Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Matt Briers, CFO Wise. I've probably met and spoken to many of you before. We're gonna spend half an hour talking through the recent news item we put out, which is an update to our financial guidance. I was just gonna give you the headlines from my perspective, what's behind this. But then let's use the balance of the 30 minutes for some Q&A. Martin Adams is here. He's watching the questions, so he'll kind of if you raise your hand, ask the question, then Martin will call it out. Let's try and get as many of these answers in the half hour as we can. What have we seen and what's been happening here? What are we seeing with Wise? Generally, you know, the mission we're on of transparency and lowering the cost of international money movement for our customers is resonating really strongly. What we've seen for a few quarters now is that we've seen really strong take-up among our customers. They more and more come to Wise to save money. At the same time, what we're seeing in the wider world, we've also, while lots of market volatility, we've seen increasing interest rates. Lots of questions we've had around what impact is this having, and we're starting to see some of that interest come through. As we've always said, you know, we're working out how to share that back with our customers. What does this mean for our financials? Well, to start with, the volume growth and the strong revenue growth that we saw in Q1 has actually continued now. We've seen that come through in Q2, such that we've seen volume growth of 47% we expect for the first half of the year. We're still finishing off this week, as you know. That's flowed through to revenue growth of around 54% versus the first half of the previous year. There's a number of factors driving that, but fundamentally, it's the core drive volume growth with uptake of the Wise Account, driving revenues, both cross-border conversion revenues and the other fees that we get from our Wise Accounts. It's really strong fundamentals of business. On top of this, revenue growth for the year is gonna be supported by increasing levels of interest income on our customer balances. As many of you are aware, we have reasonably significant customer balances. These are money that customers hold with us in their Wise Accounts. We're now gonna present that income, whereas previously it was actually a cost because many of those balances were in euros. We're now gonna present that income as part of our total income alongside the revenue from our conversion fees. That's a quite important change, but it helps us to better manage our economics of the business. We're gonna continue to share much of that benefit from our interest income with our customers. We've always done this. We share the cost savings we make on our cross-border back with our customers, as well as the shareholders. We're gonna do that, as we've said, with this interest income. We will also invest some of that in growth in our teams, in growing our teams, whether it's our servicing or operational teams, but also our product teams over time. What does this mean? Fundamentally, we now expect total income growth of between 55%-60% year-over-year for this financial year. That's for the last six months and the next six months. That's an increase versus what we described last month. It's an increase in our guidance for the year, and it's off the back of very strong volume growth that we see in the rest of the business, but also somewhat supplemented by some of this interest income, much of which we'll have passed back, but some of which will cover growth in our investments. The rest of our guidance actually stays the same. We still will, as you've learned over time, invest as much as we can down to a 20% EBITDA margin. Remember now, as we've clarified in here, that EBITDA margin is now a percentage of the total income. It's all of the revenue we have, plus whatever we pass, we don't pass through back to customers from the interest income. We still look at that at 20% as an EBITDA margin, but obviously we expect the total income or revenue of the company to grow faster. I'm gonna pause there and start to take questions. I'm sure there's many. We just said we'd do this for half an hour. Thank you, Matt. Just a reminder for those on the call, if you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand on Zoom, and I will then unmute you, so you can ask your question to Matt. First question we've got, Matt, is from James Goodman. If you could go ahead and ask your question, please, James. Great. Yeah, thanks, Martin. Hi, Matt. Apologies if I've missed it in the statement, but just in terms of the new guidance then for the year, of 55%-60%, but now including the interest income alongside the revenue. What's the expectation within that between revenue and interest income? i.e., how much is the existing underlying revenue assessment that you've made changed? I suppose the other way of looking at that or asking that is GBP 17 million of interest income already, basically for Q2 or only a small part of Q2, looks like a fairly high sort of run rate percentage return. Maybe you could also answer the question by what sort of rate of return you're seeing on those customer balances now with the financial mix of assets that you're holding. That's the first question. The other question is just, it's partly linked to that really, partly linked to the answer to that, but are you already adjusting the cost base higher as a result then of the higher total income? Presumably, you must be in order to maintain an EBITDA margin unchanged, even though it's now over a higher, you know, total income base. How are you adjusting then the cost base so quickly? Thank you. Thanks, James. Let me just play back. A few questions there. One, within the first question, there might have been two, which was, you know, how do we think about the mix or within that growth, how much of that is going to be interest income versus our normal revenue? Secondly, like what, therefore, what quantum of interest income are we expecting for the year? That's quite a separate question, but given that, how are we investing or what quantum are we investing at, and we still expect to, you know, this EBITDA margin at around above 20%. Really, like the way just mechanically for Wise for people to think about this is we have this revenue base that's growing as a function of volume-based, right? What will happen is we get more and more interest income. Some of that interest income will effectively, as we think about that all together in our income, total income, some of it will enable us to reduce down the price on some of our other services, whether that's it could be many things we decide to do, whether it's cross-border payments, domestic payments or other services. We're not explicitly able to pay interest on balances. Almost to some extent, the more that we see our interest income growing, the more capacity we have to offer a lower price on some of our core products. Remember our mission that we're on while still retaining this very healthy revenue growth. The reason, when you think about this, is the extent to which interest rates increase and/or we see balance growth. Remember, like, we are aware of the risk that some customers may get better rates or want to move their money elsewhere. There's a fair amount of uncertainty around the quantum that this interest rate, this interest income could grow to, and it'd be remiss of me to make a prediction on this right now. Rather, we have confidence in this revenue range based on the underlying growth that we see in our volumes and the revenues. I mean, we see volumes having grown near 50% for the first half of the year, and that momentum is very healthy. Naturally, to the greater extent this interest income grows, to the greater extent we can share some of that, much of that back with the benefit of that with our customers through other mechanisms. There will be some of that interest income that we will use to more than cover costs of other investments that we may choose to make in our products or our operations, whether it's in servicing our customers, giving them a better service, whether it's funding slightly larger engineering teams. There's gonna be a balance of these things. Then obviously a margin on these will flow down at or above 20%. James, I can't give you a sense of the quantum, but the fundamental driver of this upgrade, if you like, is really actually the fundamental performance of the business that we've been investing in over the last three or four years. That tells you much about the product that we're building, the proposition we've been offering our customers. It's really supplemented and then enhanced effectively with our product to get more competitive to the greater extent that we generate interest income from these balances. Your question was like, so, okay, so you have this revenue growth or total income growth, as we now call it. How are we investing that? One thing we did importantly put it in the RNS is in a world where it's incredibly volatile, like I'm sure this wasn't the. Well, this is not the only thing going on in the market today, but we're seeing a lot of volatility over the last month in our products. You've seen us actually have to increase prices on some routes, and that's because we've seen a lot of volatility around FX, and that means we may pay higher spreads or we may experience gains or losses on our product. Actually, we've seen a gross profit margin for the first quarter, which is lower than the previous first half of the year, which we expect still finishing the quarter, the half year, than the previous half year. What that means is that margin is slightly lower than we saw last year. That partly steps down the gross profit growth for the year. We are growing OpEx. As you've seen, we've grown that over the last year and we will keep investing for the long term. We're able to do that. You know, we've put some thought doing this. We've got plenty of things to build and plenty of ways to improve the service we offer our customers. Obviously, as you see, there's plenty of pressure on costs around the world as well today. We're in a very healthy place by being able to grow the business this fast, onboard a lot of new customers every quarter, while still maintaining this very healthy EBITDA margin, but growing the business much faster than we expected. Excellent. Thank you very much. Thanks. The next question comes from the line of Didier. Thank you very much. Hi Didier. Hey Martin. Hey Matt. Thanks for taking the question. Can you maybe comment, Matt, on what you're seeing in terms of the account balances growth so far in the first half? I know you had some really strong years obviously, and it's becoming more of a benefit now, but where is that sitting at the moment? And then second, in terms of the customer benefits, how do you think about, you know, have you sort of spread that across different kinds of routes? Is that more going to be across, based on the spread of deposits? Or how do you think about that? Finally, just looking at what you said on the first half volume and revenue growth, it implies about, you know, 72 basis points of take rate on in 2Q, which is obviously an uplift from what you had in 1Q and in previous years. Is anything which is driving that take rate up as well? Let me just check that. I might just. When I get to the third question, I might just check that. The first two questions were what are we seeing on Wise Account balances, and where might we think about returning some of this, reinvesting in our customers? What kind of benefit and where around the world? On the Wise Account balances, I mean, we won't give you the numbers here. This was growing quite quickly through last year as you saw. In fact, these were growing around 18% last year-over-year. Now, we've got very healthy momentum in that usage on Wise Accounts, spend on the Wise Account, people moving money in and out of the Wise Account. I think now is, like, probably not good time to comment on what we're seeing from the growth rate. Like, we're right in the middle of a massive inflection point, once in a decade, maybe even stronger from interest rates. I think what we're seeing now could be different to what we're seeing in a month or two months. What we do know is that usage of the Wise Account as a place to do international banking is continuing to grow, and the adoption of that is very healthy. Those balances have continued to grow. I think what we've seen in the last three or four months, especially as we're expecting some quite material changes in interest rates or the market, the yield curve, in the next three months, yeah, that could change. We'll just keep monitoring it, and I expect the detail for it to be very different, actually, in different countries as well around the world. I'm afraid I've said I didn't say enough. Then on what we're gonna do, actually, for our customers, these are in the works, and we're not, while on the one hand, we wanna move quickly as we do on everything we do at Wise, but we're gonna be very cautious and make sure that we do this in a way that's fair, understood, and transparent for our customers, and obviously, consistent with what our permissions allow us around the world from a regulatory perspective. I expect us to do a range of things, and they could affect the price you pay for conversions. It could affect the cost to you if you're going to charge for an account, or how you might spend on a card. A range of things across different customers and different geographies. We'll probably test our way into this. We'll try and do things that are logical for our customers to understand and feel like there's a real benefit to doing more with why they came to Wise, which is lower cost, more convenient, faster, moving money around the world internationally. I think on the third question, which is like, what are we seeing on a take rate really in there? We really just talked about aggregate revenue numbers and aggregate volume numbers here. I'll not go into the detail on this now, whether it's cross-border or personal business. We will still do our normal quarterly trading update, which will give you a bit more detail under the hood. But the big takeaway from today is that total volume and total revenue growth has been very healthy. There's no radical shifts in the dynamics there that we've seen. That is fundamentally driving the health and the strength of what we're seeing for the rest of the year. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Matt. Excellent. Thank you. Let me just ask, so that we can get through, I guess, give as many people the opportunity as possible. If you can try and limit your questions to one, that'd be awesome. Follow up afterwards. The next question comes from Josh Levin. Hi Josh. Hi, good afternoon. Just, since I only have one question here. In recent months, you've been raising prices due to AML costs and FX volatility. I guess if this interest income, if you could see it coming through, why raise prices only to now lower them? Good question. Thanks for the question, Josh. We don't generally do things in a blanket way, Josh. We tend to try and make these decisions as we go. What I'm saying there is the beneficiaries of the interest income where we decide to redistribute that may not be blanket. It may not be specifically the where we were experiencing that cost pressure before. The other thing is we believe in managing the profitability of our business. Well, for me it's sacrosanct, and it's fundamental to what we do. We recognize that if we go from hopefully a higher price in the past to a lower price in the future, that line may be steady when you zoom out, but actually is not necessarily linear when you zoom in, because we can't necessarily predict when this interest income will flow through. We've definitely seen an acceleration in the movement of the yield curve over the last weeks and months. We take a principle of it we know we've got to do this in the short term, we take that pain now for customers, and then recognizing that if we would then reduce them in the future, we will. The main thing is that our customers understand that we charge them a fair price. If we see benefit at some point in the future or those costs go away, we drop those prices again. Agree. It's a debate we have internally, Josh. Absolutely. But you need to be careful that you're not always way hoping that something better will come in the future. You know, keeps some discipline in the team and keeps us focused on, you know, those costs that have increased, whether it's market volatility or cost of servicing. Like, we still need to address those. We can't just rest on our laurels because we happen to have this other interest income. We've still got to work out how to engineer away those costs. Taking that price action is the right pressure point to do that. Thank you very much. Thanks, Josh. Next question comes from the line of Kim Bergoe. Hi Kim. Hi, Matt. Just one question for me. Obviously you were talking about when we try to model this out, we obviously need to have an estimate of what we think the balances are gonna be. You talked about that and said, "Well, now where you can get interest in other ways, maybe it will be more tempting for people to move e lsewhere." We'll see where the balances go. Could you talk a little bit about how you will try to make sure that the people who have balances and earn interest on them, that they see that they are getting the benefit? You know, how are you gonna link that? Just because I guess, you know, that will make it easier for us to try to sort of model where we think this is gonna go going forward. Thanks. That's right. Let me try and make it a little bit easier for you as well, which is, the revenue guide we've given of, I think around 55%-60%, like, much of that is, if you think about the momentum we've got in the core business, that we've always had, is gonna drive a lot of that revenue growth. What's gonna happen is like the more that our interest income grows, the greater we can still execute that revenue but at a lower price. Really, a lot of what you'll be modeling is actually how much can we reduce prices but still achieve that level of growth, if that makes sense. There is clearly sensitivity to this number depending on how much our balance grows. Given our intention to reinvest much of this interest income with our customers, really like the rate at which interest rates go up and/or balances grow or shrink really governs the rate at which we can reduce price for our customers. On the one hand, it's very important for all of our customers and will affect what happens. On the other hand, like our confidence around this guide is depending on this. That said, there is a lot of uncertainty around this. We're not allowed and we're not supposed to appropriately pay our customers or tell them that we're paying our customers interest or incentivize them to hold more and more money with us. Like, there are reasons for that, different ones, different reasons, but fundamentally we're not a bank. All we can do is really just reinforce and give customers value of what we've committed to doing, which is building an account which is very convenient, very fast to move money around the world, but also like charged at a fair, transparent price and as low as possible in our commitment to driving down those costs. We trust that if people have come to us for that reason and we follow through on that as a result of building this product, we believe that's the best strategy here, given that we can't directly reward interest income. Really this is an execution and a communication challenge for us. That's what we've done all the time. We've always communicated to our customers transparently what we do with the money that they're paying for us for our services. This is really gonna test that, and that's the extension of what we're gonna have to do. If you're a customer, Kim, hopefully you'll understand this. Some customers no doubt will optimize for a direct interest yield, and that's fair enough. Remember, in the U.K. we have our assets product and of course we'll, our strategy in the long term is to try and offer the customers the opportunity to earn a return. We're not there yet. This is all part of our strategy as to how we can build that out around the world. Great. Thank you. Excellent. Thanks, Kim. Next question comes from the line of Mohammed Moawalla. Hello. Hey, Matt. Just one for me. I just wanted to understand the dynamics from the gross margin. Obviously, you're seeing increased FX volatility. How should we think of that sort of gross margin evolution? I know you're still sort of pushing through price increases in some markets to counteract this volatility. How should we think of that gross margin for this year? Sort of do you see that sort of reverting back to your kind of mid-term trajectory over the next couple of years? Thanks. Great. We have seen increased costs of volatility. Every participant in the market will have seen this. Increased costs of moving money around the world and costs of holding exposures have increased. That's real. This is certainly the compression of this gross margin. We actually sort of reversed this last year. Actually this is as we said in the last quarter, some of this has come back. How to think about that? When we reprice, we don't necessarily reprice to revert to a gross margin as a percentage of revenue. We really price to make sure that we have, you know, an EBITDA. That may not mean that we kind of always come back to a solving for a gross margin. What that means is that, you know, running the gross margin we've run at, I'm still very, very happy at the EBITDA level that we're running to. It's a different gross margin to what we've seen before. That means we've put prices up to cover some of those costs. Fundamentally, we've got a healthy cash generating business that's growing the absolute gross margin very quickly off the volume we're moving. The volatility we see in the market today, I don't see it changing. We don't know. You know, with everything we're seeing around us, it's not just in the U.K., but everywhere around the world, we're certainly not coming out of the end of this storm soon. Without... I'm not guiding here on gross margin, but the conditions that are driving this, and the price structure we've got in place is robust today. But we're not trying to solve for a higher gross margin over time. We're trying to solve to make sure we have a healthy and sustainable EBITDA margin whilst investing an awful lot in the growth. It's much more of the same that we've invested in the past to get us to a very healthy growing business today with a very healthy EBITDA margin. Tried to answer that there, Mo, but if that makes sense. Right. Is there any way for the interest or extract only the small what into the rest of it? I might, Mo, I might just ask you to repeat that question. It's either our connection or yours. I'm hoping for the benefit of everyone else. Just do you wanna just try and repeat it? Sorry. In case- Should we just assume what you have for H1 for the second half of this year? Is that a prudent assumption? We've seen this level of gross margin in the first half of the year. I think the dynamics that have driven that. We're not expecting any radical shifts for the rest of the year in those dynamics. You know, notwithstanding pricing changes and these things. We don't see a radical shifts in those dynamics over the second half of the year. We haven't guided that. That should give you a sense. What this should give you a sense of is the rate at which so far our gross profit's been growing and ultimately, you know, give you a sense of the quantum of how much we're investing, as well as the amount of capacity to invest if we still believe we want to drive down to this 20%+ EBITDA margin. Great. Thanks, Matt. The next question comes from the line of Adam Wood. Hi, Adam. Hi. Thanks for taking the question. Just for me, could you just give us a little bit of help in terms of the assumptions you've made on the second half, on rates and balances? Are you more kind of saying, "Well, let's stay with where we are now in terms of rates and where the Wise Account balances are?" Or have you made other assumptions that they continue to improve through the second half and give you a higher level of income? And on passing that on pricing, are you comfortable using something like interest income that could be temporary to subsidize pricing, where in the past I think you've wanted to use permanent improvements in efficiency to do that, so you wouldn't have to see pricing go backwards if things went the other way against you? Thank you. Yeah. Good questions, Adam. First, the first one is what are our expectations on this going forward? Well, we obviously look at the yield curve, and we're reasonably confident in this until various politicians change the world. We'll look at that, and we'll look at various momentum that we might have in our balances. Obviously we need to try to think of scenarios where those balances don't grow if other things are more attractive or if the yield curve grows faster. Really, given that much of this interest income will help us on price, like, really what we're trying to predict is the rate at which we can drop prices rather than the rate at which our total revenues will grow. If that makes sense, Adam. Really that's where the major sensitivity is, and we need to make this kind of judgment call. You can see that that GBP 17 million of net interest income is growing. You can work out that interest rates have really only been coming online in the, you know, they haven't been steady all the way through the quarter. There's going to be healthy momentum if balances do grow, through the rest of the year, but we'll provide more. You'll see more of this detail over time. The second question is an interesting one. When we've worked out and taken a view on, okay, how much interest income do we see flowing through, and how much can we rely on, what should we do with that? Clearly some of that will fund investments and effectively a margin on this is gonna flow through 20%. If you think about almost anything we spend on investments, the margin there is gonna come through. Some of that is gonna go to customers. The reality is like whether customers become dependent on this or our costs and our salary bill does or even our flows to the bottom line does, we need to balance this. I think if we can. Unfortunately, I don't think interest rates are going to go back to zero anytime soon. We need to be very careful to not over-commit ourselves on this. I don't think they're gonna go back to zero anytime soon, but we do need to be careful not to over-commit ourselves. Fundamentally this is gonna come down to communication to our customers. How well do they understand, like, their pricing and where some of these benefits are coming from? We think fundamentally, like we believe in sharing economics with customers has got us to where we are today. You know, we could have easily got slightly greedier in the early days and we would never not have built the business that we've built today would not look anything like it or been anywhere near as successful we believe. Believe this is just another example of where we stick to that discipline. If you think about that then over the next three to five years, like this absolutely has to be something that gives us more confidence in achieving fulfilling on the promises we've given our customers and achieving that over time, which should give us more confidence in the very long term as to what we want to achieve. That's the judgment call we say. Perfect. Thank you very much. Thanks, Adam. We've got time for one more question, which will come from Frederic Boulan. Hi, Frederic. Hey, Matt. Thanks for taking my question. It really relates to the longer term top line guidance here. You've clearly over the last number of periods been well above the 20% target. I think your answer to the last question was that you basically have accelerated your ambition to reach the promised targets of zero rates essentially to customers. But how do you think about the sustainability of the medium-term top line guide now that you have what seems to be at least an incremental growth driver in interest income and top line? Thank you. Thanks for the question, and always good to talk about the long term. Really the fundamental thing we're still very focused on is increasing the volumes that we service. Everything we invest in has a view to say, "How do we help more people move their money around the world?" There will be this year maybe where we'll see. We've seen actually an acceleration in the volume, not the interest income, just the volumes moving first. That's great news. If we can continue to do that, then we'll do very well and kind of. That's our goal is to maximize the amount of volume of our customers' money that we move. We've guided to about 20% CAGR over the medium term. Now, this interest income, much of it should really flow through as. Yes, there's gonna be some investment. Much of this should flow through P&L from, you know, in the form of being able to offer that volume at lower costs to our customers, while still being very healthy cash-generative business over time. It should give us confidence in sustaining that level of growth or above over that period of time. Now, interest rates will come, and they could fall over that period. There could be a year. We'll be very clear as to how much of our income is coming from interest over time. We'll need to make this very transparent and clear to everyone so we understand the dynamic. I think if you look at this over the long term rather than each individual year, we should have confidence that we can continue to grow at or above that level. Next year, if balances don't grow and interest doesn't grow, then clearly, like, we'll have an element of our revenue that doesn't grow. If they do, if balances go up and interest goes up, that'll be the dynamic. We just need to be very clear and transparent of where this sits in our business and how we make pricing choices off the back of it. Really, it doesn't change what we're trying to do. We're not pivoting to say, "Ah, we're an interest income business." We're still in the business of helping people move and manage their money around the world, you know, in the most convenient, fast, cheap way possible. This is just a something that's helping us maybe go a little bit quicker over the time. Thank you very much. Just a quick follow-up. At what point, now that you're exceeding that 20% CAGR rate at least currently, would you consider revising the medium-term top-line guide? Not right now. Thanks, Fred. We're pretty focused on everything that's going on in the world right now and how we're working through these major changes now in what we're seeing. We've got great conviction around what's happening this year. Not commenting or talking about that right now. Thanks for asking. Thanks. Okay. Well, everyone, thank you for the time. I appreciate it. There's lots going on in the world right now and plenty going on. I won't keep you any longer. Just to recap, you know, this is just one more step along the path that we're on and hopefully what we've laid out is clear, and I'm sure we'll speak to more of you soon. We will have our trading update later in October as we planned, where we'll give you a bit more detail around the specifics of the volumes and revenues and what customers have done with us in the quarter. Obviously, we've got our half-year results later in November. Thanks for the time. Enjoy the rest of your day and, as good as you said.