I'm gonna talk you through the results, which is what we do on a quarterly basis. We talk about growth, what we've been doing and how we've been growing. Just as a reminder, we have our full year results coming later at the end of June, where we'll meet again. I'm gonna talk through the results, we're gonna open up some Q&A. I've got Martyn Adlam here, who managing the Q&A. As per normal, if you've got a question, raise your hand virtually, hopefully we can have a good discussion. Just in summary, as you know, we're on a mission here at Wise to build money without borders, we're very much so in it for the long run.
We're investing in building a great business that attracts millions of people and businesses around the world whilst building a resilient, diverse, and profitable business that our customers can trust. You can see this in our numbers. We saw a 33% growth in active customers in the quarter, driving a 45% growth in revenues, and then actually over an 80% growth in the total income. This growth drives our growth in our capacity to invest. It highlights the strength of the proposition that we've built, the diverse and quality nature of the business model, and actually sets us up really well to keep investing in the long run 'cause there's a long-term massive opportunity, and we can keep investing through the cycle whilst remaining highly profitable.
Before I go into the results and all the drivers of those results, it's just worth sharing a bit more on the great product progress that we've made in the quarter. First, as you know, we care about price and speed. It's fundamental to what we do. Actually, price didn't change that much, but speed has improved. 55% of payments are now instant. That means that 55% of payments arrive useful in the recipient's account within 20 seconds, which is pretty amazing. That's increased and is now consistently above more than half. Actually, nine out of 10 payments now arrive on the same day, which is also quite unheard of in any payments infrastructure. We've made great progress in countries like Brazil, where it's not a surprise that we've been growing really fast, and also places like Poland.
A big change, and one that's really relevant, is that our customers can now earn a return in this environment. We've focused on ways to help customers take advantage of the higher interest rate environment. It makes our Wise Account much more useful and valuable to both people and businesses. You know that we launched Assets. We've been launching this over the last year or so. Actually, after launching in the U.K., and we're also now live in Singapore, we're in France, Spain, Austria, Finland, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands. That's on our Assets product, where you have our interest product live. We're also giving customers a return on their money if they just hold it in their Wise Account. We've done that in Europe, and actually now we're doing that in the U.S. as well.
Importantly, customers now trust us to hold GBP 10.7 billion of their money in our accounts. That's up 57% year-over-year. It's proof that the product is resonating. Actually amazingly, balances continue to grow, that's inflows, not outflows, throughout this past months of turmoil that we've seen in the market. Then there's Wise Platform, where we've seen actually some really promising progress with some numerous new partners. We've seen tech firms start adopting Wise over the last years, and we've seen some really amazing progress there. We've got Brex, we've got Ramp and Bluevine, we've got Interactive Brokers, then global employment platform, Globalization Partners, all live now, which is like almost an entire vertical of these products that help companies make payments, make payroll, pay expenses, manage expenses, all now integrating Wise, which is a huge stamp of approval.
Then we've also made some early progress on integrating larger banks, which we know is gonna take an awfully long time. In this quarter, Bank Mandiri, which is, for those that don't know, Indonesia's largest bank by assets, has gone live. It shows it's gonna take a long time to integrate these large banks, but this is really promising that actually it's possible, and we can do it far afield from where we're operating here in the U.K. Oh, we've got a great new look. Although we couldn't make the lectern, we've got an amazing new brand for Wise. We changed our name to Wise, now we're evolving the brand and really refreshing what the Wise Account is, and we're seeing that in our growth. Let's talk about some of these results.
We saw a 33% growth in the number of active customers using Wise. Really solid momentum, particularly in today's environment. The momentum continues for the number of new customers that are joining Wise in many countries around the world. That's driven by word of mouth. It continues the same mix. We've not radically increased or changed the marketing mix. Continuing people recommending Wise to their friends and family as a great product to use. Interestingly, when you look at the mix of the customers joining, more than half of those that now join are joining directly to use the Wise Account, which really reflects this shift in our product over this period of time, and that's shown in the nature of our financials. These customers that are active move GBP 27 billion in volume.
That's cross-border volume only. When you combine that with other revenues from the Wise Account, that's what drove the 45% increase in revenues year-over-year. What's happening with volume? Volume, the volume trends, the cross-border volume trend, was really a continuation of the trends we've seen in the past quarter. Underpinning this is strong growth in Wise Account and Wise Business, and that's supported by new customer sign-up, but also solid behaviors in the cohorts. But we do see also the continuation of the trend we saw with this pull-forward impact from last summer, where we saw really strong volumes, particularly for high amount payments. That was impacting the volume per customer that we saw, the VPC.
That's continued what we saw last quarter into this quarter, so that you can see that in the personal VPC. And we should also reflect now that when we look at the nature of these larger payments, these are payments typically above where customers moving more than GBP 10,000 on a monthly basis. The core use cases for these are paying for or payments relating to property. Maybe it's buying a property or the proceeds from selling a property or shifting or moving or making investments around the world. We shouldn't be surprised in the current macro environment that those things will have had some impact. We know that that's cyclical, and ultimately, over some period of time, short-term.
Fundamentally, when we look at the makeup of our customers, we see a lot of new customers joining Wise. That's growing. We see really solid performance in the cohorts. It's actually no real mix change in what people are doing on Wise. We remain really confident in the fundamentals over the medium to long term. Let me look at this volume and you say, right, well, what's happened to take rate? It's the price we charge for cross-border volume. I said it's relatively stable in the last quarter. Then the income we're seeing from Wise Account, and Wise Account's growing, so we're seeing more fee income. Actually, that take rate combined with the volume is driving this 45% growth in revenue.
As, you know, an increasingly diverse set of revenue from a strong growing customer base. Let's talk about balances quickly as well because I know there's a bunch of questions on this, which is driving the net interest income, which is the difference between the revenue and total income. Fundamentally, our balances have grown, and that's driven by Wise Account adoption. Customers joining us and are moving to use Wise Account and bringing their balances to Wise. That reflects the trust in the product that we've built. At GBP 10.7 billion or 57% year-on-year growth, this balance has continued to grow, and actually that excludes importantly the money that customers are holding in their Assets product. Some people have moved balances out of that number into Assets. We haven't split that number out yet.
It's still relatively small, but it is growing fast. Obviously, in today's environment, it's got great product market fit. Off these balances, we earned GBP 72 million in interest in the quarter, and we returned GBP 16 million or shared GBP 16 million of that with our customers. That's about a 2% net interest yield. Now, that varies quite a lot by market. Some markets we simply can't pay interest. We're not allowed to. We haven't kind of implemented an approach yet. We'll keep working on that. In a market like in Europe, we can get a sense as to how much we're sharing. We're retaining roughly 1% of the interest for our own, for our own means and sharing the rest with our customers. Which means our customers are getting a great deal.
We continue to see these balances grow. They're coming to Wise, ultimately, we're building a really strong loyal relationship with that customer. You can have a sense of that as to where, like, how much we... You know, that 1% gives us all the funding we need to have a very profitable business for our European customers. When you take together, we've talked about customer growth, revenue, and then this income. When you put all that together, we saw income of GBP 280 million total for the quarter. That's 83% year-on-year growth. When you add that up, this is the fourth quarter, so the across all four. We had GBP 964 million or nearly GBP 1 billion of total income, which was 73% year-over-year.
Just ahead, importantly, of our most recent guidance. In summary, as you know, we're on this mission, and we're very much in it for the long run. We're continuing to invest in building great products. We're investing heavily in our product, our engineering teams, and that's attracting millions of people and businesses around the world to Wise every year. We're doing that, though, importantly, whilst building this resilient, diverse, and profitable business, which you can see in our financials. You can see this customer growth is driving very healthy, diverse set of revenue and income. That then is funding all of our investment in the future, in the proposition, in continuing to build this Wise Account.
This sets us up to keep investing heavily now despite the macroeconomic conditions whilst remaining really profitable and investing behind the long-term opportunity. I'm gonna pause there, and then hand over for some questions. I'm sure, as you said, Martyn's here to take the questions. Just raise your hand virtually, and I'll do my best to answer them.
Thanks, Matt. Just a reminder, if you do want to ask a question, you know, raise your hand virtually, and I'll open you up. First question comes from Orson Rout at Barclays. Orson, please go ahead.
Morning.
Morning, morning. For me, just in terms of the account balance development with, you know, SVB and everything we've seen, can you just talk a bit about how that's trended over time, quarter-on-quarter? Have you seen sort of changed behavior from your customers? Maybe a bit more color around that. You know, secondly, around the interest income related to that. It's sort of interesting in the way you present the European net yield at the 1%. Can you just talk a little bit about the U.S. product, how that compares to say the U.K. or Europe from the sort of opt-in perspective? Also seeing that you're, I think, returning some fees in the U.K. to people.
Just a bit more color in terms of how you're, you know, negotiating in the U.S. and the U.K. towards that sort of European level. Thank you.
Great. Thanks for the question. It's been a really interesting quarter from a, from a really tough quarter for the industry. What did we see customers do? Well, if you look at the start and the end of the quarters, it's actually pretty steady. We've seen just sustained and steady growth in our balances over time. When I say balances here, I'm just gonna talk about the on-balance sheet balances that we have. Across all geographies, we've seen that in the key areas where we have balances, we've seen that continue to grow. We actually look at inflows or net inflows, outflows, net inflows, and they've been very steady over the period of time.
If you look over the weekend or the week of when we saw this challenge with in the banking industry, we saw quite a bit of noise. We definitely saw Lots of businesses try to bring their balances to Wise, like smaller businesses. We helped them actually, and we made it very clear that as to how you if and how you want to bring your balances to Wise, how would you do that? We tried to help as many customers as possible.
We did see balance growth, but I wouldn't say that's a one-time kick 'cause I'm sure as many, as many businesses would tell you, like some of those balances came in, and many of those balances would have found their natural home in another bank, by the end of the following week. What we did see is we just saw very strong growth in the number of businesses using Wise. More than ever, people appreciated what Wise is about. We were very clear that your money's safe, it's available, and you earn a great yield on this money whilst without having to lock it up over a long period of time or let us lend it to somebody else. Actually that's really resonated now.
While I know many companies have started to see outflows, many highly reputable companies have seen outflows. We've actually seen inflows, which I think just talks to the nature of our proposition. Then you asked a question around interest income. In the U.S., we offer a product, it's a pretty awesome product where you can opt in if you hold U.S. dollars to actually get interest. Also you get an element of deposit insurance as well in this.
Mm-hmm.
Which is, which is really, really interesting for our customers. We do that through a partnership we have in the U.S. We're hoping to spread that from customers holding U.S. dollars. There are other currencies which our U.S. customers might hold, but it's gonna take time. You know, customers are opting into that, and we see the opt-in, we won't disclose it here, but all of that is all on balance sheets today. Actually, so the customers that are really sensitive to rate and really interested in this are opting in and earning a rate not far off the central bank rate in the U.S. on the U.S. dollar.
For the rest of the balances in the U.S., we can't yet offer interest, so we're actually keeping that interest and that's what contributing to the high net interest yield. In Europe, I think you understood this one. I can talk then in the U.K., we're actually not allowed flat to pay interest to our customers. What we do there is we look at like how can we, how can we use some of that in net interest income to reward customers for using Wise? We essentially pay, choose for some customers to offer a... Hopefully some of you on the line are some of these customers that will have received a fee rebate. We've had great feedback from our customers for this.
In some markets, there's quite clearly a hurdle that we may not be able to get over to share this income with our customers, and others there's definitely ways we can do this, and we've shown we can be innovative to do that. When you step back from this, like, we have an account which this interest is really helpful in helping a fund and cover some of the costs of, but we're very cautious around using too much of that interest income to use that. Wanna stay very balanced in keeping really strong unit economics that are super resilient come whatever we see on our interest rates going forward.
Yeah. Super helpful. Thank you. Just quickly, on the outlook for the year. I mean, did you just feel you needed to wait to disclose profitability to really give a full outlook for the year? Or, you know, is it some of this uncertainty in terms of the level of net interest income that you will, that's just holding you back from providing it at this slightly earlier stage? Just curious.
We're in the process of closing the financial year. FY 2023, I think you're talking about here. We'll report our results. As we said in the last quarter, we talked about the second half of the year having a higher profit, EBITDA than the first half of the year. The interest income you can see now is the interest income. There's no more of that.
So I meant.
To flush out in the close.
I meant for 2024. Sorry.
Yeah.
The guidance for 2024.
That's right. Well, we normally do this in June, so we'll follow up in June with.
Cool.
With guidance for 2024.
Okay. Thanks, Matt.
Great. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Matt. The next question comes from Kim Bergoe at Numis. Over to you, Kim.
Good morning, Kim.
Morning. Just needed to unmute myself. Morning, Matt and Martyn.
Morning.
Just one sort of question for me on the volumes per customer. Obviously, you're gonna probably been asked a lot about that, but the trends that you're seeing there, is it... I guess it's difficult to find the sort of industry data, but how much would you say is that a shift in sort of customers using you for higher transactions, or is that just sort of a general trend or a slowdown in these sort of transaction types? How much is Wise specific and how much is sort of industry-wide or macroeconomically driven?
Great question. And I can only. You know, we obviously there's not perfect data in the market to answer this question. I guess what do we, what do we know, what do we see versus what do we believe or what can we, what can I help you look at from a, from this perspective? What we see is we see, we saw a very big increase in the number of high-value payments in the summer of last year, and then that we've seen that fall away. We've seen that quite internationally, and when I say that, we've seen it across a lot of geographies. We saw a lot of FX volatility and that's kind of reduced somewhat.
When I see it across a lot of geographies, I believe it's unlikely to be highly unlikely to be competitive because we just don't have any global competition. When we do look at certain players and operators, we don't see anything that's changed at all really in the propositions that are being offered by our competition. I feel it's definitely not competitive or we don't believe it is anything competitive there. In fact, we see it as the combination of we're coming off a very tough comp before, and then also, when you just look at the macro and you look at what the customers are using for these higher value payments for, as I said, property and flows of investment funds, so maybe flowing into a, into an asset manager.
The market data for that, I believe that those are definitely suppressed quite a lot in the last quarter, two quarters versus what we saw before. When I observe that, and I'm sure when you observe that, you would look at it and really not be surprised actually that we've seen a reduction in this. The question is when might that return? That's a judgment call that you obviously will take and you'll take a view on when that macro will probably come back.
To answer the question, really, I don't think this is Wise specific, but rather macro specific and FX, the nature of how people used Wise over the last year. If you think about it, like we're not worried about it. We look at it and think, "Okay, I've always said there's gonna be volatility on a quarter-on-quarter basis in our VPC." If you flip it around, you'd say, well, kind of it's only, you know, three, four years ago, this was the primary driver of all of our revenue and income and profitability. Actually now we're way more diversified. You know, this is one factor. You know, we're still seeing 45% revenue growth off 33% customer growth during this period. Volume is just one of our drivers now.
Great. Thank you. That's very clear. Thanks.
Thanks, Kim. Our next question comes from Aditya at Bank of America. Aditya, over to you.
Hi, Aditya.
Hey, Matt. Thanks for taking the question. A few from my side. Firstly, on the VPC, you spoke about the macro impact on higher value cohorts. Could you just talk about what you're seeing on the lower value cohorts? You've said that's still strong, but if you could just give us some color on how maybe that's been trending Q- on- Q, and how you see that as you've entered FY 2024. Same thing for business customers as well, how those, how they're spending and their behavior, any, maybe any impact of macro, especially on maybe the smaller businesses that you work with. Second, on the point of margins, I know you're not giving anything today, but we know, as you said, two-edge margins are going to be higher.
Can you talk about how you've taken this windfall from interest income and maybe been reinvesting that into the business in terms of, you know, hiring? What have you been, sort of been investing in, and, you know, maybe that's new features or new products, and when do we start to see that maybe becoming more visible in terms of growth for next year? Just finally, you've talked a lot about the platform wins, over the last few months in Interactive Brokers and a couple of banks. Can you talk about what's the contribution of those platform customers today in terms of volumes, maybe how that's been growing, again, how you see that trending?
Great. That's cool. Thanks for the questions. Let me fire through these to make sure we get through. On VPC, on the kinda core of the Wise Account and Wise Business, we've seen very strong Wise Account customer growth, right? Pretty stable VPCs here. Which basically means that we've seen, if you kinda took the dates off the axes and just looked at the trend, it's very steady and very strong. Actually, you know, this shows the loyalty, the kind of relationship we have with these customers, and I'm just talking about the personal here, through this period, where they kinda use Wise.
They're really core to people's lives increasingly. Actually that's a really dependable core, and that's really what we've been investing in, as no surprise, of what people are using the Wise Account for today. It's very consistent and very stable growth in this, in this group. It's pretty much the same for Wise Business as well, where you actually see kind of just Q- on- Q sequential growth in the active customers for people and businesses. That's driven by these, this core populous volumes. For businesses, we don't see so much of this high amounts impact because businesses do move more, but actually they're paying staff or they're paying their suppliers. These things are less, way less discretionary.
We did see a drop Q- on- Q in the VPC for businesses, but actually that was within the realms of seasonality. We typically see that from our Q3 to the Q4. Rather I just see this in the noise. But actually we're just seeing very healthy sign-ups from businesses, and this is continuing to drive growth in, you know, behind what is a massive opportunity. Any question about margins, like I will talk more about this in the half year, and you're right, we did guide that this is slightly higher. We invest across our teams. We...
Obviously people think, "Oh, you're investing in products, or you're investing in marketing." Actually one of the things we're really investing in is in our servicing teams and the service that we're offering our customers. You'll see these growing. The headcount of Wise is continuing to grow. Actually that does really help our growth. We know that if we can offer customers a much better service, shorten the queue lengths if they've got a challenge with Wise, onboard customers faster, we know that that's a huge return from a growth perspective. Actually, that's where we're putting this first. We really prioritize. We won't actually invest in growing our products till we can offer a really great service.
I think that speaks volumes as to how we treat our customers, which ultimately is then what drives this word-of-mouth growth in our products. We are continuing to grow our product teams, but these are investments that we'll make over the longer term. The last one on Platform, we haven't split this out and we won't. Like the number of Platform partners continues to grow, and that business is growing very well. It's very early. Really, we're just continuing to build momentum with the partnerships we've got. And when we look at the return on the investments that we're making there, we have confidence to just keep scaling that team and really building our infrastructure to work for the world's biggest institutions.
All right. That's very clear. Thank you.
Thanks, Aditya. Matt, the next question comes from Justin Forsythe at Credit Suisse. Justin, over to you.
Good morning.
Morning, Matt. How are you?
Good. Thank you.
Thank you for this. Great. Great. A couple from me as well. Thank you very much. First, I wanted to talk a little bit about engagement on the platform. Can you talk a little about going from kinda top of the funnel through to kind of becoming quarterly active? You know, you download the app, how long does it take typically before customers become active? And is there a difference between cohorts, meaning are the, say, 2018 and before cohorts typically higher or lower engagement? You know, maybe on average, understanding that, you know, the 2022 or 2021 cohort might, of course, not be super engaged given how recent it is to current day. And then how long is it typically before like a customer cohort becomes active?
Meaning, you know, from when I download the app, how often, you know, is that within six months, 12 months, et cetera? Lastly, on this engagement piece, can you maybe give us a little bit to quantify whether Assets or any of these newer initiatives have helped increase engagement on your existing download base? That's kinda the first set of questions, I suppose. I just wanted to talk a little bit about the, the net interest income disclosure and appreciate some of the detail you've given there. I guess that maybe changes a little bit the algorithm for margins, although we're basically, as we've talked about in the past, back-solving to a 20% EBITDA margin.
Maybe you could help us understand what you believe the core margin of the payments business, if you will, on an ex interest basis is? Is that, you know, We've been up in the low to mid-twenties at some point in the past. You know, I think we've implied a little bit lower than that recently. Can you just talk about what the longer term margins of the core payments business is? Thanks.
Cool. Thanks. Great question on engagement. I Well, it's worth explaining first, like, what is an active customer for Wise because I think it's gonna be different to some of the other businesses you look at, and we try and keep a really honest metric for this. Actually, an active customer is a customer who's come to the app or the website, registered, downloaded, got a card. They may have made a domestic payment, but if that's not been cross-border, they're still not an active customer. It's only when you've made a cross-border payment or a conversion that actually we include you in the active customer base. Actually, a lot of that engagement time that you're talking about upstream is kinda going on now, like, without it showing up in our numbers.
Actually, we'd be paying for it. It's in our servicing costs. But actually, it's, we don't include customers that don't make cross-border payments. That keeps us really honest to, like, attract the right kind of quality customers to our business. That said, it does take customers time. They'll register, they'll check us out. They might, they might even, try and order a card or open an account. That does take a bit of time in some cases. Some people need it instantly, and they can start using Wise really quickly, which is why we get great feedback. I guess, like, the one thing I would try and explain is maybe the difference between what we used to see with TransferWise or our transfer product versus our account.
With the Account, we do see people sign up, start using us, maybe start spending overseas, and then their usage might grow more over time. We see this for businesses. Whereas for Transfer, it was like they start using us, and that's the use case that they might use us for. We do see more of a ramp in our Wise Account businesses. Overall, when we look at the cohorts, we do see an improvement in the quality of the cohorts as we shift towards Wise Accounts. Just to be clear, like our data is customers that are already engaged and active, if that makes sense. The question is, what are these new products doing?
Well, all of the products that we're launching from on top of the transfer, like the Wise Account, the card, account details, all of the features, and then Assets are all continuing to drive use of the Wise Account, which drives ultimately more engagement. People make many more transfers. They make domestic payments. They hold their balances. Therefore, we see, as we've reported stats on Wise Account, them ultimately through their lifetime using Wise more, earning, paying. You know, we earn greater fees. We see them move more volume. Generally, all of these things steadily increase that engagement over time.
Matt, just a quick clarifier there. Because this is a quarterly statistic, that means if they hadn't done a cross-border transfer, then they would fall off of that statistic, right?
That's right. If you transacted with us in November but then didn't transact with us in this quarter, you're not in our active customer base.
Yep. Yep. All right. Thank you for that detail. Then on the, just the margins. Thanks a lot.
Yeah. On margin, we do look at this in aggregate. We have a cost base. You know, our core product is our Wise Account. Our Wise Account has a wide range of costs. Our Wise Account helps people move money across borders. It helps people hold money. It helps people send money within the country and also make payments on their cards and even receive payments into their Wise Account. Actually, we look at the profitability of our core as the profitability of that Wise Account, which we're gonna manage to the 20%. Now, from an interest income perspective, that can and should help, some of that should help contribute to the cost.
We don't wanna subsidize everything that we offer to our customers with our conversion income, 'cause that's sends us down a pretty bad road of, you know, how banks have offered free banking but have hidden the fees in their fees. We look at, you know, how much of our cost base should be covered or is fair to be covered by interest income that we would keep versus share back with our customers. Obviously, like, we have to be very cautious that we don't become too reliant on interest income from a margin perspective.
You know, if you take just the European business as an example, you know, we're using 1% of that to support the profitability of the business and the costs related to running that account that aren't related to the conversion product. That first 1% we feel very happy and reliable on that as a sustainable, reliable, resilient income off of the balances that customers are holding. Also sharing back, you know, for dollars maybe 3% or 4% with our customers, which keeps them on the platform. I think when you look at profitability, we look at it as a whole because we look at the Wise Account as a whole.
We make sure that we have profitability in all of our product lines.
Got it. Sorry, I just wanna make sure I heard that correctly on the 20%. Do you say you're managing the core Account product, if you will, or suite of products to be more or less 20% margin longer term? Is that what the target relates to? 'Cause then you at the end there were talking about a comment around interest playing into that but not playing into it. Just to make sure I understand that clearly.
Yeah.
... T he core account business ex-interest should be 20%, or is that... or am I misunderstanding?
We will use some of the interests, as you can see in some markets where we can, we retain some of that interest. That interest will contribute to our overall margin.
Okay. Okay. Got it. Yeah, in theory, the core business will operate as it may and that can fluctuate based on how you fund kinda the same way it'd been talked about in the past, right?
Yeah. As we said, in a time where we are yet unable to return all of that interest or how much we want to our customers, that's why we've seen elevated margins over the current period, which is what we said last quarter. You know, we're cautious not to become too dependent on interest income, but we'll use some of that interest income to support our margin objectives.
Got it. Crystal clear. Thank you, Matt.
Thanks, Justin. Matt, the next question comes from Josh Levin at Autonomous. Over to you, Josh.
Morning, Josh.
Good morning. Just two questions. It looks like personal VPC is now below where it was in your 4Q 2021, so that would be the first quarter of 2021. In the press release, you attributed this to higher growth in lower VPC cohorts. How much of that growth in lower VPC cohorts is due to geographic mix, and where do you think personal VPC might bottom? Along that, why is a business VPC dropping? Is that also a pull forward, or is that something else?
Cool. Thanks for the questions, Josh. Personal VPC is down like the primary driver of Q- on- Q or from the summer is actually the reduction in the contribution from the higher amount claims, which we expect to be somewhat cyclical given the use case of these. We just can't predict what that cycle is. That contribution is lower than we've seen over the recent, the recent quarters and periods. The growth that we've seen, actually, we check this really hard to look for like, is this root mix?
You'll have seen in app downloads, you know, quite a healthy, robust growth in, like an account standard place like Brazil. Actually, this is not a dilutive impact. This is not driven purely by a dilutive impact. We're actually seeing a pretty healthy contribution to growth across all of these geographies. Actually, we ask that we do the rump and the underpinning growth in the business by this core of Wise Account, which we're seeing string through the period, and then we do see the volatility or the noise driven by the movements in this high amount contribution. On Business, Josh, actually, We saw like a step down in VPC quarter-on-quarter a year ago and before this on the Business VPCs.
Actually, really, it's not so much driven by high amount, but rather just driven by what we expect on seasonality, within these, within these businesses.
Yeah.
Nothing really to report on Business, I would say at this stage.
Thank you. Just one follow-up, if I might. In the U.K., I believe that's where you rolled out your interest product first of all your markets. I think it was in December. Can you talk about the adoption rate so far? What percentage of customers in the U.K. are using the interest product?
We haven't disclosed that, but I'd say it's grown a lot, grown quite healthily. It's a long way from being anywhere near a majority, but like we do see customers increasingly using this. In particular with the launch of the interest product, as we call it, where you can hold money, it's instantly accessible, and you earn, whether it's the Bank of England or the ECB or the Fed rate on your funds. That's starting to...
You know, I think a couple of quarters ago in these calls, we were already asking like, "What is this product?" Or, "Why have we shipped this product?" I think now, like particular in the last months, we've seen some steady growth on that. We expect this to be... We'll see how this grows over the coming quarters and periods before we start disclosing that. I think it's current events could skew this.
Thank you.
Please try it out. So.
Thanks, Josh. Matt, the next question comes from Soomit Datta at New Street Research. Over to you, Soomit.
Good morning.
Hi there, Matt. Thanks for taking the call. Just a couple from me, please. Firstly, just on net interest income again, sorry to kinda return to this, but just to check, you talked in Europe about sort of retaining 1% as a net yield. As we then sort of try to model this across the group, bearing in mind you can't offer this product in the U.K., is it then fair to say that we should be thinking about you targeting somewhere between, say, 1%-1.5% or 1%-2% on a group-wide basis because again, of those regulatory issues in the U.K.? Is that the right way to think about it?
Secondly, please, just on personal volumes again, thinking about the kind of phasing of TPV, I think we saw the pull forward it seems in the first half of fiscal 2023. Is it possible to disaggregate dollar strength and broader cyclicality in that? By which I mean, I think initially it felt like it was a temporary FX issue, which was driving some of the volume trends, and now it sounds maybe it's a bit more like broader macro cyclicality, which will take a little bit longer to recover. Any granularity there would be great. Thank you.
Well, thanks for the questions. We won't be guiding on like what we're targeting for now. Our goal is to share a fair share of this interest back with our customers whilst maintaining a, you know, really healthy, profitable Wise Account, that will use some but not a reasonable amount of this interest income. What you see in the Europe is where we have full control over how much we can pay. That's kinda gets us to the level that's basically what we choose to do. Our economics, you know, it could be higher than that, and you can make a judgment on where you think this will land.
In some markets, we simply can't yet, or we won't ever be able to pay that back. We'll continue to work on that. I think if you're looking at this really over the longer run, it's gonna, we're gonna have to work really hard to like, to manage that net interest income down. Bear in mind, we're always gonna do that whilst maintaining a really profitable, fundamentally profitable business. Too soon to give guidance. There's plenty of moving parts in terms of the products we can offer and also the regulatory environment. I'm afraid just keep watch this space. I think you've kinda got some of the bounds of the equation there.
On TPV, it's really hard to disaggregate this actually between this FX impact and the more fundamental macro, household income impact. I definitely, we're definitely confident that we saw this volatility over the last year because we've seen this go up and then come back down. The reason I talk about the macro is I think we should just all be very cautious around and very mindful of what's going on in the outside world, and that the primary driver for these large payments has been these two use cases.
It's very hard to disaggregate it, but I think the rate at which this will recover will not be simply just the pull-forward impact, but is likely and with the best crystal ball, is likely to be somewhat weathered by the rate at which people start moving money for property and investments again.
Okay, thanks.
I share this in the context of helping you think about that dynamic rather than in the past when it's purely pull forward, we see it bounce back very quickly.
Thanks, Sumit. Matt, the next question comes from Hannes Leitner at Jefferies.
Good morning.
Sorry, I spoke to the TV. Thanks for letting me on. I got two questions. One is on the take rate. We know that the customer pricing has been resilient for different reasons. Your overall take rate increased. Can you maybe disaggregate that difference? Given you receive on the current account interest product, you receive there some facilitation fee, I assume that this goes into the normal take rate and not into net interest income. Is this right? The second question is just around the momentum of additional businesses coming on on the platform. Do you expect this to accelerate? It seems like to tag along around the 20,000 per quarter cadence. I think that would be quite interesting to understand the underlying trends. Also maybe is this a net interest?
What are the leavers and the reasons for customers leaving, and what are the dynamics there? Thank you.
Okay, cool. On take rates, just to clear up, yes. Anything that's a fee rather than interest, so for example, if we charge customers a fee to onboard, or we charge them for a card, or we earn a fee on the Assets they would hold in our Assets product, all of that goes into other income, which goes into the revenue take rate. If it's charging for a cross-border payment, it goes into the cross-border take rate. If it's net interest income, obviously, it goes into the net interest take rate. Where importantly, when we've offered a in the U.K., where we've offered people, customers, a fee refund, that comes off of the cross-border take rate.
Like, so, you know, if we could offer them interest, we would, and it would come off the net interest income. Really what are the dynamics sustaining that take rates? Excluding the net interest income element of it's, yes, it's our changes in prices, which we didn't really have any major price changes Q- on- Q. It will be supported by growth of Wise Account where, you know, where customers continue to adopt the Wise Account, use us for spending on their card or opening Wise Account. Actually some of that's gone, you know, where we've, we might in some markets have offered same currency. The use of the Wise Account is growing really healthily and we're...
That other element of the take rate is continuing to support the overall take rate. On business momentum, you're right actually. We do see continued growth and steady growth in the number of businesses incrementally active on Wise, and that's driven by a very stable set of cohorts. I mean, very stable like, you know, the majority of these, as you know, are using the Wise Account, core to what they do. That's growing because we see just a steady increase in the number of new businesses active with us every quarter. That's grown in this quarter as well as we saw, you know, no doubt some people wanted to move to Wise. They felt we were a good place to operate.
Really good steady momentum on businesses. It's quite steady and slow burners and there's a massive opportunity which we're growing into. It's primarily driven by word of mouth and we, you know, we continue to see that grow over time. I think you asked the question on why do people leave Wise. The primary reason why someone would stop using Wise is actually the use case goes away. It would really be because, maybe you're funding your, one of your kids overseas at university. They're gonna come back at some point. Now, they might take out a loan and continue to be a customer themselves, but actually the primary reason why someone might stop using Wise is typically a use case would go away.
That's less when people open a Wise Account because we become stickier and they use us for what they use us for longer. This is the primary reason.
Matt, I just wanted to maybe drill down into the take rate decomposition. These other fees, could you give us the sense of feeling how is this composed? I mean, we understand that you charge, various fees, I'm really interested in that facilitation of interest product. We know it's only early days.
Yeah.
...Clearly this could give quite a big tailwinds to take rate.
Actually it's very, it's very small and it's If you do the math on what it would need to be it's, you know, the fee we're earning from interest is roughly 20 basis points of the balances under management. Really like yes, that can if that really scales, that can help contribute to the take rate. It's 20 basis points of the balances, not 20 basis points of the volume, right? It's very early days on that and we're not splitting out, so it's not a major contributor to the take rate at the minute. We don't split out other take rate in this report.
As we've said before, the primary driver of that other take rate is actually the interchange we're seeing on card spend, is one of the primary drivers. That's really like when people use the Wise Account, that's the primary thing that's driving that at the minute. Clearly, Assets is really relevant for our customers. It's driving balance growth. Sorry. It's driving the balances that the people are holding with us, but also just the reason we launched this and the reason we launched the Account is really to just to have a broader relationship with our customer, which means they move and manage all of their international money through Wise.
Thank you.
Thanks, Hannes. Matt, the next question comes from Mohammed Moawalla at Goldman Sachs.
Morning, Mo.
Morning, Matt. I just had two quick questions. Firstly, I know you're gonna give us the sort of the guidance in June at the full year results. Just trying to understand the dynamics around, you know, the comps, because obviously you had a very strong volume numbers in the first half of fiscal 2023. You've got that, some of that kind of FX vol unwinding, but then you talked about this increased cyclicality on the kind of higher cohorts. Just trying to get your perspective on how we should think about sort of that growth evolution across both first half, second half, but are there any specific things we need to be wary of across the quarters as well?
Secondly, in terms of the, some of the platform customers you talked about, can you talk a bit about, you know, the kind of ramp-up rate? 'Cause I know when you had signed Shinhan Bank, it was kind of a legacy bank, but perhaps takes a bit of time to ramp up. I noticed you signed this Indonesian bank customer. Just trying to kinda understand on the platform side, the time it takes between kind of announcing some of these customers and the volume ramp, and are there any kind of noticeable differences in the type of customers that would affect that ramp? Thank you.
Cool. On guidance, I wouldn't give you guidance now and I don't plan. I think, Mo, you talked about it, right, which is, you know, we've got a bunch of things happen in the last year on different line items which will affect things. You know, for the first half of this year we had very strong volume growth. The second half of the year we've had very strong interest income growth. If you just look at total income across the year, its growth is coming from different parts, which means we'll lap different parts of that.
I guess, so stepping away from the optics elements, I guess what does this mean is like really, really as a, you know, as a company that's investing in long-term growth, the company, like we've built a diverse business that's got many streams that are contributing to this, gross profit, which enables us to continue to invest. Yes, there's gonna be different turbojets from different elements of that through the period. Given the way we manage the business means that we've got a very steady stream of cash flow, which means we can continue to invest beyond the end of next year and into the following years, and maybe for the coming decades, without having... I think if you know...
We will manage to to this bottom line. I think, yes, you're gonna see some noise in some of these optics, but they're top of the optics and really we've got solid underlying fundamentals, which means we can continue to invest at scale and over the next decade. On Platform, you're right. Actually, these things do take a while to ramp. The hard thing for this Platform business is the rest of the business is pretty big and growing fast still.
If you think about, you know, we're moving, you know, well over GBP 100 billion on an annualized basis now. I don't believe there are that many banks in the world themselves that are moving this much money. When we add a bank, even a bigger bank, we have to ramp and know any bank that's sizable will have us, you know, start on certain routes typically, or in certain geographies, and it's only responsible for them to test us and learn over a period of time. Then these tech firms that we're integrating are growing fast. They're relatively small to start with. We know that the businesses that we're integrating today are gonna be some...
Know which ones, otherwise, it's not our game to invest in them. Over time we expect these things to grow and ramp, but they've gotta do that relative to a, a very large business that's growing quite fast itself. We're not splitting it out now, but it is contributing and we're confident the investments we're making in Wise Platform are paying back as well as any other investments in the business, actually.
Got it. Just can I come back on the first one? When we saw the kind of the interplay between the VPC and the take rates, I guess, on the volume side, obviously as you lap the tougher comp, should we think of similar offsetting some degree of offsetting dynamic in terms of the VPC trend versus the take rate trend, given the movements in the kind of high quarters?
It's very, very hard. I'm not gonna predict, what's gonna happen on these.
Sure.
I think it's probably a complicated spreadsheet to sit down and talk through most. I think there's gonna be a bunch of moving factors, some things that we are lapping and some things that will change, you know. As we move forward with net interest incomes more, maybe more under our control. But, you know, we'll, you know, on VPC as, you know, we tried to share with you today some of the drivers of that, and I think we'll make a judgment call on how that evolves and we'll talk more about this, and share some guidance with you as well in June.
Got it. Thank you, Matt.
Thanks Mo. Matt, the next question comes from Grégoire Hermann at AlphaValue.
Good morning.
Hi everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Sorry to come back on that. Maybe a bit redundant, but I tried to ask the question differently. On the take rates, just trying to understand, because over the past quarters, you've said that the take rate had been increasing both on the back of higher customer price, but as well, I think of a wider adoption of the Wise products. Right now, this quarter, you're actually breaking this kind of dynamics with the lower customer price, which is great for your story. Just trying to understand here what has changed suddenly compared to previous quarters. Is this the different routes of money transmission that have made the, you know, the take rates and the customer price decreasing?
Has there been like management actions or, you know, increasing integration into different schemes to decrease this customer price? On the customer growth, just trying to understand whether there has been a different kind of pattern in terms of geographies as per the previous quarters. That is it. Thanks.
Well, on customer growth quickly, like no radical shift in the patterns. We always see slightly up, slightly down on some geographies, but fundamentally the contribution to growth is really balanced across all of our geographies, which kind of isn't a surprise because we've, you know, in places like the U.S. it's large, it's growing, but we've got a lot of headroom to continue to grow. Also places like Brazil, it's actually really significant number of customers joining us. Actually the overall mix, the overall mix isn't changing that radically in terms of the overall active customer growth. Pretty healthy across. We're not overly dependent on any geography and pretty healthy growth in all of the core areas. Now, on back to your first question on take rate, the primary...
We control the take. We set the prices, and the overall take rate is therefore a function of the prices we set, the route mix, and then the customer's adoption of various features. The primary thing in the last quarter is we didn't. Just so you know, when we look at price, looking at some of our team here who do this, essentially we are looking at the unit cost and then adding a margin on top of this. We don't react to competition. We're just trying to work out like what do we need to charge, rather, what can we get away with charging our customers?
When we look at that on a monthly and a quarterly basis, we will adjust the prices. Over that period when prices went up, it's because primarily we pushed through price increases. The last quarter we've not had to do that. Now we might going forward, we might not. You know, over time this will go up and it will come down or go down and come up. And it will vary by route. We've invested heavily in our product teams and also in our servicing teams, and over the last year, that's what's driven some of this increase. We've also seen volatility in things like FX drive the need to recover some of that cost. Over the last quarter, we've not done any of that.
Actually all of the impacts of the past now kind of washed through, which is why it's been stable. Like it will move up and it will move down, as we manage our unit economics to make sure that we're profitable and charging a fair and transparent price. There's no metronomic impact that's just continuing to, or like inbuilt, that's continuing to drive up the take rate other than maybe adoption of the Wise Account, which is driving up some of the other income.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thanks, Grégoire. Matt, we have no more questions. I'll hand over to you now to close the call. Thank you.
Cool. Thanks very much. Thanks for all the questions. Thanks for all the engagement. I'm sure there'll be more questions and please feed those into the gang here at Wise. We will, we'll catch up again in June when we have our results. If I don't speak to you before then, I'll see you then. Thanks very much.