Good day, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Wise Q2 Trading Update Analyst and Investor Call. At this time, all participants will be on a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. At which time, should you wish to ask a question, you'll need to press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. Please be advised that this conference is being recorded today, Tuesday the 19th of October, 2021. For any further assistance, please press star and zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to the speaker for the day, Mr. Matt Briers. Please go ahead. Thanks very much, good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining. On the call this morning, you've got me, I'm Matt Briers, I'm CFO of Wise. You've got Martin. Martin Adams, our Head of Investor Relations. We're pleased to be publishing our Q2 trading update today. I'll take a couple of minutes to recap the main points from this morning's announcement, then, of course, I'll happily take any questions. We've made great progress in the recent quarter. We've dropped prices, our speed has increased, we've launched some new features for our customers, all of which we believe will continue to drive cross-border volume in the future. Fundamentally, we've also become stronger as a business in this time. Remember, our mission is to drive down the cost of moving money around the world, we only do things sustainably. In order to drop prices for our customers, we actually have to engineer and optimize away the marginal costs of moving money around the world. We've become efficient in many areas, but most notably recently, if you've read the blogs, we've become more efficient in how we manage our FX exposures. We've got leaner. If you're a customer, you'd likely to have seen or heard through the last quarter that we've dropped prices. If you step back from this means that we can generate the same level of gross profit needed to invest in all of our future growth whilst naturally giving customers a lower price, which is why I think about this as a stronger business. This is at the heart of our strategy and mission as it encourages more customers to join us, price is one of the main reasons why people join, and it also deepens our competitive advantage for the future. For our call today, we'll cover two main areas, just as we did last quarter, and I probably will do in quarters to come. First, an update on our mission and the progress we're making, and then an update on some key numbers, mainly revenue and volume as we do quarterly, and obviously the number of customers using Wise. First let's have that update on our mission. Wise's mission is to make moving and managing money across borders faster, easier, cheaper, and more transparent for everyone, everywhere. Our teams made great progress this quarter on price, as I mentioned, but also on speed. Our product's features improved. We also made some further steps on our platform. On price, in the first quarter of this financial year, we were able to reduce pricing by 2 basis points to 67 basis points. In the second quarter, the one just passed, we reduced by an exceptional further 5 basis points to 62 basis points. It was much faster than we'd actually hoped. On speed, 40% of all transfers were delivered instantly within the quarter. That's within 20 seconds, you've sent the money and it's with the recipient. That's up from 38% in Q1 and significantly up year-on-year. For example, we've integrated with a payment network in India so that Wise customers can send money to India and have the transfer arrive within 20 seconds. We've continued to enhance our proposition through several new features. We launched Assets, which gives customers the option to switch their Wise Account balance into a different asset class with the possibility of a return. It's actually more useful to use the Wise Account. We've launched new features for business account holders, allowing them to set account permissions tailored to individual employees or their accountants. Finally, on our platform, we recently partnered with U.S. neo bank Sable to give their customers faster, cheaper international money transfers directly via their app. Also, we're now still working with existing partners like Monzo to give their customers a better UX for cross-border payments. On Juno, enabling their customers to send money direct to India, China, Europe, U.K., and the Philippines. As always, on a quarterly basis, we'll shortly publish our full mission update blog on our website. Please do take a look and have a good read through, and you'll get a much broader sense for the improvements we made for our customers over this quarter. Moving on to the financials for the quarter. 3.9 million customers transacted on Wise in quarter two. The number of personal customers grew 22% year-over-year to reach 3.7 million. Business customers grew 44% over the same period last year. 230,000 business customers are active in the quarter as we continue to broaden the appeal of our proposition. Overall, volume grew by 36% year-over-year to GBP 18 billion. Now the growth in the customer base continues to be the main driver behind our volume growth. The average volume per customer was also up 10% year-on-year, partly reflecting the growing proportion of business customers, also the adoption of our Wise Account, which typically sees a higher average volume per customer. Revenue grew 25% year-on-year to reach GBP 132.8 million, in line with our expectations. The difference between volume growing 36% and revenue by 25% is obviously explained by the take rate, which reduced 6 basis points year-on-year. This is in part driven by a change in route mix year-on-year, also due to price reductions linked to the leaner marginal costs, as I mentioned earlier. Looking at the quarter-on-quarter movement, as always, I'll repeat my health warning on Q-on-Q trends because they can be volatile. It's worth reflecting on these, given our growth in Q1 was actually flattered. Year-on-year growth in Q1 was flattered by soft comps post from COVID the year before. In Q2, we've seen active customers grow 7% Q-on-Q for both personal and business customers. With business customers, this growing proportion now 25% of volume in Q2. This is a driver behind the increase in volume per customer, which grew 2% Q-on-Q. Volume increased 10% Q-on-Q and revenue by 8% Q-on-Q. VPC continuing to steadily increase, and the take rate decreased slightly, one basis point compared to Q1. The price reductions in the latter stages of Q2 kind of began to flow through into the take rate, but they only flowed through during the quarter, remember. In conclusion, we're pleased this financial year, FY 2022, has started well. We've got more customers, more volume. We've got lower prices for customers, whilst we've maintained a very healthy and sustainable growth margin to invest in the future, which we're actively doing. As I said at the beginning of the call, our strategy of lowering unit costs means that we can continue to generate the cash required to sustainably run and grow Wise, while also giving customers a better price, encouraging more customers to join us and strengthening our position in the market. This strategy leads to two things when it comes to our financial KPIs. All other things being equal, lower marginal costs and lower prices lead to lower take rates, but higher gross profit margins. Put it another way, we've managed to engineer away our unit costs or some of our unit costs, so we have to charge our customers less to create the same cash gross margin, which is good news for stronger business. Looking ahead, we expect the take rate to be slightly lower in H2 versus H1. The price cuts only came in midway through this quarter. We continue to expect revenues to grow by low to mid-20s% on a percentage basis for the year. Importantly, at the same time, we expect gross profit margin to be higher than I previously guided to, at around 65%-67% for this financial year, FY 2022. This is of course, subject to FX costs, which can ebb and flow on a monthly basis. It's subject to them continuing to remain broadly stable at the recent levels that we've seen. The guidance on adjusted EBITDA margins remains unchanged, as we'll continue to invest as fast as we can in our growth, but obviously doing that sustainably in the near term. With that, I'm happy to take any questions that anyone might have. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask the question please press star and then one on your telephone keypad. First question comes from the line of James Goodman from Barclays. Please go ahead, James. Your line is now open. Yeah, morning. Morning, Matt. Thanks a lot for taking the questions. Just a couple from me, please. The first one, on the volume, a strong sequential increase, I think GBP 1.6 billion, way ahead of the last couple of quarters. I just wondered whether you sort of got any further view there in terms of how much of that is the seasonal uplift in the business, and the extent to which that's still sort of valid in the current environment versus an underlying acceleration and what that might tell us about your volume expectations for H2. The second question is around the gross profit margin guidance increase, which for me is probably a better way of looking at the net revenue, really, of this business. We don't actually have the gross profit disclosure, I don't think, for Q1 and Q2. Wondered if you could help us a bit in terms of what's happening, maybe in terms of a gross profit take rate, if you divide the gross profit into the volume? When we look at the H2 guidance, is that really the gross profit take rate being flat? I.e., coming back to the first question, is it being driven by the higher volume increase, or are you actually expecting also to be making more gross profit as a percentage of volume? I hope that made sense. Thank you. James, good morning. Thank you. Let me try and break these down. The first question is what's been driving. We did see a GBP 1.6 billion jump in the volumes. We have seen in the past some movements around summers and things like this. Actually, I think with the way the world's working, I think all sense of seasonality is still somewhat out the window based on certainly my summer holidays have been seen. I've said on a quarterly basis we've seen some volatility, and we will continue to do so. I don't think I would point to some radical underlying acceleration in our volumes, but it just shows. If you look across the longer term, which I hope everyone is doing, it just shows good, solid progression in our customer base. There's built-in dynamics in there which we're seeing with the shift to business customers and the shift to the Wise Account, which is supporting more active customers that are moving more money through the platform. Second question, I think was maybe the second and the third, James. The second question was gross profit. How to think about this. We haven't disclosed our actual results for Q1 and Q2, you're right. What do we expect going forward? We will be obviously giving our first half-year results on around the end of November 30th, I think is in the diary, where we'll disclose this fully. Rather than disclosing on a quarterly basis our gross profit number, we're just updating our guidance for the year on where we think that will come out, which is obviously higher than we previously guided to. We will have a gross profit number for you in due course, obviously. I would just take this guidance as a steer on where we think we'll come out for the full year based on what we're seeing in the business side in the first half of the year and the longer-term trend. It's interesting, and I think it's very healthy, actually, to look at this the way you're thinking about it, James, around fundamentally, the generation of gross profit is the cash and the value generation that funds all of our future investment and ultimately any margin that we create. The COGS or the cost of sales that sit on top of that are one way to think about that definitely is some of the friction between us and our customers through using financial intermediaries. The extent to which we engineer those away is a great thing for everyone involved. Going forward, I think what are we expecting on gross profit? We've given some guidance, which hopefully, given what people understand with our volume growth and where our take rates move, that should give you a good steer, hopefully, as to how you'd think about that in the round going forward. Okay. Thank you. Just to be clear, in terms of, I guess, unchanged gross revenue, gross profit are, as to whether that's coming from basically a higher volume or a higher gross profit divided into volume, it sounds like it's perhaps a little bit of both that's driving that. Thanks for the answers. Next question comes from the line of Adam Wood. Line now open please ask your question. Hi. Good morning, thanks for taking the question. I've also got two, please. Maybe just first of all, on the improvements on the engineering and the technology side. Obviously, this was a pretty big price drop during the quarter that I guess you probably flagged as a little bit unusual. Could you just talk a little bit around the pace of improvements that you're seeing from a technology point of view and the benefits of scale that you get? Is it possible that you're actually seeing accelerations here, and that maybe we shouldn't see these kind of price drops as so unusual in future? If you could just talk a little bit about pace of engineering change and how that could play into price movements going forward. Secondly, could you maybe talk a little bit about what you've seen in the past in terms of the price drop starting to drive volumes in the business? What sort of correlation do you see between prices coming down and getting extra volumes coming through from both business and consumers? Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, Adam, for the questions. The question around momentum on engineering and tech. The rate at which they're working on this is somewhat relentless. As most things in life, the rate of outcome and progress is rarely linear. The teams are consistently driving now on across our infrastructure as to where can we integrate with more partners, where can we integrate directly into payment systems, and where can we negotiate away costs with scale. Even in this situation with what we've done here is, where can we optimize our processes and change our products such that we can reduce the exposure. For example, by increasing payment speed, we reduce the time at which we would carry an exposure on a payment, which actually reduces down the potential gain or loss, or hedging requirement, which then flows through to a lower unit cost. The momentum is not going to be linear, but you're right, Adam, this was definitely one of the bigger, from a quarterly basis, the biggest shifts that we've had. I don't think we should necessarily expect shifts like this on a good quarterly basis. The corollary to that is actually that whilst these shifts are driven by reducing cost of sales, which is somewhat in the sense of our ability to generate gross margin, it's somewhat that we almost don't need to worry about that because actually we're reducing away the COGS whilst not really driving effecting this gross margin. I think there will be more things to come, Adam. I hope, and we need to in order to complete on our Mission. These things won't be steady, and I'm afraid they won't be steady and linear, but this quarter was somewhat exceptional. From a momentum perspective, we've now got more than 500 engineers working on this across the world on all of our infrastructure. In that sense, we do have strong momentum. We're incredibly focused on this. I'd expect more progress. On the price versus volume, I kind of look at this two ways. On the one hand, it undoubtedly does help us from a volume perspective in two manners. One is, the main reason people talk about Wise or, and even TransferWise as we knew it, was because we're radically cheaper than the alternative, which is typically banks. That gap has remained as we continue to put pressure on price, and it keeps our identity. If you think about other tech firms that have done this, they've just continued to reinvest their economics and their customer base to build this recognition that you can trust Wise to be the lowest cost and the lowest price and fairly priced. That's driven our word-of-mouth growth, which is still 2/3 of our customers coming through word of mouth in the last year, as you saw in the prospectus. Going forwards as well, if you look at this, you need to look at it on the very long term, which is 3 years ago, we were still really charging 50 basis points or 60 basis points in some markets that are now in the 30s of basis points. And there's no doubt that for us to be in the If you're looking over this over the 10 years, or 5 or 10 or 15 years, however long people want to look, but over the long term, which is the period over which we're investing, it's clear in our minds at least that actually building that lowest cost platform is what's really going to determine the long-term success. Whilst we do look at it, Adam, on the short term, it's really rather with the focus on the long term that we're making this investment. That's why we have to do this profitably and sustainably, because it's very easy to do without that continuing in mind. Thanks very much, Adam. Thank you. All right. The next question comes from the line of Josh Levin from Autonomous. Please go ahead. The line is now open. Hi. Good morning. I have two questions. Obviously you've guided up quite a bit on gross margin for the year, and you've talked about how that results from lower unit costs. How should we think about that beyond this year? Can it continue to go higher than 65%-67%, or is it some point I'd imagine it's capped because at some point you do have to pay some amount of bank fees? The second question is you've talked about your mission. You've used the word mission a few times today, and you have this Mission Zero. You ultimately want to get customers pay nothing to transfer money across borders. Given that is basically your revenue model, what does it mean for your revenue model in a world where customers pay nothing or almost nothing to transfer funds? As you've shown this quarter, you can have price drops happen more quickly than you would have thought in a given quarter. You could see prices dropping faster than we all thought. Josh, thanks for the question. Very cool questions. On gross margin, we're really guiding for this year, previously we guided for the 62%, now we're guiding to this other range, the 65%-67%. We're not guiding beyond that. Fundamentally, this is where we see we've managed to get our gross margins to. In the past, we have seen a dynamic where whilst we engineer away some of these costs, we also might enter new routes that have got effectively a higher marginal cost. Whilst we've driven up gross margins in some routes, we've effectively accepted new routes that have got lower gross margins. At the minute, where we've moved to is we've seen the shift. We're not guiding any longer term than this. Ultimately, in the very long term, just going to your second question on Mission Zero, one thing is in order to be free, we have to engineer away all of these costs at some point in the future. That's going to take a very long time. Secondly, you'd obviously have to scale away all of our operating costs, and that's going to take even longer. The reason we have this Mission Zero focus is because at some point, A, we've got to work out, for example, on our lowest price routes, let's say GBP-EUR or EUR-GBP, how can we get from, say, 30 basis points, 35 basis points, 40 basis points down to 30 basis points, down to 25 basis points? It's this incredibly stretching goal of Mission Zero, which brings this discipline inside the company. Without that, it would be too easy for us to relax because we're quite cheap. Actually, as an owner of the business, we'd hope you could take confidence to the fact that this incredible focus on and relentless focus on Mission Zero over time is what's going to really differentiate us from having the lowest cost platform in the long term. You're right to question and say, "Well, when do you get there? What's going to happen to the revenue model?" Frankly, we're not desperately worried about that at the minute. The way we're managing it is every quarter and every year, how do we sustainably do this such that we're growing a very healthy business that's valuable for customers and valuable for shareholders? We're a long way from working out how to get to be below 30 basis points in the U.K. or 20 basis points, let alone getting anywhere near free. That's a problem that's quite a long way down the road. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Mohammed Moawalla from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. The line is now open. Great. Thank you. Morning, Matt. How are you? Morning. Just a couple from me. First of all, just coming back on this dynamic that, look, if you're going to reinvest back in the business some of the gross profit benefits, you're obviously cutting pricing. Over the medium term, when we think of just the pace of volume growth, implicitly, you should continue to gain market share. Can you talk us through how perhaps you expect some of the volume growth benefits to come through? Secondly, just in terms of these investments, I know that at the IPO you talked about continuing to invest in the platform, continuing to hire. You've had a viral model from a marketing standpoint, but as you think of these incremental investments, are they going in those same areas or are they in any additional areas, which again, would again point to further stimulation of growth? I don't know internally if you have a metric or how you look at every extra GBP of incremental investment and how you gauge the payback on that. That would be super helpful to know. I had one more. We've talked a lot about price cuts, but when we think of the other side of the equation on the take rate, you've obviously been moving into a lot of these other ancillary areas. Could you give us an update on the investment product and what are some of the economics there? Also if you do have any updated stats on how the Wise card and the interchange revenue from that is coming in, and how that should sort of impact the take rate in the other direction. Thank you. Very cool. Let me talk about what's happening. How do we think about volume on the back of price investment? From the investment, what are we investing in and how are we rationing this? Then third, talk a little bit about new products, Assets, and Wise Accounts, and the impacts that may have on take rate. Cool. We haven't guided on our volume numbers. Essentially, when we reinvest in price, like as we would when we invest in our engineering and our marketing, we do that because it drives long-term volume. We obviously expect that to have an impact and this both helps us grow, but also gives us competitive advantage and resilience as a business. We don't explicitly give a pound for pound or a rate return on these price drops. Rather, the way we think about this, as you said earlier, is we're investing in the long-term kind of resilience, sustainability, and defendability, if you like, of the business. That said, you have seen volumes growing healthily, and if you were to ask customers why they joined and why new customers are joining and people are active, it's really a function of the prices, but also the speed and the convenience of the product. The question is then, when we generate this gross profit, what do we invest in? As we said in the listing, we invest that in price, but we also invest that in our product engineering team, and we do also invest that in marketing. I would say the mix there is relatively stable. It's not significantly different. We certainly, we're continuing to grow as fast as we can onboard the engineering teams, through hiring engineers around the world and also investing in marketing across a range of channels, which includes digital channels, but also for our Wise Platform, growing sales and marketing capabilities. We're hiring engineers, and as we said earlier with our EBITDA guidance, we're continuing to be able to hire and scale our investments, kind of consistent with managing to that level of EBITDA. You asked a really cool question, which is how do we rate govern the extra GBP that we would spend in each area? It's a little bit different. Like in marketing, we've always said that we can invest as much as we possibly can in marketing, as long as we get a healthy payback. In the past, that's been 12 months payback. We limited that. We'll continue to review that on an ongoing basis as we get more confidence with the types of customers, especially, for example, business customers we're onboarding. We think about it as a payback rather than a fixed budget. If we could spend twice as much on marketing, we absolutely would, as long as we have the capital. In engineering, the way we would choose which engineering projects to work on would really be by the cross-border volume impact. If we can grow volume, then we're essentially really growing. Obviously, that's what customers use us for primarily. Even when we would launch new features, we think about them from the impact that they can have on our overall proposition and the extent to which they can drive volume. We would stack, frankly, practically, what does that mean? We'd just stack rank the products we'd have based on the volume-made impact. Obviously that is always above a sensible payback on the engineering investment. These engineering investments tend to be much more long-term and obviously have a stronger annuity effect than marketing, for example. On the price cut side, you asked about the new products. There's two there. We'll talk about Assets and then talk about the Wise card interchange. Assets is really exciting. It's launched in the U.K., and we're working feverishly to try and do that elsewhere in the world, as you'd expect. In the U.K., for those of you who are using it, please try it out. You'd see that we're charging around 40 basis points as a charge on the Assets that you would hold in there on top of the fund fee. That should give you a sense of how the economics work in the sense that we'll earn a return based on the quantum of assets that we hold. It's going to be small to start with. Please don't get too excited from a revenue here yet. Essentially, we're charging our customers like we would across our products, like a fair price. We think about what it costs us and what it would cost us in the medium term, and we're charging that plus a margin. We're quite excited to launch this product. We think it's a really useful feature. It's different from what's offered elsewhere, and it's a real enhancer for the Wise Account. On the Wise card, we haven't disclosed numbers on the Wise card. You remember the Wise card is just one feature of the Wise Account. We did say the Wise Account continues to grow very healthily and is driving volume growth, as you can see in some of the metrics. As you'd expect, obviously the faster that grows, that will have a contributing effect to our take rates. We'll talk more about this in detail when we get through to the half-year results. There's no major change in the momentum in that side. Great. Thank you very much, Matt. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Kim Bergoe from Numis. Please go ahead, Kim. Your line is open. Morning. Thanks for taking my question. I had two, and I think the 1st one about the gross margin, I think that's been answered. My second question is, you flagged this before, and you mentioned it here again about opening up for additional features in India. Could you give us an idea of what to expect there? It's obviously a very big market in terms of number of people there. How significant is this? On one hand it's really exciting because it's the combination of, we've got a lot of customers, a lot of people wanting to be customers when they request our product in India, and it's also a massive market. It's something we're investing in. On the other hand, we need to recognize that a couple of things. One is it takes time. It's not all under our control. We're working with the regulator to find a way to launch an awesome product in India. I would expect, I think actually, if you look back in the prospectus, we showed a chart that shows the rates at which markets grow, and they all tend to grow at a similar rate. They start. They grow through viral growth, which you can see is like a slow and steady but ramps. Rarely do we see a market turn on and then suddenly, a massive impact on total volumes. I think if you're thinking medium-term to long-term, it's very exciting. Obviously, it's why we're investing our time in it. This thing will ramp steadily as and when we're successful. Kim, I hope that helps. I would refer back to those charts. I think they give a fair steer as to how a market would grow and what to expect. That's very clear. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next question comes from the line of Omar Keenan from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead, Omar. Good morning, Matt. Thanks for making the time. I just had one or two questions, please. Yeah. Just a follow-up on the engineering and tech momentum question. You did say that it was going to be quite lumpy, as you would expect. I was wondering if you could just give us perhaps a bit more color around the timeline for further reduction in unit costs. I guess that's the Australia infrastructure development. It would just be interesting to get a little bit of a timeline around that and what else that is significant is in the pipeline. Then maybe just a bigger picture question. Thanks for all the color on the mission statement. Clearly, you're focused on running the race faster than anyone else, and that's very clear. When you look over your shoulder, have you detected any changes in the competitive environment? In terms of whether that's the IXB initiative from banks or what other fintechs are doing. Be interested in your thoughts on how big you think the gap is versus other fintechs. Just a last question as well. Could you give us any color on the exit rates on the customer price, please? We can think about what it looks like in the coming quarters. Thank you. Cool. Okay. Let me talk about the engineering and tech, what's underway. A little bit about competition and what's coming. You mentioned speed. I think that's interesting. I think the question was how to think about take rate going into the coming quarters as we exit Q2. Cool. Thanks, Omar. I won't try and share a pipeline now, but actually I would say, I think we're way more transparent here than most companies. If you go to our blog and check out the product roadmap, we actually use this to tell our customers what's coming and also excite a bunch of engineers around what they're going to work on. If you look on the product roadmap, you'd probably be able to see in there some of the types of things that we're working on as to like, and you'd be able to see which of these might be driving efficiency in, or which ones might drive speed and which ones might open new markets. I'll check this out. I certainly wouldn't commit to saying, right, this is going to drop in a month, this is going to drop in 2 months or 3 months. You called out the integration in Australia. That's really exciting because that essentially puts us directly on the metal like we are in the U.K., which has been transformational for us because, yes, it lowers our unit cost, but also gives us total control over our product and how we manage and move money around. The customer experience just gets way better. As and when these drop and these go live and we're able to disentangle the existing cost structure is sometimes within our gift and often not. Just on the one hand, don't worry, there's plenty that's coming. We're engineering and working on this, you can have confidence that it will come. On the other hand, you kind of also don't need to worry because the way these sort of work is, as the ones recently, we'd move away some of these cost of sales, but actually the fundamental kind of gross margin generation of the business is pretty intact. Please refer back to this pipeline. It should give you a sense as to some of the things that are coming. Question, looking over our shoulder around these things. IXB is a great call-out actually, it's very interesting. Also maybe talk around what other banks are doing and what other fintechs might be doing. IXB is really interesting. For those that are not aware, this is a development where certain banking platforms, including SWIFT, are trying to get together to say how do they better connect the world’s payment systems? SWIFT fundamentally has been trying to do this for a while. The Clearing House and SWIFT, I think, have been working together for 5 or 6 years trying to do this. For example, there’s plenty of other examples, actually. This is not the only one. For example, India and Singapore are connecting to try and get their payment systems working seamlessly together. This is all really good news, frankly. What does it do? One, it validates that these payment systems need to be connected. That's what we've spent the last 10 or 11 years doing, is actually stitching together the world's payment systems in order to make money move around these really helpfully. Just connecting one or two of these is, one, it's bloody hard, and two, actually, it's not the only part of the solution. If you understand our infrastructure and how Wise works, it's stitched together all of these solutions. It runs effectively a ledger and a treasury platform that can move money instantly around these platforms and always know where it is at what point in time, so it can predict when these monies are going to be paying out. Then it has all of the other UI around this, and infrastructure, for example, compliance infrastructure that helps you manage and understand where the money's coming from, where the money's going. We definitely need to be able to stitch these payment systems together, and we've made great progress on that, and we're continuing to do that. Part of what IXB doing, on the one hand, it totally validates that that's an important thing to do. If IXB works, that's great. We'd definitely use it. Of course, we'd expect to have access to this. We also know how long and hard these things are doing. This is fundamentally putting together technology that already exists. We'll see, only time will tell as to how efficient that is and how easy that is to integrate into. We'll keep an eye on it. Hopefully we'll participate, but it's certainly not a silver bullet that we see, but something that might help us over time. The question is then, what is everyone else doing? Think about banks, and let's think about fintech. On the fintech side, we haven't seen anything radically shift over time. We continue to see some good fintechs making progress in their domains, and that's great. The world needs all the help it can get in payments and making banking easier for people. Nothing radically changed there. We've seen on the other bank side, remember 80%, three-quarters roughly of our customers are coming from banks. What does that mean? Obviously, the rate at which banks can improve this is quite interesting. We got quite hopeful. I think Santander announced 2 years ago that PagoFX would launch, and they'd offer a similar or maybe a competitor to Wise. Unfortunately, they've shut that down, which is a shame. We're quite excited to see banks start to compete with each other on this and start to raise awareness of this problem, but I think this just demonstrates it's pretty hard for them to make this work. I think they were charging a reasonably healthy FX take rates on that as well. HSBC have tried to make some progress on this. It's unclear how that's worked. Generally, we haven't seen anything really change from the bank's perspective, and they've got their hands full. Generally, across that competition, I don't see any transformational change on the infrastructure perspective. If things are changing, it should help us. Then on banks and fintechs, there's nothing really changed in the fintech world. Actually, on the banks, a few things that we've seen have maybe slowed down a little bit. Hope that answers that question, Omar. Thirdly, just practically take rate going into Q3. I haven't guided on this one, and I won't right now. Maybe a way to look at this is, you've seen what happened between Q1 and Q2, and obviously these price changes happened through Q2 and some of the announcements towards the end of August and September. That can give you a sense. You don't need to get too creative to work out what might happen in the coming quarters for the overall take rate. That's lovely. Thank you, Matt. Thanks, Omar. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Richard Watts from Jupiter. Please go ahead, Richard. Yeah. Hi, Matt. Yeah, well done on a strong trading update. Two questions from me. Firstly, coming back to the gross margin guidance and the revenue guidance. It seems to suggest a GBP 20 million-GBP 30 million uplift in gross profit for the year. I just wonder in terms of the amount of cost increase that needs to absorb that kind of number feels pretty significant. Can you just talk a little bit more around there? The second question is around the Google Pay relationship. Can you just give an update on that as well, please? On Google Pay, I won't share anything specific. Yeah, we continue to work with them and make progress. Obviously, it's an awesome partner to work with, and we'll invest in that relationship. I think it's too soon to give any sense of concerns or progress. It's definitely something that we see has been successful so far, and we'll continue to work with them on. We have to remember we started relatively narrow alongside Western Union, only moving currencies from the U.S. out to markets like India and Singapore. Like any partnership, hopefully, we want to try and grow that over time. On gross margin, you're right, actually, in the onset. We have guided to a higher number from a percentage basis. We have success. Our goal is to generate healthy kind of fundamental economics in our products, which maybe pointing to gross margin is a pretty sensible way to look at this. Invest as fast and heavily as we can in the future. We don't have any change to our adjusted EBITDA outlook. We're hiring across our engineering, across all of our teams to improve the service we can give our customers. Making sure we scale the business. When I say the business, I mean the kind of support and overhead functions to scale our business around the world. Obviously hiring in our product engineering teams to build products now that we can release in the future, and that will drive volume growth beyond that. I don't see any change to the overall guidance we've given on the adjusted EBITDA. Fundamentally, I think the thing to take away from this is the fundamentals of the business of what we're growing, how we're growing, and we're leaner, but still generating the same ability to invest. These have improved, and it's on us now to be investing that for future growth. Thanks Richard. Thanks for the question. Yeah. Thanks very much. Our next question comes from the line of Patrick Basiewicz from finnCap. Please go ahead. Patrick, the line is now open. Hi there. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got maybe two or three because one of them you might have just explained. The first one, I'm looking at your take rates between your business and your personal business lines. There was a relatively, let's say, sharp decline in the take rates in the business segment. Maybe can you give us a bit of understanding how does the price reduction works between the two business segments? The second question, sorry, I'm going to maybe disagree with you a little bit. Recently, Rapyd has been on a bit of a marketing campaign, and kind of showing their business payment solutions to a number of people. I had a chat with them. They really stressed that the key differentiator in that segment is the ability to automate payments. It's about connectivity to ERP, CRM, accounting system, KYC systems, and so forth. Can you maybe give us a bit of a color? How are you thinking about that area of the business payments? The third question, which might have been answered, I was kind of asking about OpEx, so the basic cost below the COGS. You sort of mentioned that you are expecting the margins to be more or less the same despite the sort of really good bump in the gross profit margin. Is that correct? Thanks. Thanks for the questions. The take rate between personal and businesses. Actually, fundamentally at the transactional level, we charge businesses pretty much the same as we charge people. We try not to discriminate between any customer or have subsidy between any customer and another. What we see on businesses, a couple of things. One is you see a different route mix slightly, which would drive this difference. A few other differences in maybe the average transaction size, which might drive these differences. We don't actively say, "Oh, we can get away charging people slightly higher than businesses." We fundamentally charge fairly across all of these differences. From a difference of a quarter-on-quarter movement, it's likely down to just the exposure of businesses to rout mix rather than we haven't done anything differentially for businesses versus what we've done for people. On Rapyd, that's pretty true, actually. They're right, which is the way we think about our platform is for larger businesses and for people. We think about over time. Far in our journey, people have been coming to Wise, opening an account, and using our platform directly through the app or through our website. In the future, we're working out that will continue to happen, but also how do we take Wise to where the money is, frankly, make it easier and more convenient. For example, if you wanted to use Wise through your own bank, it's going to be much more convenient to you as subject to their app being convenient than necessarily opening up another account. Just like it is for small businesses are quite happy to use us directly. Maybe they're a one person or only a two people in the business. As businesses get larger, they clearly have finance teams. They have accounting platforms, and it's much more convenient for them to actually, for much larger businesses, to be able to interact directly through. For example, we integrated with Xero, and through Xero now you have Pay with Wise, which essentially helps you instruct payments directly from the accounting platform. This is a way for us to reach a different set of small businesses and maybe larger businesses as well. They're right in this approach in that in order to reach customers, you can do it directly, but also indirectly through partners. Our partners might be banks, they might be accounting partners, platforms. They might be accounts payable software. The focus on our platform in the long term and in the future is to work out how do we take Wise as a platform to these types of customers. As we disclosed, it's still a small proportion of our volume. It's growing healthily, but it's the focus for how we make Wise as a platform and bring our infrastructure to where the money is. The third question you had was on OpEx. This is right. We are continuing to grow our OpEx as we expected from a pound and a dollar basis. We still expect roughly the same EBITDA margin as we guided to before. You kind of have to work through the numbers yourselves and see. We have this EBITDA margin as a sustainable margin which generates enough cash and capital for us to run the business and have a healthy balance sheet. We're a growth business, and we think about ourselves from how we're growing and investing for the next 10 years while making sure we generate to have a robust, sustainable business in the short term. We don't plan on increasing that over time in the near term. It's rather like it gives us a governing factor for how much we can invest in our growth. We've been successful so far and continue to invest in our growth, which reflects no change to that EBITDA guidance. Thanks for your three questions. Okay, thank you. Sorry, was there one other? No, just wanted to say thank you. That is very, very useful answers. Cool. Thanks very much, everyone. Any more questions, Martin? No further question at this time. Please continue, sir, and do your closing remarks. Well, I think I hopefully covered it all. This is our quarterly update. We've actually got our full results at the end of November. We'll talk more then. There's not going to be anything different on volumes than revenues, obviously. Hopefully that gives us the flavor. I look forward to speaking to you soon, and thanks for all your questions, and no doubt catch up with some of you shortly. Thanks very much. This concludes our conference for today. Thank you all for participating. You may all disconnect. Have a good day, everyone, and stay safe.