Good morning, everybody. Thank you very much for joining us today, both in the room and online, for our FY 2025 results presentation. We have some slides that have been produced that will be presented to you by our CEO and co-founder, Kristo Käärmann, followed by Emmanuel Thomassin, our CFO. We'll then move into Q&A, and I'll explain the process for Q&A once we get there, but we'll start in the room before moving over onto Zoom. Without further ado, it's my pleasure to introduce Kristo.
Thanks for having me. It feels like we're doing this every other week now. We just had the Owners' Day only a month ago. I would love to find a clicker so that I can kind of move on the slides. It's coming. Thank you so much. Great to see you again, and happy to cover now, as a kind of the full scope of the financial year that we just finished. We did give you a lot of preview already on that during the Owners' Day, so a lot of the numbers are probably familiar to you. We also added another announcement to our earnings release this morning, so I'll come back to that towards the end, so hold tight. I'll start with, actually, before we get into the numbers, the reminder of why are we—why do we even exist? Why are we doing what we're doing?
It's because we believe that money should work without borders. It should work the same internationally as it works at home. There is still a huge amount of friction and stress when people and businesses move across borders or try to do business across borders. We will remind today about how our infrastructure and products are addressing this problem and cover the progress that we've made. First, I'll keep reminding ourselves that we are very early in our journey. We estimate individuals move about GBP 3 trillion a year across borders. We have about a 5% share of that. At small businesses, that's another GBP 14 trillion, and our market share there is even more in the beginning. Now, adding the scope of enterprise and corporates, you can get to GBP 32 trillion, which not all of it was in scope of our direct apps.
As we started bringing more and more volumes into Wise Platform, actually, the infrastructure we're building is to serve this entire 32 trillion market. While today we already move around GBP 145 billion a year, we're building this network to move trillions. Let me take you through some of the highlights of this year. It's across different parts of our product and the service. Starting with the infrastructure, we brought live the integrations into the two payment systems in the Philippines. Actually, even before that, from official numbers, we estimate that we deliver 12% of all the money that is going to the Philippines in the world for people. The engineering work is still ongoing on Zengin in Japan and PIX in Brazil.
By the way, as a reminder, by the central bank statistics, we're already by far the largest institution moving money in and out of Brazil by transaction count. We already have a huge head start, or we built up a head start in Brazil. Now we're linking much deeper into their payment systems. Wise Account, it got better for Australians who can now switch their interest for their Australian dollar and us dollar holdings. We rolled out the international account for people and businesses in the Philippines. There are a lot of features that we've added globally to the Wise Account to make it a better place to hold. You'll see from the numbers shortly that this is starting to make a difference in terms of the customer holdings. On features specifically for our business customers, we're actually addressing the most important task for any business owner.
This is getting paid, and in our case, getting paid internationally. We already talked about invoicing, I think, one of the half years. We observed that 25% of the businesses who are using Wise to get paid, they're actually getting paid by other Wise customers. That's why we built QuickPay. QuickPay is where businesses can get paid online with cards, but they can also get paid with QR codes by other Wise customers. That's enhancing the Wise to Wise transfers that are super cheap and fast and probably the best way of moving money from one place to another. It was a strong year for Wise Platform. You heard this on Owners' Day. We've added more logos since then. We included Itaú, the largest bank in Latin America, and Raiffeisen.
Much of what we've been talking about through this year, all the launches of the developments or the investments we've made, they will have a compounding impact on financials for many years to come. Very little on this financial year. When we start looking at the numbers, start looking at the financials, we will be looking at how our previous year's investments are now playing through and bringing us growth. Let's see how these are performing. When we start with active customers, last year alone, we saw 15.6 million people and businesses who made cross-currency transactions. This was 21% more than the year before and 2.6x since we listed on the exchange. The similar rate of growth is visible in terms of cross-border volume. We moved GBP 145 billion volume, again, a 23% growth.
When we look at the holdings, so people and businesses keeping money on their Wise account, this has really grown substantially, 33% only last year, and reached GBP 21.6 billion. It is also a big testament to how the Wise account is starting to get traction. Growth in customers, volumes, and holdings, they all increased the return for our owners. Underlying income, 19% in financial year 2025, reaching GBP 1.4 billion, which is 3.2x the amount that we generated in financial year 2021. Underlying profit before tax increased 17%, and our reported profit, including all of the interest income, was also 17% higher, reaching now the other side of GBP 500,000,000. As we move on towards our goal of moving trillions, we will continue to create more and more value for our owners. How do we get to that? How do we get to trillions?
We will do this through the products that our customers love, and we'll do it profitably. It starts with infrastructure. We're coming back to that. As more and more people and businesses move and hold money with Wise, our network is greater flows. Greater flows, we see economies of scale lead to better outcomes for everyone who uses Wise Network, people, businesses, now banks. This, again, brings more users to Wise just because the service and the scale is so much better. We get more of the share of the GBP 32 trillion that is already moving across borders. All of these effects are really powered by this infrastructure that we're talking about. This is something that we built from scratch to replace the outdated correspondent banking networks that hadn't been fit for decades already.
Our infrastructure is also the reason why payments on Wise are so much faster and served at lower prices than any competitor can really match sustainably. This strategy of continuously lowering our fees makes it harder for anyone to compete, and it will underwrite the long-term success and growth of Wise. By the last quarter ending 31st of March, we brought our take rate to just 53 basis points, 0.53%. This is in comparison with what people and businesses are charged when they use their bank. This is already so much ahead. More and more payments are also going faster. Now 65% of all the transactions that move from one country to another arrive in less than 20 seconds with the receiver, with the recipient.
It is all these smart investments in the infrastructure, in our technology, in our marketing, the products that will be driving the growth for years to come. We looked at how the previous ones are doing, and we will hear more later. As a reminder, this infrastructure that I just covered again and the fundamentals that you are seeing, this reaches our customers through the products that we build and through the experiences that we create in our service. We started with a simple transfer product. We remain absolutely focused on providing the best way to move money from one country to another. We now serve a huge amount of people and businesses through the Wise Account. Our customers wanted to get paid internationally. They wanted to hold money on interest and spend without the hidden FX fees.
While it's in the very beginnings, we're already seeing some of the world's largest banks operate through Wise Platform. While we're onboarding more than a million people a quarter to Wise directly, to our apps directly, the vast majority of cross-border volume that we looked at, this 32 trillion TAM, is with retail banks. The largest leverage to our infrastructure will be serving this volume through the banks, through Wise Platform. We get often asked why large banks use Wise. First, cross-border payments are really hard. They're very inefficient. They rely on this outdated, underinvested infrastructure that the banks are operating on. They're slow. They're paid. They operate very manually. It's expensive for banks. If it's expensive for banks, the banks have to charge it on to their customers. Prices are therefore high, although they try to hide it.
In addition to poor experience, the end users are then hit with these high costs. Many of the customers of retail banks are taking their international business to faster challengers or other faster banks who move faster on this, and sometimes to specialists like us or other challenger banks. Wise Platform is a fantastic solution for banks, for them to get ahead of their competition and give their customers a reason to stay in the bank's ecosystem. That is why we see every quarter the network of our banks on this chart expanding. Last month alone, we added Itaú and Raiffeisen on this map. The logo should be probably much larger here, but it is pretty good. With that, I gave you a bit of a reminder of how we think about Wise as an operation from the infrastructure through to the product. Now the important part is financial. How do we do this sustainably? Because what we're doing is pretty exciting. I'll hand it over to Emmanuel, our CFO, to cover.
Thank you, Kristo. Good morning, everyone. Yeah, 2025 was another exceptional year of growth driven by our commitment to our mission. Today, I'd like to walk you through the numbers and also the story behind it. Obviously, we are very pleased with the year 2025, with our performance during the year. We saw a preview of these numbers during our Honors' Day in April, a few weeks from now. During my presentation today, I will cover the different drivers, but also the stories behind our performance.
In 2025, we continue to see a double-digit growth in both customers and volume, but also we saw a significant increase in customers' balance, and we also delivered very strong margins. I would now like to cover the key drivers behind this strong performance. We start with our customers. In 2025, active customers increased by 21% year on year, with now customers experiencing the ease, the transparency, but also the affordability of Wise. Word of mouth remains the main customer acquisition channel, with over 70% of customers' growth coming from this channel. This is the evidence that our product convinced and continued to have a great impact on people's lives, and that continued to build our evangelical customer base. On the mix, the active customer growth was mainly driven by an increase of 22% in personal customers, which increased from 12 to 15 million last year.
The business active customers increased by 11% last year, from over 600,000 to nearly 700,000 active business customers. We are pleased with this recovery because of this customer group following an onboarding pause in the second half of 2024, as you surely remember. Now moving to cross-border volume. Clearly, the customer growth was the main driver behind our cross-border volume of 23% last year. We believe that price remained the main reason why customers choose Wise, which was also pretty evident during the second half of the year. In particular, our price change that we took from the summer made us more attractive to customers moving high volumes. This resulted in volume growth, outpacing customer growth in the second half of 2025.
Overall, the cross-border volume increased by 23% to GBP 145 billion for the full year, with growth in personal cross-border of 22% and business of 24%. The growth of the Wise Platform has continued to outpace overall the volume growth. In 2025, Wise Platform represents 4% of the cross-border volume compared to the 3% in the previous year. We are very excited about the long-term perspective of Wise Platform as we continue to ramp up their announced partnership and have new partners to the platform. Kristo just mentioned that the newcomers over the past weeks were Raiffeisen Bank and Itaú. Now I'd like to move to a different element of our underlying income, starting with our cross-border revenue. Our cross-border revenue grew by 6% versus last year to GBP 840 million.
While the growth rate reflects our price reductions, it also underscores our commitment to making Wise more accessible for everyone, as we will see on the next slide. We closed the year with a cross-border rate of 53 basis points compared to in Q4 2025, a reduction of 14 basis points compared to the same quarter in 2024. This reflects the price adjustments that we had from Q2 2025 onwards, as well as the impact of current mix and an increase of high-volume customers. For the full year, the cross-border take rate was about 58 basis points. Going forward, we expect to continue to invest in gradual, but also sustainable price reductions as we continue to share the benefit of the economy of scale to the customers.
We have also continued to see an increase in the adoption of Wise Account, which drives also higher retention with the broader use of our products. In last year, in 2025, over 3.5 million people started to use the Wise Account. We have also seen a strong growth from card-only customers, which represents around a fifth of our active customers based in Q4 2025. As a result of these factors, card and other revenues increased by 45% year on year last year in 2025. We saw an increase of 31% in card revenue to GBP 200 million-GBP 220 million, and 71% growth in other revenue to GBP 152 million, out of which nearly 10% was coming from our asset product. This increased adoption of the Wise Account is also driving an increase in customer holdings.
In 2025, we saw an increase of 33% year on year in customer holdings to GBP 21.5 billion. This includes GBP 17 billion, sorry, from customer holding balance in the Wise Account and GBP 4.5 billion in asset under management. We have seen a 55% increase in asset under management as the increased numbers of customers now benefit from our Wise Asset product today. Through Wise Asset, our customers can earn interest on their balance by investing their money in a money market fund. Wise Asset is now live in Singapore, in Australia, in Europe, including the U.K., where we can directly pay the interest to our customers, as you surely know. Overall, our underlying income increased by 16% to GBP 1.4 billion, mainly driven growth by the personal segment, as I mentioned before, by 18%.
This growth in the Wise Account has allowed us to further diversify our underlying income, with 38% of underlying income now coming from card, other, and also underlying interest income. Now I'd like to move to our cost structure and profitability. In 2025, cost of sales increased by 5%, which is significantly lower than compared to the underlying income growth of 16%. This allowed us to grow the underlying gross profit by 20% and expand our margin to 75% for the full year. This was mainly a result of banking and customer-related fees increasing by only 4% last year as we continue to enhance our infrastructure through direct integration. We talk about this into domestic payment systems. Also, alongside, we optimize our costs and are becoming more and more efficient.
The administrative expense increased by 25% last year to GBP 769 million as we continue to invest into the business and also providing a better experience for our customers. Our strong growth, alongside our relentless focus on driving cost efficiencies, delivered a profit before tax of GBP 282 million, an increase of 17% compared to the year before. Our underlying VPT margin was at 21%, which was flat year on year as we continue to invest in our business. While this margin remained above our midterm target of 13%-16%, we expect our investments into building the business and also sharing our economy of scale with our customers through pricing to narrow the gap.
I share this slide with you at the Owners' Day in April, and I'd like to cover this again, how the efficiency that we generate and the growth driving is driving investment into the business truly generates a virtuous cycle. While we may start with a targeting underlying VPT margin of 13%-16%, as you know, we see our margins grow our previous investments and also the relentless cost-focused drive by efficiencies. We can then reinvest this additional generated margin back into the business, into enhancing the and building the products, creating an even more powerful infrastructure, building the brand of Wise through marketing, increased marketing investments, also efficient, effective services, and last but not least, sharing the efficiency with customers through lower prices. These investments drive our margin back to the 13%-16% midterm target range again ahead of the next investment cycle.
Our focus is making sure that we can reinvest as quickly ahead as the substantial opportunities of the 32 trillion that we mentioned before stand before us. Now let's take a look at how we invest. In 2025, we have an increase of nearly 50% in non-employee-related expense to GBP 356 million. This includes third-party costs, including outsource servicing, advisor spend, but also marketing and tech infrastructure costs. Our spend in employees' benefit increased by 9% to GBP 413 million. Let's dive into the detail. The increase I just mentioned in employees' benefit of 9% was driven by the headcount growth that we saw last year as we were joined by new joiners of around 1,000 new Wise-based joiners last year.
We also increased our investments in marketing last year as we increased our spend in brand awareness marketing with existing campaigns in Australia and most recently in Canada. We also diversified our marketing channels with an increased presence on TikTok and also on Reddit. We also complement the work with our team with three key creative agencies to deliver targeted campaigns driving brand awareness and considerations. We also increased our spend in product development during the year as we invest in improving our product to better serve our customers and deepen our moat through continuous investments into our infrastructure and also our tech stack. Our technology spend increased broadly in line with the volume growth, and this is linked with the data storage capacities due to the volume and the trading.
We also invest in our servicing function to service a larger customer base, whilst we are still driving efficiency by increasing automation and reducing customer contacts. This includes the use of outsource providers, enabling us to meet demand high, high quality, and also cost-efficient demand. Finally, we also continue to invest in other functions. Now moving to the reported VPT in the full year 2025, we generate GBP 444 million in interest above the first 1% yield. As a reminder, as part of our interest income framework, we seek to keep the first 20% of this and distribute the remaining 80% back to the customers. In full year 2025, we return GBP 161 million to the customers out of the GBP 355 million target. Our reported VPT in the full year 2025 was GBP 565 million. This is an increase of 17% year on year.
Following our income tax expense, our profit after tax was GBP 416 million. This market, massive market opportunity, and also the cycle that I just covered is what underpins our midterm guidance. I'm very proud of our progress here to date. Our growth and growth we expect to deliver on the 15%-20% CAGR underlying income growth in the midterm, driven by the mix of customer growth as well as growth of our products and also reduction in price. We still expect to deliver on the 13%-16% underlying VPT margin in the midterm, with the margin around the top of the range as we announced also at Honors' Day in 2026. Before passing back to Kristo, I'd like to provide an update on our capital allocation. First, I'd like to cover our strong level of cash.
We maintain a strong capital and cash position to ensure resilience, but also flexibility and to meet also the requirements of our regulators. We announced it also in Owners' Day. Wise received an investment grade rating of triple B by both agencies, S&P and Fitch, which will allow us to optimize our working capital. Secondly, on return of capital, we announced it also at Owners' Day. We announced a share repurchase program of an incremental 25 million shares into our employee benefit trust to fund historic options. This we started in early the full year 2026. For this program, we have already repurchased 4.1 million shares at an average price of GBP 9.5. As I mentioned in April, this is a first step we are talking to return capital to owners, and it does not exclude any additional future returns. And with that I'd like to pass back to Kristo with remarks.
Thank you. Thank you, Emmanuel. I just have some final comments before we move into the Q&A. I'll kind of summarize with a few thoughts on this. All of the good news, Emmanuel's given us quite a lot of good news of how well we're doing. We're not in this position by accident. It is a result of over a decade now of taking the hard options over the easy ones. We're building infrastructure over gimmicks, the result of avoiding distractions, embracing local laws and regulations, financial prudence, and steady prioritization of customer outcomes. This didn't come overnight. It's rather over the long term and through us maintaining our focus on this mission. The next 10 years, they're not going to be easier.
They will demand no less discipline for different parts of our organization and us adhering to these principles. As we think of these next 10 years of growth, as announced this morning, we are proposing to dual-list our shares, adding a primary listing in the U.S. We are excited about this proposal. I believe it will bring significant benefits to our owners, actually down the line to our customers. Our stock will be much more liquid, giving our owners flexibility, giving access to people and funds who did not have access today. It also strategically lifts our profile in the U.S., gives us greater access to the growth opportunities that we see there, especially our kind of single-out Wise Platform and the business space. We are committing to the U.K. We are retaining our U.K. listing. This is where we are founded. It is a source of really smart people.
We just really opened this office. We are thinking of this move as additive. We are adding a listing to the U.S. We are expanding our owner base. We are improving liquidity for our shareholders. We do not want to make anything worse for our U.K. shareholders who are based here. We are, I think, a company like no other in recent history where we set foundations to eventually fix how money works across borders, both for people, for businesses, and now for banks. We are very focused on becoming the network for the world's money. We talked about how we are moving, or we moved $145 billion this year, but we are on the way to move trillions. We have made great progress so far, but the path together is pretty clear and pretty exciting ahead of us. That was all I wanted to share today. But we are open to questions. I think Martin, you'll have to help us here. Thank you very much, everyone, for coming in.
Thanks, Kristo. Yes. For Q&A, we'll start in the room and then we'll take a few questions from Zoom. If I could ask you to raise your hand when you receive the mic, please do introduce yourself and your company, ask your question, and then hand back the mic. If we just start here with Pavan. Thank you.
Yeah, thanks. Pavan Deswani from Citi. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got a couple. Firstly, could you maybe expand on your comments about the growth opportunities for the U.S. listing? You particularly called out platforms in particular. Does it also help with the conversations with regulators in terms of direct connections possibly in the U.S.? Then secondly, we're two-thirds of the way through Q1, obviously seeing quite a lot of volatility in the markets. Could we maybe touch on some of the trends so far in Q1?
I'll start with the first one and pass over to Emmanuel. We're thinking about these listing updates very much in the long term, so in the next 10 years. The strategic impact we expect to be soft and indirect. There is no one thing that we cannot do today and we can do then. We expect this to raise our profile in the largest market of the world. Where our opportunity is enormous already, I'll skip the stats, but a vast amount of our volumes touch the U.S. dollar on one leg or one currency. It is important for us to operate in the U.S. It's a big part of our business already. I'll leave the second part to Emmanuel.
Yeah, I mean, like maybe to add to that, there are 4,000 banks in the U.S. For the Wise Platform, this is a massive opportunity. We think that it will also increase our brand awareness. That's one of the aspects. Concerning the business, I mean, like the announcement on a certain announcement from coming from the U.S. had an impact on the volume trade. We saw like on the overall perspective, if you look at the month of April and May, they are completely in line with what we saw the month before. Within the month, you have some fluctuations. We had some upfront loaded volumes in the first two weeks of April, decelerating for the second for the last two weeks of the month.
Overall, as I said, it was completely in line with what we saw the month before. Obviously, we're monitoring what's happening and what kind of decisions will be made further on top of tariffs. It seems like it's cooling down a bit. I should add, like, you know, we're probably not so exposed compared to other players. I mean, like, you know, we're not exposed especially for one country, like I would mention, for example, China, where we don't have a massive exposure to one specific country. I think the portfolio, the footprint that we have is almost natural hedge. Yes, acceleration of the activities, the first two weeks of April, over all the months was completely in line with what we saw before. So far, also the first two months are in line with what we saw the first quarter of 2025.
Great. Thank you.
I can go to the front here to Justin, please. Thanks. Awesome.
Thank you very much. This is Justin Forsythe of UBS. Good to be here. So a couple of questions from me. Wise Platform, wanted to touch on that. Obviously, some really nice wins, including Raiffeisen, Itaú. Maybe you just talk a little bit more detailed about the rollout and the phasing. And specifically, I mean, is this a repeatable process or because of the size of these organizations, is there any sort of bespoke services type of work that you have to do to implement the solution set there? And how long, I know it's going to vary depending on the partner there, but how long should we expect those rollouts to take? Is this three, four, or five-year journeys and can they pick certain currencies? Like, how are you thinking about that?
I know we maybe spoke about it in the past, but it's, you know, six months since Standard Chartered. Maybe we could have a little bit of an update there. I wanted to ask about the merchant acquiring proposition, the payment links. Maybe you just talk a little bit more broadly about your go-forward aspirations because I think this is just a starting point. Maybe there's opportunity to do more stuff with e-commerce and just how it works, including with the QR code. Are you ultimately the payment processor? Are you leveraging any partners to execute those transactions on the back end and how you view more broadly the payment processing proposition going forward?
Okay, I can try to probably split the first one with Emmanuel. You're right. We've covered the progress. It's almost, I would color it in the way that this 2025 was a great year because we revealed a set of large logos, high-profile banks that we've been working with. Of course, it's been years in the making to get to that stage and it's going to be years as we ramp up different volumes. Emmanuel has shared a little bit on a kind of a grander scale of how do you think of Wise profile as a whole. We're unlikely to be able to comment on individual volumes of clients, but maybe.
You know, you remember probably at Honors Day, we said like we're around 3-4% today of the revenues and midterm is going to be 10%. Long term, we foresee a 50% of the revenues coming from the platform. Of revenues. Of revenues, yeah. We stick to that. In terms of, you know, acquisition or the, I do not know if you, you know, the part of it was also the timeline. As Kristo said, the acquisition takes some time. I have not said that obviously announcing this kind of big wins increased the inbound calls and we are pretty optimistic for the years to come on the platform. The ramp-up after the signing took some time. usually, we start with one product, one route specifically, and then we increase the volume as time comes.
Answering your question on this 20,000 banks in the world, it has to be a repeatable process to an extent, but with any kind of enterprise sales, it is a process.
Thank you.
There was a second part.
Second part was the pure, well, the payments. Payments, yes. Payments. Indeed, maybe I will start with where the sweet spot is for our business customers. Where we serve our business customers today are the ones who do not get paid like 100 times a day. There are very different solutions for those businesses.
There are even different solutions for businesses that get paid 10x-20x a day. Those who do not get paid like multiple times a day, so if you are a contractor, if you are selling more occasionally, that is where we can help. Especially when you do it internationally. Domestically, a lot of these solutions are quite advanced and quite well set up. If you do this internationally, the main reason, like with our individual customers, businesses really hate discovering that whoever the service provider is, they managed to take an FX markup and there is a 2% tax or 3% tax on it. That is what they do not love.
We have a transparent solution for them, but it is geared towards less frequency, less frequency payments. I do not know if that helps the philosophy.
Are you partnering with anybody or is this like full-stack Wise solution?
We are partnering across U.S.. We should be. So within our stack, of course, we try to use others as well, but especially these Wise to Wise payments, they are completely on our stack. There is nothing there. But then financial services are very integrated. The integration is actually power rather than a downside.
Thanks. Just Alex, next one.
Thanks. Alex Short from Berenberg. I noticed in the results you reference that you have entered into an insurance safeguarding policy for $520 million. My understanding, correct me if I am wrong, is that that will allow you to use customer funds as working capital. Is that the case? And what is the rationale behind that? Is there going to be any material impact on direct costs? Could you or should we expect that 520 million to grow over time? It's obviously quite a large amount relative to your post-capital requirement corporate cash balance.
When you refer to the safeguarding insurance, it's part of, we have it already, right? This is part of the overall strategy for safeguarding. It will continue. I mean, like we are prolonging this safeguarding and over time we aim to increase it. This is part of the overall strategy of safeguarding.
Okay. One more. I noticed that H2 revenue performance in North America was a little bit softer. Could you just elaborate on the underlying reasons behind that?
America? I mean, like you mean like from the Americas or the U.S. dollar?
North America, the geographic revenue disclosure that you provide.
That, I mean, like I'm over, I can't answer this question, actually. Sorry.
Thanks, Alex. Would you mind just passing it to Patrick? Thank you.
Thank you. Andrew Hollingworth from Holland Advisors. Just a few questions if I may. You talk about strategically sort of lowering fees, but obviously this year was a big step down and then the previous years was not so many steps, albeit that I think you'd spoken about wanting to be reducing fees. Have we sort of got to an inflection point, you think, now whereby sort of operational gearing the business means that you're just going to be continually lowering some years more, some years less, but the trajectory is now consistently down. That's just a simple sort of yes or no question, I suppose.
I'll make it a bit broader. I think historically it has always been, it just has in the middle, there were a few years where it was not down that much. I think it will vary. It will depend on our economics and our scale effects. Yes, it is a short answer, but if you look at over the years, it is just there is varying. It is not a now being different.
Okay, great. Thank you. Then just two other ones that are perhaps a bit more expansive. The investor today, a lot of people ask questions about the network and about sort of new products into larger corporates and all the rest of it. I run a small business and for me, the products you offer for a small business in terms of cross-currency invoicing are just fantastic and just save a fortune. It feels to me like there's a massive, massive potential in SMBs, but your sort of growth rate in that sort of segment, it's never quite what we want it to be because of all the onboarding and all the rest of it. Having got through that, how do you feel about that sort of segment three, four, five, ten years from now? Do you think it could be a massive business or is there always going to be onboarding step changes that we're going to have problems with?
No, you're right. This is a massive opportunity. I mean, because also we have a beautiful cohort with these SMEs. They are usually very sticky, but the acquisition time obviously takes longer. I mean, like for small businesses to be acquired, but this is a massive opportunity for us. We also declared the Owners' Day. I mean, on Honors Day, it was a part of the presentation how we focus on launching new products that are facilitating, well, your daily life with invoicing and so on and so forth. We will continue to focus on these opportunities for sure, but this is a large one.
Okay, as much as we've had slower growth more recently, you just, I know you're not going to give a target, but it just feels like that's a bit that should be growing a lot quicker for a lot longer at some point in time.
For sure. We put a target on those GBP 14 trillion across border by the boat. That's fine. That's a big enough target. That's where it's going. Okay.
The last one, could you just talk about, you know, some competitors, sort of Revolut and Nubank and Nu Holdings that obviously have chosen to become banks? By being a bank, obviously you give me greater security about me having deposits with you and so on. Could you just talk about that decision to do that and not to do that? Because obviously being a bank has that feeling of being old, lazy competitor, but Nubank, and let's not talk about Revolut, but Nubank is not an old, lazy competitor.
I can try and answer. Being a bank really only gives you mostly one thing, which is the ability to lend me, to lend your business's holdings to people on this side of the room. None of our customers are really asking us for that. You're not calling and saying, "Hey, I have this money here. You're paying interest, but I'd actually want you also to lend it to someone else." That's why the banking as like lending deposits is really that relevant for us. Of course, because you would be taking as a customer a huge amount of risk of holding your money with us if we were to lend your deposits. Therefore, this concept of deposit insurance is devised to give you comfort that you should do something as reckless as giving us your money and us lending it. Of course, if we're not lending your money, you don't need the deposit insurance. I agree with you that most people won't want to think about it. There is this aura of security that comes with banks.
If your business is registered in the U.K., what you can do is switch on interest. With that, you'll be getting pretty much, you're A: getting government guarantee on your holdings because all the holdings are in assets that are either issued by the government or guaranteed by the government. You get an interest that is not far from what Bank of England would be paying on banks' deposits. With assets, you actually get the best parts of both worlds. You get much more interest than you would get from the bank, and you get the security across all of your holdings, not only the chunk of it. That is why you also see the assets part of the holdings growing pretty fast because this proposition is actually better than any bank can offer. Okay.
I mean, Revolut's going to play the bank security card in terms of the deposit stock security. Have you got messages that you can give your customers that just say, "Look, you haven't got the GBP 85,000 security, but you've got so much other security"? That's what I'm trying to get at [audio distortion]
I think when we look at the distribution of how big sums people have with us, you'll be surprised how large these numbers are. It is already happening a little bit. Of course, I take your comment that that is a feature or setup that is new to a large population and we are on the way of bringing this to the market. I think we are in the early days of this.
I think it's also fair to say that we're not a bank, but we face obligations to safeguarding. We just touched base about it. Basically, we are securing the money of our customers for sure. Yes, one way to look at it, and that's also fascinating, is like you could say, you know, the state only guaranteed to a certain level. What happened beyond, right? Basically, it's in brackets, only GBP 85,000 and EUR 100,000, but basically, you know, some people will hold more money than this. We have the obligation from the authorities to secure this money from our customers anyway.
[audio distortion]
We're getting really detailed questions there. Joining us.
Hey, morning. This is Aditya from Bank of America. Just a few from my side. Firstly, just on the point around the pricing changes. You've had a couple of more direct connections, which will probably go live during FY 2026, Brazil and Japan. How would that sort of reflect on your pricing changes during this year in terms of maybe timing or scope? Would that be something more gradual or could that sort of be another step change? That's the first one. The second one is more broadly on the us listing, which has been proposed. Could you just talk about what's the requirements to get added to some of the us indices? Once that happens, I know there's a few steps before we get there, but is there a need to incorporate the business in the us as such or have management there? I don't know. What are the steps there to kind of get to that point?
I maybe start with the second and I come back to the pricing. Today, and actually, we just announced the recommendations. There's more to come. I mean, we're working on the details. I think it's too premature to give you details today. We have a circular going out at the end of June, and then you will have the full detail of this. If you refer to basically where we are today in London, one fifth of our employees, 6,000 employees, one fifth is based here. We're looking for 100 positions. We just moved to a new office, so we don't have any plan whatsoever concerning the move to the U.S. Maybe more on the financial part because it's the part I covered. Yes, they will have some implications with the prior listing. I mean, obviously, U.S. GAAP is one of the things.
We, in the preparation and consideration with the board and the long discussion that we had, the teams have been working on the preparation already. We know the steps that we have to follow in order to be ready for listing, assuming that we basically got the approval from their shoulders. On pricing, I think it's important because sometimes we forget this. I mean, we do price adjustments every month. That's something that, you know, I think it's fair to say that, you know, we continue to pass the efficiencies to the customers. You know, that's something that we have already factored in our guidance. Yes, there would be price adjustments where we can. We are driving the business in a way that we become more efficient every single month. You know, once we have this clear visibility, we will pass this efficiency back to the customers. Yeah, there will be price adjustments. You know, the magnitude is soon to be seen.
Maybe just one follow-up. You've spoken about the GBP 2 billion of investment over the next two years, having invested GBP 3 billion in the previous 10 years. Given that sort of large runway of opportunity, the GBP 32 trillion TAM, how should we think about that investment scope beyond the next two years? You could easily invest another GBP 4 billion, GBP 5 billion, GBP 6 billion, just to capture the opportunity. How do you think about the investment opportunity beyond this couple of years then?
Yeah, first, I mean, like, you know, these investments come with their kind of return expectations. You know, we can measure, I mean, we share the 2 million. If we get the return that we expect or even beyond the investment, the return that we get, we might come back to you and say, "Look, I mean, we see an opportunity here to invest a bit further." It's too early to say. I mean, like, you know, we're accelerating our marketing spend. As we said for this year, we see good returns, good reactions for the market. We're driving the funnel higher in Australia, and we will enter other markets during the year. For the marketing, we are increasing our product and tech headcounts. That's where we start today. Beyond the GBP 2 billion, if the return is good, I think we can expect us to continue to invest. I mean, the opportunity is so huge, you know, like sure. If the return is there and we create value for the shareholders, we should continue to do so.
That's great here. Thank you. After this question, we'll jump over to Zoom. Perfect.
Craig McDowell from JP Morgan. On the platform business, obviously a lot changed in the macro since you spoke to us last in April. Can you comment on whether there's been any change in the funnel of opportunities? Are you seeing prospective partners either delay or deprioritize? Similarly, on the integration of confirmed partnerships, any changed integration plans?
I haven't seen any impact from macro. I think either no or negligible on Wise Platform funnels. I think like banks, they like us thinking long term. When banks talk to us, this is also a long term, pretty strategic move for them. Probably short term movements are not affecting them.
Great. Thank you.
If you are joining via Zoom and you'd like to ask a question, please raise your hand. We do have a question here from Gregoire Hermann at Barclays. So over to you, Gregoire.
Hi everyone. I hope you can hear me well. A couple of questions, please. The first time would be on the timeline, potentially on the dual listing. Is there anything you can tell us here? I know you said on the 26th of June, you will circulate the proposal, but forwards, you said you're ready. What can we expect there? Then on the platform and more specifically, Raiffeisen's announcement, which was, I think, a couple of weeks ago. When do you expect it to be effective? And then lastly, more on recruiting.
I think you said that as of March 21st, you mentioned that you had more than 6,500 employees, which represented more than 2,000 recruits over the past three years. Should we expect that same pace of recruitment over the next three years? Thank you.
I might start with the timeline. Yeah, you're right. The circular should be available to the shareholders by the end of June with the full detail. I mentioned before the legal setup and other details. That would be by the end of June. There would be an EGM taking place where we're seeking the approval for this consideration. That would be at the end of July. There's a timeline to consider the prior listing in the U.S. We're working full speed. As I said before, there's a financial part of it. There's also a compliance part of it. You know, the timeline should be, you know, around a year or so. We have to work and we have to file. We will have an iteration with the SEC. That is probably what you have to keep in mind. The next immediate steps are the circular on the 26th of June. We mentioned that this morning and a vote of the shareholders by the end of July.
In terms of your question on platform and Raiffeisen, the dynamic there is similar as discussed before. We expect each of the customers to be once announced. We announce usually when we are starting to see some of the volumes or very close to that. We should see each of these ramping up at their own pace. I think the one to track is the overall Wise Platform volume rather than the individual deals.
You mentioned the headcounts. Yes, we've been increasing the headcounts in the last three years. We ramp up the service departments or the service teams the last two years quite a bit because of the demand of the customers and onboarding the customers on the private side, but also on SMEs. We also announced, if you remember, about six months ago that we're working a lot with third party in order to also have this flexibility and bandwidth to satisfy, you know, when we onboard more people or less. That is a full ongoing. This is also part of the expense increase last year, not related to personal. In general, we are looking for recruiting in the world, really. Like this is true for Japan, this is true for Singapore, India that we announced we build an office there.
U.K., I mean, like we have more than 100 open positions as of today. And the U.S., obviously. Yes, we continue to recruit, probably not at the same pace in terms of certain departments and certain departments as we saw over the last two years. We're focusing on efficiency. We're focusing on automation and artificial intelligence is obviously something that should also drive efficiencies here.
Great. Thank you.
Now passing over to Alex Faure at BNP Paribas. Over to you, Alex. You may just need to unmute on Zoom, Alex.
Hi, good morning. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can, thanks. Oh, apologies. Thank you very much and thanks for the tip. Yeah, a couple of questions if I may. Firstly, on the new U.S. tax bill, in that context, how should we think of the mix between maybe discretionary transfers and less discretionary transfers coming from your U,S.-based end users? And my second question is on stable coins. Obviously, we've got a cynical starting trading in a few hours now. Just wondering what exploratory work you might be doing within Wise around stable coins and maybe as an add-on to that, how do you view potential competitors when it comes to cross-border payouts, maybe technology from Bridge and BDNK and the likes? Thank you very much.
Yeah, we can try to answer. Your question was about the proposed U.S. transaction tax. We do not really have a position on this. Of course, the country can tax there how they want. We do not particularly expect a substantial exposure to our financials. I think that's what we would have said if we expected that. I think that's—let's see what happens there. I would encourage. On the other topic, on stable coins, interesting to watch. What are the going to be the use cases? It's hard to see how the—it's hard to see that the kind of the general use cases of how people use money across the world, the local, as long as the local currencies are being used. I think it's hard to see these technologies competing with the infrastructure that we've built up, but also kind of reserve the opinion there.
Got it. Thank you. That's great.
We do not have any further questions on Zoom. At that point, we shall conclude today's presentation and Q&A. I thank you very much for joining us this morning. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thanks, everyone. Thank you.