is on purpose. Our cross-border take rate decreased by 10 basis points year on year to 52 basis points, the sharpest adjustments in the company historic, while our cross-border revenue increased by 5% compared to last year.
We are investing in pricing because we believe that the lowest cost, the lowest price, and the best infrastructure provider will win over the long term. The Wise Account is key to our strategy in increasing customer retention and broadening the product usage. The card usage has grown significantly, with card spend exceeding GBP 15 billion in the first half year of 2026, generating GBP 132 million in revenue. This is an increase of 28% year- on- year. The popularity of the Wise Account also means that customers are holding more money with us, nearly GBP 20 billion in Wise Account and another GBP 5.6 billion in assets. That totals customer holdings over GBP 25 billion at the end of the period. This balance obviously generates significant interest income in H1, even if slowing down year on year due to the lower yields in the market.
We have successfully shifted the mix of our revenue base, which makes our business more resilient, but also represents multiple engines for growth. The non-cross-border revenue now represents 41% of our total underlying income. We also have a diversified regional footprint as we continue to invest into growing across multiple markets. You have seen this investment framework before, but it is worth reinforcing it as we explain our financial strategy. This framework ensures a sustainable approach to investment and earnings growth over the long term. Once we achieve efficiencies, we consider investing back into the business. We also can invest in price reductions, which drive customer and volume growth. This leads to increased profitability, and then we can reinvest. Let me go through how we deliver on this.
Starting with our servicing function, as we build the right structure to onboard and provide a better service to a growing customer base. Our investments in servicing increased by 20% year- on- year to GBP 134 million. We are pleased with the benefit that we are seeing from AI and automation customer servicing, with big improvements here. A lot more is planned as we ramp up AI technology. We are also investing into our teams, including compliance, which is critical to the success of our business. Our historic investments in servicing are paying off. As you can see, some key examples here on the screen. In particular, we have been able to expand our Net Promoter Score to 69. The high levels of service we provide and our investments into price continue to help us to build a loyal customer base.
This is clearly highlighted by the 70% of customers that join Wise through word of mouth. We are also going beyond that. As we continue to increase our investments into marketing and sales, as we shared at our Owners Day in April this year, we are investing more strategically across diversified channels, increasing our brand marketing spend, and building awareness and driving more organic growth. In H1, our marketing and sales investments increased by 59% year over year to GBP 57 million. We invest as much as possible within our targets, and this is evident with our payback period remaining strong at six months. In H1, we run brand campaigns in regions like Australia, Canada, and the U.S. You saw some examples from Australia at our Owners Day in April. Today, we also played an ad of the U.S. earlier today.
That is not all what we are doing. Here you can see some examples on how we brought the Wise brand to our Canadian customers' daily commute. Through these investments, we have continued to drive a constant increase in new customer acquisitions. Importantly, we add 3.5 million new active customers in H1 2026. This is a result of our strategic investments to attract and retain our customers, including investments into pricing. Next, on tech and development, we invest GBP 144 million in H1, and this is up by 18% year- on- year across multiple teams. A significant portion of this spend goes to maintaining our existing and available products. For the rest, we continue to invest in launching new features, but also rolling out the existing features into a new market.
Kristo shared an earlier example of many launches and improvements that the team is working on. Finally, we're also investing in corporate function and infrastructure. These teams might not be customer-facing, but they are essential for sustainable growth. The spend here increased by 35% to GBP 131 million, supporting areas like compliance, risk, people operations. This is also including one-off investments related to our dual listing project. We expect this investment base to continue in H2 with administrative expense to offer around GBP 1 billion for the full year. This includes investments in our people across the area that I just covered. In H1, we welcome over 1,000 additional colleagues at Wise, and we plan to keep on hiring in H2. These investments, together with the top-line growth we delivered in the period, clearly highlight how we are delivering on our strategy.
As you can see clearly in our margin progression over the past two years, the increased profitability we generate in H1 2025 has been reinvested, taking us back to our underlying profit before tax margin target range of 13%-16%. This is exactly the model that we promise here, and it is working. As you know, we only use the first 1% yield we receive of interest income within our underlying profit before tax, because we are committed to building a business that is sustainable without relying on cyclical forms of income such as interest. Including additional interest income beyond the first 1%, we reported a profit before tax for the period of GBP 255 million. Now I would like to cover our expectations for the rest of the year, and we are reiterating our previous guidance.
For the full year 2026, we continue to expect underlying income growth to be within our midterm range of 15%-20% on the custom currency basis. Based on the phasing of our investments, we continue to expect underlying VPT of around 16% for 2026, excluding the one-off listing expense of circa GBP 35 million. On our capital allocation framework, as we continue to make prudent decisions to deliver on our long-term mission, our business strategy aims to deliver strong profitable growth so that we can generate strong cash in the future. This means that we can sustain a strong level of cash, maintaining a strong capital to ensure resilience and flexibility. On the return of capital, I wanted to share an update on the share repurchase program we announced earlier this year.
From the incremental 25 million shares into our employee benefit trust to fund historic options, we have already repurchased half of it. We are executing our strategy with discipline and seeing strong results across every single metric that matters. We are growing our customer base, we are deepening our engagement, diversifying our revenue, and investing for the future. All this while maintaining our target profitability range. The fundamentals of our business have never been so strong, and we are just getting started. I will leave you with another ad as we set it up for questions. Thank you so much.
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Right. Okay, we're just going to take any questions that you have. What we'll do is we'll start in the room, and then we'll jump over to Zoom. If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand as some of you are ready. Do introduce yourself, ask your question, and do hand back the mic so that we can get it to the next person that would like to ask a question. If you could just start over to the right here.
Yeah. Hi, thanks for taking my questions, Josef Goleman. Firstly, platforms demonstrated a strong inflection in the half, now 5% of volumes going around three times than the total volume. Can you talk to us about some of the momentum and ramp you're seeing within this segment and talk us through that midterm guide of 10% of volumes in terms of the growth you need to get there? Secondly, one for Kristo, please. Stablecoins are certainly gaining traction within the payment ecosystem. Can you talk to us about where you see Wise positioned with respect to stablecoins and what are some of the opportunities and potential challenges given you built one of the lowest cross-border payment infrastructures?
I'll start with the platform. Thank you very much. Yeah, you're right. I mean, we have a very good momentum. I mean, every time we meet, we are pleased to announce new names, new partners joining the platform. That is also driving inbound calls, so we are really, really pleased with that. You see basically new names coming, and we are integrating them. Also, as I mentioned in the presentation, you see the ramp-up of names that we mentioned before, where we see the volume increasing over time. Today, we are at 5%, a little bit more than 5%. This is 1% more than our last meeting that we had in April. Yes, we are on track for delivering the 10% midterm and the 50% long-term. Yes, we have good momentum here. We see interest from new partners or potential new partners.
Thanks, Josef. On the stablecoin question, indeed, you are right. We've built the world's fastest, most efficient, lowest-cost way of moving money between countries and currencies. When we talk about this, we often talk about the direct integrations and how we link together the local payment networks. In fact, Wise Network also comes with this regulatory infrastructure that allows us to do this in each of the jurisdictions around the world. If we ask about stablecoins in that context of money transfers that go just beyond moving U.S,. dollars between wallets, it's these regulated on-and-off ramps into those local currencies. How do you get the money into the USD stablecoin and out of that USD stablecoin? That's actually the hardest thing to achieve reliably, which is exactly what we built Wise Network, this Wise infrastructure for. If we want to think about Wise in that context, then.
As these legitimate use cases of USD clearing outside of the Federal Reserve and outside of the main banks emerge, we're starting to see reliable anti-fraud, anti-bribery, anti-tax evasion, anti-money laundering mechanics come live on the stablecoin environments. Of course, we have the best on-and-off ramps to make use of this new technology across the world. Furthermore, if these challenges improve, I'm actually personally quite excited if we can add something like this to move U.S. dollars next to Fedwire and Zelle and Venmo and other options that are there today for our own customers.
Thanks. It's Adam from Morgan Stanley. I've got two questions for you. First of all, on the pricing, obviously a big reduction over the last 12 months. The policy in the past has always been to cut pricing as you engineer cost out of the platform. Could you just give us any change to that, first of all, and then any visibility insight you could give to how you're thinking about that over the next 12 months? Secondly, on the investment side of things, obviously a big investment gone in already and more in the second half. Do you see any change in the payback metrics that you're getting? Would you be more comfortable with maybe moving those payback periods out a little bit? Critically, in some of the new markets you're in, there's a big flywheel effect with Wise in terms of getting people on and getting volumes up to bring the cost down. We know how that works. Are you seeing that this advertising is accelerating that flywheel in some of these newer markets you're going into?
Would that push you to do a little bit more to accelerate how you get to more of those instant transactions and so on? Thank you.
Let me try to respond more principally. We are keeping our investments. We aim to keep our investments really balanced and steady. We saw, as we are describing, we did a pretty decisive move about a year ago and now have been kind of stable. Going forward, we try to avoid big swings, but definitely the strategy has not changed because we amazingly see this working. We see more volume even coming up in the short term, let alone this economic mode that we are building. This is definitely going to continue, but we are going to try and avoid big swings. That will be kind of a steady expectation.
The other question that you had around, do we see the market marketing working? For sure. I think we're one of, potentially our marketing team is one of the world's most disciplined when it comes to payback. I don't. I think the magic still is if you can reach more people with the same investment return, because at the end of the day, we're investing our shareholders' money, and that has to have a return.
Thank you.
Good morning. Thank you for the presentation. Kristo, first of all, looking at that photograph, I wanted to ask you which shampoo do you use? The real two questions really are, one is in terms of margins going ahead. Are we kind of, sorry, let me answer the margin question second. The first question really being, you obviously currently Wise transfers kind of charges per transfer. Are you thinking of something like an Amazon Prime model where somebody pays in, let's say, GBP 10 or whatever in whichever currency, and then they kind of monthly, they can have so many transfers? Are you thinking about that? Have you already tried that in any particular market? That was my first question. My second question was about basically margins. Obviously, it's a huge, huge market out there. Are you also thinking of kind of saying willing to kind of take lower, lower digs and lower margins? Because obviously the volumes that we're talking about are like 100,000x potential. Thanks.
I'll take the first one. Maybe Emmanuel will take the second.
Yeah. I won't talk about shampoo, but on the margin, look, I mean, we guide the market to 13%-16%, and we are really serious about this. I mean, we want to grow because there's a massive opportunity out there, as you know. Kristo mentioned just now how we reinvest in pricing, but this is one of the options that we have. This year, we are investing in marketing, we're investing in servicing, we're investing in product and development, we're investing in people. Basically, to offer the best service we can. We anticipate, obviously, the growth. We have the strongest ad customers in the history of Wise and basically for customers and businesses. We know this is working. While we still guide the market at the 13%-16%. This is a massive investment that we're doing. We're delivering not only on these fields that I mentioned, but also all the features, the direct integration. We're really, really busy.
We still deliver on this margin at the top of the range right now. I think in terms of margin, we are really disciplined. I mean, the money we win, we do not spend, we invest. We want to have a return. That helps us, this discipline, to guide the market to the 13%-16%. As long as we get room to invest and we get a good return and the time is so fantastic, I think it would be silly not to do this. We can expect us to be disciplined.
Your other question on the different charging models or bulking together, of course, we play to a reasonable extent with all of those, and you might see some evolution there. I think principally, we really value this loyalty that comes with our strings attached. This is quite amazing if your customers do not come back to you because they bought a subscription, but they come back to you because they want to come back to you. That is kind of something that, however we end up pricing, I do not want to lose or trade away.
Good morning. This is Aditya from Bank of America. Three questions from my side. Firstly, on the platform volumes, could you just talk about how much of the growth came from the, as you said, customers who have been live for a long time versus the ones who have been onboarded over the last year or so? Second, on the hiring, you have hired 1,000 people just in the first half versus the initial expectations of, I think, hiring 700 people for the full year. There has been an acceleration.
Could you talk about why you decided to step up the pace of that, which areas you've been hiring in, and then how should you think about that for H2 and then for next year as well? The last one, on $35 million one-off, should we think about that? As you think about the next year, does that one-off, I guess, get reinvested back into other areas, or should you think about that just again, flowing back into the profitability?
I'll take the easy one if you don't mind. Let's go. Your question on investment and how were we able to invest so much in this first six months. I'm actually really, really, really pleased with that. It seems like it's a fantastic time to invest. If you look at all of those categories that Emmanuel went through. Starting with servicing, the payback that we get from an instant service and the confidence that customers then bring. GBP 25 billion of their money to hold with you, that's amazing. There's still room to invest there, let alone the rate of the growth that we're now seeing. We need to be ready. There's going to be a lot more customers to serve going forward. We talked about marketing already. That has a very direct, very clear payback. Has a very, very good ROI to use money. On engineering, if you look at the numbers, we're actually investing not as fast as our volumes are growing. We're investing in lower. I wish we could go faster there. That will take a bit of ramp-up. I'm actually pretty proud that we wanted to invest.
We talked to you about this at the Owners' Day, that this is a fantastic time to invest now. Feel like we made kind of more progress in the first six months than we hoped for. Leave the heart of it.
Because your first question was on platform. Actually, what we see is that we have a ramp-up of new customers, like basically volume coming from new customers, but also customer partners that have been there before that are extending the contract with us. We are in a very comfortable position where basically, as we told you, usually we start with one route, and then all of the time they extend the contracts. This is what we see. Clearly, there are new customers that we signed last year. On top of that, the former ones are extending the contracts.
This is really a mix of both, which is very, very healthy. That is driving this 1% increase, or a little bit more than 1% increase.
Yeah, on the hiring, just like as Kristo said, I mean, Wise is a brand that people are attracting, and then basically we are in a position where we can scale and anticipate the growth rate that we see on the customers. That is very good. I think on the last question was the reinvesting capacities, or?
I think one of the issues that I am going to screen back into the next year is reinvesting by the day.
Yeah, I mean, this is clearly a one-off due to the dual listing. That is why when we guide right now on the margin, we clearly exclude basically the one-off. We're going to have a small part of recurrent cost, but this one is a one-off by nature. You should not forget the left side.
Hey, Pavan from Citi here. I've also got a couple of questions. Firstly, on instant payments, good to see the step up to 74% from 63% last year. What's really driving that? Is that mainly from the go-live with PIX in Brazil? Should we expect that to step up again when you go live in Japan? Secondly, on the elasticity of pricing, you've reduced pricing by 15% over the last year. Has that really translated into the volume uptake that you've seen so far, or is that really a multi-year payoff?
I'll take the first one. You're directionally correct that these instant payment rates are basically a reflection t o large parts of how good our local connectivity is, how fast we can get Australian dollars to the end recipient. Given the timings, I would probably attribute this more to our Australian integration that went live about a year ago or about six months ago. It kind of ramped up. It's probably more of that than PIX. We'll see some from PIX as well going forward. I'm definitely looking forward to this number going up further.
On the price elasticity, it's clearly for us like a long-term strategy. We know that price matters to every single customer. That's the first maybe statement. We know long-term price will matter, and it will position us at the number one option. Last year, as we did the price adjustments, we also increased some price. I mean, it was not only going down, and it was by design. Basically, what we've seen is that the larger transfer is becoming cheaper and more attractive for customers. That was an immediate reaction. We saw that people are reacting to our offering as we decrease the take rate for the larger transaction. There is an immediate reaction, but we think that price is anyway a long-term game. That is why we want to push on the efficiency so that we can pass this back to the customers.
Thank you. I'm really interested in the decline in take rate that you're reporting. Can you just help me understand and unpick that a bit and the difference between changing mix in the business and like-for-like price cuts on your kind of rate card? What's the balance between those drivers of a decline in the reported take rate?
I can take that. This is very much driven by us setting the fees and setting the fees lower than we did before. It does bring about a secondary effect of a bit of a mix shift. For example, I'm kind of coming up with an example. If in a country we used to be, we discovered that one payment method, say people paying in with cards, is particularly more expensive, and we raised the fees on cards, lowered it on bank transactions, then what you do see is the shift from people who used to use cards before because they were kind of subsidized, moving into bank transfers, bringing down the take rate. For them, this is actually a benefit. You get these little secondary mix shifts, but generally, it is. We set the prices.
Hi, Annie Hall. I'm Rothschild & Co Redburn. Thank you very much for taking my question. I just wanted to follow up a little bit more on the stablecoin question from earlier. I know earlier on in the quarter, there was some news around you potentially exploring hiring in the digital asset space. I know you've been speaking to customers in terms of, is it something they'd be interested in? I'm just wondering if you could comment on the outcome of those discussions or any kind of further updates on things that you're looking at internally to do with stablecoins. Thank you.
Thank you. As I already covered, the investments that we're making are quite general in terms of we're building the network that will be useful in the context of stablecoins or without the context of stablecoins. We're not making a bet on one payment scheme over another, one transaction method over another. There is a lot of. We are going to be very deliberate on what kind of use cases we are going to accept and where it is actually going to be useful. Going forward, I think you should expect us to be very deliberate about that.
Vineet is here, please.
Hi, thank you. Vineet from Autonomous Research. Just two questions. What other countries do you see? Do you need to do direct integrations that will complete your overall infrastructure build? Any thoughts on rumors about Wise exploring a banking license?
I think on direct integration, we are not done yet, right? I mean, there are so many payment systems that we think we should integrate in order to be even increasing the instant payment. I mean, we have done the tremendous jump. If you remember, we had 64% last year. We are now 74%. We want to integrate more systems. I mean, we want to make sure that we come to the highest number as possible in terms of instant payment. There are plenty of payment systems, and you can imagine that our team is working actively on that to add more in the future in terms of having the license and then the technical integration. It's not over yet. I mean, we have eight today. We will continue to integrate more payment systems.
On the comment of rumors, just the fact is the OCC in the U.S. has reported that we're in the process of a license application for a trust license, which is a form of banking charter. It's not quite a banking charter, but it's a trust charter. That is indeed true. In the U.K.? Sorry? In the U.K.? In the U.K., there have not been any announcements. Of course, we have licensing procedures or processes ongoing in probably 20 countries in parallel for different things that we could do for our customers.
Simon Young, could you just help us understand what the correlation between your direct payments and, sorry, instant payments and the ones that are direct, and therefore also the impact on the gross margin? As I understand it, the gross margin is very high on stuff that goes through the direct payments. If it goes higher, obviously gross margin should go up. Yet gross margins in the first half were flat. Can you just help me understand what is going on, please?
I will try. Yeah, I will try a little bit. Just to build your intuition about this a little bit, I think if you look at mechanically on the cost base. You maybe see less of an impact going direct or having a very good indirect clearing mechanism. However, the cost benefit does come through quite a lot in the reliability that you get being direct and also the customer experience that you get. It's not as direct as what I think you had in mind, but indirectly, indeed, we should see benefits operationally, benefits from customers and customer affinity and so on. It's definitely very worthwhile investments, but I'm not sure you can translate this as directly into the gross margin increase.
Culture is a massive issue. Simon, sorry. Culture is a massive issue for any company. How do you embed successfully 1,000 people in a half and keep the culture that Wise has obviously developed so successfully in the last 12 years?
I'm glad you asked this question because I'm here for a year, but I can tell you basically the onboarding is very successful. I mean, you really quickly understand the culture of Wise. It's a developing culture, and you get the support of your colleagues. I mean, so I think Wise is a brand that is really highly seen by candidates, but the way we integrate people is really like supporting the team are supporting and managing to onboard newcomers like me very, very quickly. Last year, I had the pleasure to be here after four weeks. It was because basically my colleagues also in this room were helping me a lot to onboard. I think this is the culture that we have. We have one mission. We repeat this mission. We want to move to Indians, and everyone is working every day on that path.
I would amplify that the job of onboarding the 1,000 people has solved the 6,000 that are already here. It is not that hard if you take it this way. Six to one.
Thank you. Moving over to Zoom, Justin Forsythe from UBS, , over to you.
Thank you very much, Kristo, Emmanuel, and thank you, Martin, for letting me on here. I want to hit a couple of questions on my side. First, Kristo, the 4A and the stablecoins, maybe you could just talk a little bit. It felt like six months ago, it was a bit of an afterthought for you guys. Clearly, quite an evolution there. Maybe you could just talk through a little bit your evolutions personally in coming to an understanding with this aspect of the market. It does seem like there is a lot of players in this on-and-off ramp business within stablecoins.
How do you expect to differentiate there? Is it simply because of your connection to local faster payment schemes? Is it fair to assume that a lot of those providers, those competitors, if you will, do not have the same level of licensure and local scheme connectivity that Wise has? Question number two. Emmanuel, around the PBT margin. I think first half was excluding listing costs around 17.5%-ish. You effectively reiterated the full-year guide, but excluding listing costs. To me, that implies second half margin down quite a bit sequentially, I think around 14.5%. If you include listing costs, I think you are down at like 11.5%.
I just want to understand, one, if that's the correct math and maybe a little bit more detail on what's driving it and what that also implies for the cost base going forward in the beginning parts of the next fiscal year. On top of that, thinking about underlying income growth, because it seems to imply that there's quite a large acceleration, could you be doing 20% plus in 2H as the take rate comparison eases? Thank you very much.
Thanks, Justin. You were slightly tricky to hear in the room for the audio. It's probably an issue on our side. Let me try and respond to the first part, which was imagining the Stablecoin ecosystem improving, then how are we competitive in these on-and-off ramps? I think you're spot on there that the qualities that make these on-and-off ramps. Amazing in the fiat world of going from Australian dollar to U.S. dollar or to euro, that's exactly the same. Cost, speed, regulatory reliability, the same things that will matter in the Stablecoin world. You're spot on that this does work exactly the same way.
I mean, I start with the margin evolution. The guidance that we give for the full year, excluding our one-off expense for the listing, and we want to be at the top of the range, we rated this at 16%, around 16%. What we would see basically in H2 is that we're driving this investment in Q in the first half year, and we will also continue to invest in H2. This is basically our promises that we give in honesty.
I mean, we're going to invest where we can, where we get a good return, and still guide the market to the 13%-16%. That is without at-class or the dual listing cost. Bear in mind that this is one-off by nature. I mean, for next year, we will have some recurrent cost, but nothing compared to the $35 million that we're expecting for this year. When it comes to underlying income growth, I hope I understood the question rightly. Yes, you have a kind of disconnect between the volume growth that you see, the cross-border volume, and the underlying income or the revenue that you generate out of this volume, cross-border volume. This is basically a like-for-like issue. We're comparing basically two periods of time where we had the price adjustments last year in the first half year that is coming to play.
The comparison like-for-like is very difficult. You will see this. We will see the real growth, I would say the real growth in brackets in the second half year when this pricing adjustment is not affecting anymore the comparison for a year-on-year comparison. I hope I answered your questions. If not, please just let me know.
We'll now move over to Bharath . Over to you, Bharath.
Hi, thank you. Thanks for taking my questions, Bharath from Cantor Fitzgerald. Could you highlight some of the logos that you signed previously within the platform's business where you're now seeing volumes ramp up? Is there any kind of a case study with regards to how long it normally takes to ramp up volumes materially here? What are the conversations that you're having with these kinds of customers?
Is it to do with lower take rates for these businesses or anything else? That's the first question. The second one, could you speak about your investments, the marketing investments across the U.S., Australia, and Canada? Which ones are faring better? Are you seeing any regions with better ROI, relatively speaking, and has there been any change in this ROI coming from these investments given the macro worries? Thank you.
I'll try to take the first one. Bharath , unfortunately, I think if we did a case study, it would be misleading because each of the, we're onboarding the world's largest financial institutions often, and each of them is so different. It's going to be really hard to average those. We're very happy, actually, with our past announcement, past logos that have gone live, and you see that in the results. It's something where it's very early to start singling anyone out. We're very happy with the onboarding progress here, and that gives us confidence. We mentioned today where you kind of can see getting to 10% in the medium term with platform volumes.
To your question on marketing and ROI, comparing Australia and the U.S., maybe I should start that we're using the same discipline and the same KPIs, and we have the same expectation on return no matter which campaign we started in which country. However, comparing Australia and the U.S. is difficult at this time because Australia's campaign is running for one and a half years, where the U.S. is basically starting, I think, two months ago or so. We are very pleased with the return that we see, and that's why we continue to invest in Australia.
We see also that the campaign in the U.S. is quite successful. We invest also in three further countries, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.K. We are monitoring the progress in every single country, but it's really, really difficult. It's challenging, but let's put it this way—to compare Australia, where we have this campaign running out for a year and a half, and we continue to invest because we see the result. The result is our CPA is going down, so the cost per acquisition is going down as longer we take the campaign. We're monitoring. We're also adjusting. To be quite frank, we do sometimes adjustment and tricks. We say, "Oh, this creative that you see today, we have to adapt this for this country." We start a campaign again.
What I can tell you is that we're looking at this with the same lens. Basically, we want to have the same return no matter what. If a campaign is not as successful as we expect, either we do the creative again, we change the campaign, or we stop the campaign and come with a better idea.
That's right.
Thank you very much for joining us today. That concludes our presentation and Q&A for our half-year results for FY2026. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, everyone.
Thanks, everyone.