Good morning, everybody, those in the room and those joining, virtually by Zoom. I'm pleased today that we'll be joined by our CEO and Co-founder, Kristo, who's going to talk through our mission update, our progress on our mission for the first six months, and Matt, our CFO, who's going to talk through financials for the first six months. We'll then move on to Q&A, so I'll start by taking Q&A in the room. Then for those that are joining us virtually, I will take questions by Zoom. Just as a reminder, if you do have a question and you're joining by Zoom, if you could just raise your hand through the Zoom function, and I'll introduce you. With that, I'd like to hand over to Kristo. Thank you. Hey. Thanks, Martyn. Josh, you have to wait. Still have probably about 10 minutes of me talking and then Matt as well. Welcome everyone in the room and everyone on Zoom. Before we go into a bit more detail and a bit more numbers, I just wanted to remind us why I'm here. I'm here with my team because we're solving, like, a really big problem for international people and businesses. This is a real thing that we're working on. We're doing it by building something completely new, restating the infrastructure and how these payments work. They power products that people and businesses love, so it's a great thing to be working on those and doing it in a way that it's sustainable, meaning we're independent, we're funding our own growth. This is, for me, an amazing thing to be working on. Now from the shareholder's perspective, when you kind of read these things, you'll see that we're working on a really large opportunity, which builds on this infrastructure a massive competitive advantage, and that has an inbuilt growth engine through word of mouth. In the end, it's a profitable company. Just to put this into context of why we're here and why I think you're here. How did we do in the last quarter? We had 5.5 million customers use us for cross-border transfers. Our average price stayed at 0.64%, and more than half of our payments are now instant. If you look at us in the context of growth, our volumes are growing 49% year-on-year, and our total income, which Matt will break down a bit more, has gone up 63%. We're staying at our 20% of or above EBITDA margin. I'm going to take you through how did we actually do in this quarter in terms of the product and how our customer experience has evolved. As a reminder again, the reason the things that our customers care about and the things that we're solving here is that money internationally is very slow. We're making it fast. It's quite expensive to use. It's inconvenient and has lots of hidden markups and fees in there. These are the things that we're solving on our own infrastructure. In the context of where we are today, we're making visible progress on individuals. We're up to 4% of the global volume is moving on Wise. On businesses, we're still a rounding error. We're less than 1%, we think, in small businesses. There's a lot of work for us to do here. Going through each of these pillars one by one, we see that over the years, we've actually made really steady progress on instant. Now half of these transfers arrive in less than 20 seconds and almost all the transfers in less than 24 hours. Last quarter, we had a drop-down. You'll see some of these ups and downs. We anticipate this will be moving upwards, and we can increasingly make more and more transfers instant. On fees, it's the same journey. We've managed to bring the fees down to 0.61% for the last few quarters, and then last quarter, we're up to 0.64%. Again, in the long term, we expect that our goal is to bring the fees down rather than up. Put this into context, the banks are still somewhere at 3%, so the small ups and downs on our journey have to be seen in the context as well. Now, I've always talked you through a little bit on the progress on those four things that go around building our infrastructure. First is expansions. We're expanding globally. We're already quite a lot in. There is plenty to do. This half year, some of the bigger achievements was getting a settlement account in Reserve Bank of Australia, which leads a way for us to become a direct member of the Australian Instant Payment Scheme, which then again helps with our goal both on faster and more efficient transfers. Japan, we actually were already pretty fast, sadly, just during the working hours. We changed the connectivity this time around, and now we brought faster transfers to Japanese 24/7. The regulatory front, there's quite a bit of movement on Wise Assets. We got licenses in Singapore, started serving our customers there, and also in the EU and Estonia. This is going to take a little while as we passport out to the rest of the Union. On operations, we're onboarding a lot of new customers. We're gonna be talking about the demand that we see for Wise and Wise Account. We've been scaling up our operations teams. We added about 1,000 people there. On technology, the stat for the half year is 99.7% uptime. Actually, for the last quarter, this was 99.9%. The reliability of our platform, especially for our platform partners, is relevant and important. Now moving into how do our customers experience this. They use us through three products. It's either the Wise Account, Wise Business, or Wise Platform. Just as a reminder of like who are these people who use this, I hope a lot of our shareholders are also customers. Just as a reminder, who do we see using the Wise Account? There's definitely digital nomads who spend their time working in countries where they're different than employers. We have expats who move into new countries and then use the Wise Account as their first account for a little while. We see travelers, and we see students who are often expats as well. These are the, sort of the few groups that we see among the Wise Account users. On Wise Business users, that's actually even more diverse because these days there are so many businesses who do international payroll and pay suppliers international. It's very hard to be really, really just a domestic business. Then increasingly businesses are using Wise to invoice their customers who are probably also not in the country where they operate. For businesses to be able to operate internationally, the Wise Account really does come to life. Next I'm going to talk a little bit through the features that we've added on the Wise Account for the last six months, just to bring out the trend of development. There's a few in the U.S. actually. Our USD Account or the Wise Account in the U.S. got much better connectivity into the local brokerage platforms, the financial services apps. On global front, we're rolling out a new homepage experience. What we're seeing is that there's a lot of, so we're hearing a lot of demand for the features that the Wise Account now offers, but they haven't been as easy to find. We expect that there's more people, even more people finding the features that are useful to them. We started rolling out debit cards in the U.S. Again, we've been talking about rolling out cards in different places around the world. There's one place where we didn't serve businesses with cards yet, that was the U.S. We've fixed that now and U.S. businesses are getting cards. Again, on the business side, we're starting to enable our business customers to invoice their customers and get paid with cards. Our business customers use our account numbers quite a lot, so they get local account numbers in 10 different countries, so they use that to invoice their customers, but sometimes they need to pay by card, so we're enabling that as we go forward. All of these things that we're building for the Wise Account really seem to resonate because we're seeing more and more of our customers, and you'll hear about how much more customers are generally signing up to Wise, but more of them using the Wise Account than merely transfers. On the individuals, it's up to 20%. Sorry, 30%, and business is up to about 50%. The interesting bit here is that those who use the Wise Account, they have either more use case or larger use cases, they end up using Wise for more volume moving through us and more transactions coming through us. We've, we feel that with the Wise Account, we definitely created a better product, or an added product for our customers that means they can get more of their things done with us. One thing as you saw, the share of the Wise Account users is going up, but also the general amount of users is going up quite fast as well. There's no surprise that we see the balances that customers hold with us just go almost doubling year-on-year or 88% year-on-year growth. They're split between personal and business and almost growing at the same pace. This again is so far has looked like a really steady mix. We talked a little bit about the Wise Business and the Wise Account. Now our customers reach us sometimes through our partners. We have talked to you and shared a few platforms where Wise is built into other products. You've see a lot of banks here, some challengers, some more traditional ones, and different types of platforms where these platforms give their users the benefit of Wise. This last half year, we have a few logos up of, again, you're seeing a few banks, both the challenger types and more traditionals, and also quite a lot of non-banks as payroll providers, company registration agencies and others who make use of Wise for their customers. With that, we kind of talked about all the new features we're bringing out, all the, all the new customers that we're servicing, and the capability that we're building for that is something that we measure through the user experience. The few things that are really important for us, how quick and easy it is for a new person or a business to start using Wise. If you've tried to open an international bank account for a business, you might be spending weeks or months on it. We endeavor to get all of this done and open for you in 24/7 and in 24 hours. There's still quite a bit for us to do. Also to kind of give you a view of how we're. Like the standards that we keep ourselves up against. You know, when we say that 84% of payments arrived on time, meaning some didn't, but those that didn't, that means that they didn't arrive in 20 seconds, they arrived in 25. There's a bit of a scene setting here. Of course, when we say to your customers their payment's gonna arrive in 20 seconds, we expect it to. There's still something to grow towards the 100%. Moving on, just to put this into the context, we've added about 1,000 people to our team in the last six months, and we keep hiring and adding more language support, more specialisms. There's a lot more there to build. Now, the last thing from me is gonna be just the international context. I think we showed this maybe a year ago. We've kind of made this effort of plotting two axes. One is where we kind of see how deep we are integrated in the local regulatory and technical infrastructure. Going from partnerships through our own licensing process to having direct connectivity to the central banks, what that means to the customer. Obviously we expect this to be somewhere, the journey to be somewhere in the middle. The better we integrate, the better features are available to our customers. We see that in some of those countries at the top far, the U.K., Singapore, we're kind of, we're already quite far ahead and then there's a lot of those countries where somewhere in the middle where the service is already pretty good, a lot of free features available, but there's a lot there to build and there's a few countries you definitely don't even see on that map yet. Just to give you the kind of way that we think about the travel here. Just to narrate a little bit on what's happened in the last six months. We mentioned we acquired a licensed entity in India, for example. That means we've moved a little bit on the x-axis. We haven't really moved on the y-axis yet because the customers haven't seen the benefit of that. There's a bit more to do there. Australia's a good example. We have the settlement account open. We definitely moved on that axis. There's still work to be done to actually get into the payment system and start switching on instant transfers in both ways out of Australia. With Singapore maybe there's a good example in a different way. They already have a QR system that we're kind of connected to, so enabling our customers to pay with QR codes again something that we were able to improve on the user experience side without too much effort on the integrations. Just to give you a kind of a view in our internal world of how we see our geographic expansions and deepening going on. Now to summarize what I've been talking about here, there's these four things that we work on that drive the user experience that we measure in the NPS, that does play through in the word of mouth that is 70% probably highest we've ever seen as a share. Moving on to driving growth. The people recommend us, that drives more growth both in personal and business customers, and that yields the numbers that we're seeing both in the volumes that we transfer, the impact that we have on the movement of money but also our year-on-year growth and the financials which Matt is gonna talk us through next. Thank you so much. What do we see? We're moving an awful lot of money now. Moved over GBP 50 billion, that's growing, as Kristo said, around 50% year-over-year. That's generating, actually 63% year-on-year growth in income. Over GBP 400 million. That's actually pretty profitable at a 22% EBITDA margin, highly profitable, GBP 92 million of EBITDA. That's, and that EBITDA is growing fast. All of that's flowing through to real bottom line, profit before tax at GBP 50 million. As you know, the way we run our business it's high quality earnings, it's highly cash generative too. Just to step back and put that in context before we go into the details on this. You know, the environment we're in, we're still growing fast. We've still got huge demand from our customer base, whether they're people, businesses to move money around the world. Actually, we're translating that into transparent fees, which we translate into income for us. We're still highly profitable despite actually investing significant amounts in our growth. I'll go into more detail as to how much of that gross profit we generate is actually translating through into investment, which we're making for future growth into our business. That's in the context of a really challenging economic environment. You know, we're a profitable cash generative business that's resilient through the good times and the challenging times, and that's intentional as to how we've built our company. We're really proud of these results, but let's click in as to what they actually mean. Our active customer base has grown. Our personal customer base has actually accelerated to growing over 40% year-on-year. We're seeing still strong growth in our business customer base. Those customers are moving more money through us. People moving 6%-7% more on a versus last year. Actually business is moving quite a bit more. Now, some of this is moving, as Kristo mentioned, more customers using the Wise Account, and those customers will use us more. Some of this is route mix. Also some of this is undoubtedly inflation through and through, particularly in the businesses we think where, for example, some of those you can imagine some of those examples Kristo showed where businesses are paying their suppliers and those costs are going up. That's translated into volume growth of almost 50%. On a currency adjusted, worth calling out, around 44%. Both business and personal volume growth is growing really strongly. Just step back and think about that GBP 50 billion or GBP 100 billion annual run rate. That puts us well ahead of, I think, nearly any other money mover around the world. Probably the largest standalone money mover growing really fast as well, which is quite. Just to frame this in context. Describe here our take rate. We've always talked around our cross-currency take rate, then our other take rate, but we now also have this interest income that gives our total income take rate, and you can see that's gone up. We see Kristo mentioned what's happened on cross-currency prices. We see more and more customers use our Wise accounts, we're also seeing some of this interest flow through into our total income take rate. Overall what that means is our revenue is growing around 55% year-over-year. That's growing all across all regions. In fact, pretty amazing how even when you look at the U.K., this is growing very healthily still, despite actually, as we called out before, having a really high share of share of the market. Really just shows that still huge demand, even in our most mature markets, or the markets we've been operating the longest to continue growing. People and businesses are actually holding GBP 9 billion of balances with us. As Kristo mentioned, that's really adoption of the Wise Account rather than the average balances growing. People finding use for the product, storing and trusting us with their money. Thought I'd provide a little bit clearer around what where do these balances sit and how do we hold these? You can see we have a mix of currencies. That doesn't purely driven by the mix of customers. Actually, for example, if you're a customer in the U.K., you might hold as many dollars with us as you hold pounds, just like if you're a customer in the U.S. Overall it means we've got a fairly even mix across pounds, euros and dollars. A lot of people try and help understand what is the rate that we're earning on these. Half of that is still held in cash in banks, so in high credit quality banks who we partner with to help us run our infrastructure. Another half of it's held in government bonds or in money market funds, which, you know, highly liquid. Our job is to keep this safe and secure and available for our customers. This means that actually we often ask around what the yield is we see on these balances. Just in September, because obviously rates changed and also shifted our balance mix over this period of time, we're seeing around a just over 1% yield on these assets. You compare that to what the average rates would be, you can see we don't earn interest on all the balances, but we're earning interest on a fair sum of this. The question is, what are we gonna do with that? I think we've been clear, and there's no new surprises today, but just to reiterate that. The first thing is many of our customers will have the opportunity to earn interest, and we want to be able to pay interest. We're not always able to, but we're looking at ways as to how we can do that. Second is actually our account, an account that people use and value, where they're holding this, we're gonna have costs of running that which we can help cover with some of this interest income rather than necessarily conversion fees or other ways. So some of this interest we'll use to cover the costs of that. Also, like, where we can invest, we always will. So some of this can help us continue to grow. Across all these costs, any costs that this would cover are clearly, we'll continue to earn a margin as we always will and always have done on these costs. Primarily that's our thesis, and there'll be different answers in different regions, but this is how we're thinking about moving into this. Let's step back. Overall income growing around 63% year-over-year, GBP 416 million, supported by, you know, the early stages of that interest income that started to come through in this half year. These numbers you're familiar with. Let's just go through some of the margin stats then. We generated a 63% gross profit margin across the half year, which means GBP 262 million of gross profit. We've always said and been clear around what do we do. What, what is our business model or our investing model? You know that we invest for growth, so that's the gross profit generated from our product, and we reinvest a bunch of that into marketing, which helps us bring more customers, brings more volume. We invest in product and the features. We've given you examples of, you know, sustaining that development in our infrastructure and our products, which drives volume. Also we will, where we can, lower price where that's possible. Also we'll maintain our price or increase our price in order to make sure we can sustain this flywheel. Today I just wanted to give you a bit more color as to what some of this balance might look like, because we've always talked around our expenses. If you look at that gross profit, that GBP 262 million, where does it go? I've kind of given a split here of three. A lot of that, you know, you can see at least a third of that is going into flows to EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA. Actually a third of that, the other two thirds, is split roughly between covering the costs of running the company, think about our operational teams of everything from customer services, verifying customers, but also cost of running finance or our other corporate functions, and the offices we're sitting in. Versus on the other side, actually a third of that is investing in our growth in the future. That's not really changed over time. Much so that actually, there's kind of an interesting fact here. If you look at the cumulative amount of money that we've spent in product development since the very early days, the first engineer, we've spent around GBP 350 million. That's all time spent on this. If you look at the GBP 525 is twice the current. It's not a guidance for the year. It's, it's twice the, it's twice the last six months' gross profit, right? Actually, it's quite a nice return if you think about spend in one period, and what do you get back in the next period. The reason I show you this is, I like the discipline that we have, you know, when you see a third of that gross profit going into investment and growth. Those principles really haven't changed around us. Invest in things that our customers want and need that will help them move more volume. There's pretty healthy return on investment that we see on this spending. Gives us huge confidence to keep investing in that third, which when you look at that pie chart, it's around where we're investing. That also includes marketing spend. Actually, if you look at that, just media spend alone, we've grown around 40%. We've always said we have a nine-month, less than nine-month payback on that. That is literally the return on that media spend by, you know, relative to the customers that it brings in. Actually, if you look at the blend across all of our customers, it's radically lower at three months. Actually, if you look at the returns across the period, I know there's a lot of pressure on returns on marketing and pressures on media spend, but actually our returns got better over the last six months. Actually, we've seen payback improve consistently over the last year. Let's just remember that actually 70% of our customers that join us do so without this media spend. They're coming through word of mouth. They're coming off the back of that cumulative investment of GBP 350 million in our product, which is only getting bigger and appropriately so, given the opportunity that we've got ahead of us. If you look at total expenses, this is the full stack of expenses. This is growing just over 40% year-over-year. Clearly, we're investing heavily in our teams, in employee benefit expenses, investing in marketing, and then some other things in there as well. We did have some one-offs in this time last year relating to the listing. Transparently, if you look at the expenses that sit between gross profit and EBITDA, those are growing around 57%. This shows that the slower growth in some of the costs that sit below that, whether it's the amortization or the stock-based comp charges. 40% expense growth relative to the 60% income growth. Our EBITDA, we said, we're investing. We're generating a very healthy gross profit. We're investing heavily in our future growth and maintaining an EBITDA at or above 20%, and that's 22% for the half year up on the 20% we saw in the last period. This is very, very intentional and it reflects the balance of growth and profitability that we're managing of a highly profitable business growing really fast. It's also cash generative. If you look at the strict definition we've got of cash flow, we generated GBP 78 million of free cash flow. If you adjust for some of the working capital adjustments, we always have working capital movements in and out of collaterals, for example, for these periods. Actually, this underlying free cash flow is really growing in line with the income and the profits that we're generating. It's a very, very healthy cash dynamics in the business today. We're bottom-line profitable, like a lot of companies which will use EBITDA. We do as a good comparison. We think it's helpful for our business. Just to give you the confidence, we see really fast growth in the bottom-line profit before tax that we're seeing, more than GBP 50 million for the period. To summarize, we're moving a lot of money now, moving more than GBP 50 billion in six months, that's still growing really fast. Like the incremental billions we're adding year-over-year is significant. That's translating to very healthy income growth, also from a profitability perspective, both at the gross margin, we're investing an awful lot of money in our future growth and still managing a very healthy 22% EBITDA margin. That's generating bottom-line profits and cash generation. Pretty excited now. Think about the context for this. Yeah, got very healthy business and very resilient and continuing to invest in the future. Thanks very much. I'm gonna hand back to. One more thing. No change in guidance. We upgraded our guidance, you remember, in the last set of results. Still continuing 55%-60% income growth for the year and no change to our guide on revenue or adjusted EBITDA. I'll come back to Kristo. Thanks, Matt. The last thing for me is just to check whether the numbers match back to the reasons why we're here. As a reminder, we're here to solve a big problem for people and businesses. We see more and more of that, generally demand. Scientific use-wise, we're building the infrastructure. I kind of showed you the progress, how that's going. Again, we're seeing, even the markets where we are working, we've been working on those markets for 10, 20, 10, 12 years. They're still growing as the U.K., for example. Creating the experience that people love, being sustainable on the way, the numbers do match up with what we do. Do we have some time for a QA? Yeah. Thank you. We'll manage this in the room, and then Martyn will help us broker this. Do you want to? I'll be told to keep it in the screen. Okay. Let me start. So James, just for everyone, what's your name? Where do you come from? Then what's your, what's the question we've got? No need to wait for a mic then. We- All right. We should be up there. I'll be shouted at if it doesn't work, so. Okay. James Goodman from Barclays. Thank you for taking the questions. Maybe just to come to the account balances, which clearly have grown extremely strongly, actually ahead of volume. There is an argument that maybe customers should start to think about where they can get the best return on those balances. You're clearly adding new functionality into that, but can you talk a little bit about your comfort in those balances continuing to grow? Maybe just to help us think about that interest income percentage. When you show the amount of funds which can generate interest income for you, where can that get to on a structural basis? That's the question really, a broad question around the account balances. Second question is a bit more specific. Just I noticed that with the business account, you're starting to offer cashback to some of those businesses. It's an interesting way to start to give some of this back to customers. Wondered whether you could talk to that and whether there might be the opportunity to do something similar at some point in consumer. Okay. Why don't I take the first question. Sure ...really cover the second one? Question is, like what's our expectation of growth really of these balances, and then also what might be the structure of that look like from what we hold those balances in? We haven't given any guidance on that outlook and don't plan to. You can see so far they've really been driven by the rate at which customers are adopting our accounts, our Wise Account. What that means is people are continuing to come and bring their balances to us. Customers will have options, no doubt. Maybe not from their bank, maybe from somebody else to earn some interest. This is inevitable, and actually we'll offer that option to our customers as well, hopefully, you know, through our assets products in certain jurisdictions. Clearly like our objective when we launched the balance product wasn't to attract balances, it was to attract to help people make it more convenient to use Wise accounts. We'll continue to invest in that. We if we can pay interest, we will. Inevitably there could. We'll see. Like, we'll learn in each market as to how we develop our proposition as to what happens to those balances. The most important thing for us is that customers keep using Wise and keep moving their money, and using Wise to save money versus on moving their money internationally. As to the mix, we probably can go higher on the mix of... We'll do that cautiously. We're not, we're not racing to chase yield. We are making sure that the customer's money is safe, that it's available and liquid. Then as we feel comfortable with this, and we're pretty cautious on this as you'd hope, you know, we will, we'll work it out so that operationally it works really well and that there might be a yield. It can increase and it'll be different depending on the jurisdiction and the regulatory requirements. On the business spend cashback, that you're referring to, this is something that we're launching in the U.K. For U.K. business, and we're rolling out where we can. This is really speaking to our approach to not subsidize across customer groups. We are getting that, interchange from the schemes and the merchants whether we want it or we don't want it, and this is what the business customers earn by using their card. It would be, I think, not really thoughtful to use that money to subsidize some of the other products that we're doing, but rather, give it back to the, to the people who kind of earned it. I think, eventually we'll see other banks and card issuers do the same thing because, you know, otherwise everyone's gonna start using the Wise Business card, they probably wouldn't wanna see that happening. Hi. Good morning. Omar Keenan from Credit Suisse. I've got a question for Kristo and a question for Matt, please. My first question for Kristo. you know, you've been Wise has been a publicly listed company for more than 12 months now, and, you know, part of the feature of that, I guess, there's been a debate around where the, you know, cross-border market is going. I guess if we think about over, you know, more than 12 months, you know, we've had things like cryptocurrency, IXP, HSBC Global Money. You know, the kind of debate as to whether somebody can come along and do it better than you're doing, or at least as good. Standing here today, it feels like those fears are a little bit overblown, and you're still doing it a lot better than other people are. I just wanted to get your thoughts around the industry landscape, when you think about the alternative ways that like other fintech disruptors could potentially do this that's out in the market. Do you see any sort of obvious ideas that you can bring in and do things differently at Wise? Do you see any movement on the incumbent banks to reduce that differential in terms of how much more times expense, more expensive they are? I guess the most public one that we heard was from HSBC Global Money, that's kind of gone a little bit quiet. Would like your thoughts there. My question for Matt, I hope... I was wondering if you could help us a little bit more with the mechanics of the interest rate sensitivity around the Wise deposits. You know, I appreciate you don't wanna give guidance on growth in the level of deposits, but the 1% yield, you know, in September, obviously central bank rates are going up from then. Understand that, you know, you're holding, there are some balances in, you know, bonds that you're holding. If you could talk about the roll-off profile there that could help us mechanically think about the interest income and where you have balances sitting with banks. Understand that you've sort of, you guys have hustled a little bit more in terms of trying to get the interest rate, you get up, you know, up on that. Yeah can you help us think about what that pathway is gonna be? Related to that, the use of that money in terms of reducing price towards the customers, understand that's gonna be weighted towards other fees, which is currently 15 basis points. Can you give us a bit of a steer as to what you've announced already, how that's going to change? It's a 15 basis points because you're using less domestic. Yeah ... charging less for domestic fees. Is that gonna become five or 10 or something like that? Got it. Right, Omar, you were asking for kind of advice of how to do this better than what we're doing, and I wish I knew because then we would do it differently. The thing that I kind of shared on this map that works is really linking into the local payment systems and clearing with clearing in the local networks, which is all doable, and we can demonstrate it. It can be done. We've removed 50% of the payments already instant. I think the technology exists. It's just a matter of how you make it work and how do you interconnect the world, which is just a lot of work, unfortunately. I wish there were silver bullets. I haven't seen any. I think what we're building and where we've made years of headway, like, is the way how this, like, money is gonna work without borders. That was, I think, the first part of your first question. Yeah, the incumbent banks, what are you seeing from them? The incumbent banks, I think for them the trickiness really is because they never tell their customers what they charge, it's very hard for them to say, "Hey, we're gonna cut our fees by 50%," but because we never told you that we charge 3%, like us telling you now that we're gonna start charging 1.5% is really hard. It's just I don't know how they're gonna deliver that message. I think we haven't seen much of that happen yet, but I think it's first they will have to move towards being more transparent with what they charge, and only then quickly, I think we're gonna start seeing the fees come down as well. Getting over the first hump is I think the harder journey. Yeah. I'm basically taking from what you said that when you survey the landscape, that this is the best way to do it, and there's no threat to the morality in this business model for the foreseeable future. Despite all the debates that people have had in the last 12-18 months, this is still the best way to do it. It's the best way that I've found. Yep. Cool. The second question then is what are we seeing with these balances? Where might the rate go, I think, was really where you were trying to get to. So far, I mean, let's look over the last six months when we've really seen the interest rate environment start to change. As you can see, we haven't seen a radical shift in the in the vector and the rate at which these balances are growing. You know, there's still people coming to us. Not to say that won't change. Like, we'll find out. Like, a lot of our customers have never seen an interest rate. You know, think about the age of customers. I think we'll see how this, we'll see how this works over time. The best we can do, as I said, is, where we can or where we want to pay interest, we will. You asked around like, actually you asked around like what might be the impact of the things that we're doing to maybe like the, on the other fees around these things. Clearly, like some of these things were announced either the, towards the end of the quarter or even in this quarter in this half year already, so they're not necessarily in these numbers. The way kind of stepping back from this, the way I think about this is like we look at the total income base or so that we have and actually we think, right, effectively, where do we wanna cover our costs or pay for the costs of operating this accounts? Where in the past it might have been from conversion fees, now some of that might be from interest. I'd rather think that, if you're trying to think, don't think about like how much of this would necessarily drop through as extra, so when you think about the rate. We're really thinking about like what margin do we want to continue to earn on our business, and like what's the best way to fund those activities for our customers. We'll test things like cashback. We'll test look at things like domestic payments being free, which we shipped recently in some markets. Overall, I would think about, you know, still driving this volume growth and still seeing... We've given you a census to the overall income growth, and we'll test our way as to how that's made up between interest and interest and revenue. Such that if interest really let's say the... As I say, these central banks have to put their rates up to 10%. I'm not sure this is in the curve, but like, whatever. If that goes slightly faster, it means we can maybe go slightly faster on our proposition, if that makes sense. 'Cause that's how we think about investing for the long term. Yes, we may be able to get a higher yield balance to because we might put some of that cash we might see move into interest-earning products. We might actually earn interest from banks on this. I would rather think about this as, the better job we do on that, the better our proposition gets rather than thinking about immediate drop-through. Does that, if that makes sense? Yeah. That makes complete sense. I guess kind of the reason for asking the question is not to assume that there's a full drop-through, but in a way, the more interest income you earn, then the better you can invest in the business and increase the virality of the business because it allows you. Exactly. ... to cut domestic payment fees. I guess that's why the question is interesting. Yeah ... is that if that 1% yield on interest income goes to 2% or 3%. Of course. ... that allows you to cut other fees. I guess my question is, you know, mechanically, is that gonna go to 2% or 3%? Uh, well, well, I mean- Yeah in Central Bank rates have moved since that. We've given you the average rate, so it's definitely gonna go up. At some point it might come down again or quite a bit as well. It will. You've seen, it's connected to the Central Bank rates, which you've seen have increased and probably will increase. The question is what are we gonna do with this rather as, you know, 'cause it's clear that we're gonna have an opportunity to reward back our customers for holding balances with us where we can or other mechanisms to make our product really competitive. Is there any color you can give us on currency splits or? I showed you a currency split in the chart, which is roughly split between dollars, pounds, euros. You can see like sensitivity to one Central Bank rate or another. Yeah. I'm gonna go this way around the room. Kim. Thanks. My question's about growth. First of all, I guess in a bigger sort of way and in broadly thinking, between businesses and personal, how should we be thinking about growth going forward, those two? With that, we can see the lots of customers you onboard, you're clearly taking market share. Where is that market share coming from? Second is the competition. Finally, you know, having assisted and having seen you for this long, but we're going into sort of a different kind of macroeconomics at the moment. I guess everybody's trying to figure out what might that do, what's your sensitivity to that? If you could. Obviously, nobody knows nobody's got a crystal ball. If you can help us sort of think about your business in a slower economic global market. All right. I'm gonna. There might have been three, but I definitely got two of them. Like business personal, like what, where's the growth gonna come from or where's that going? Second is like, you know, when the market's economic environment, like our sensitivity to that. Maybe you take the second, I take the first. The question was around how do we see going forward our business and personal growth. I mean, they're growing both very fast and it's, so we've been asked a long time ago, when is the business gonna overtake the personal? You know, it hasn't because the personal has been growing so fast as well, although the business is growing very the business customer base is growing really fast. Both are growing really fast. I think the dynamic to point out there is, and you've heard us talk, actually over the years now, how we're building features for larger and larger businesses. Businesses who bring on their team to Wise, we have like dual approval, accounts, employee cards, a lot of the things that businesses need to do that personal customers don't have interest in. We've been building out these feature sets, and rolling them out to business customers, which has, I think, perhaps gotten that, as you see the business per customer volumes are increasing a little bit. I think some of that might be a mix that there's now... It's more useful for larger types of businesses. We see that we're going from like very, very small businesses to very larger and larger ones that find Wise useful and usable in their business context. I think we're definitely gonna be seeing more like business growth even coming from that. Again, like there's so many more people starting to use this a lot that it's hard to kind of think about the mix top-down. Therefore, it's easier to think about it bottom-up. You asked about where are the customers coming from. They're really like nearly always coming from banks. Banks, there's like 6,000 of them around the world, and that's very kind of it's a very fragmented business. There's no one competitor really to point out here, but very large base of like normally have used banks or maybe they have the first ever international payment to make and now they've kind of started looking around. On macro. Yeah, on macro, like, I guess there's this context of both the use cases for people using Wise and then what we've seen in the past. We see in our customer base, and maybe you saw some of these on the screen. It's not a, it's not a purely discretionary activity. You might be paying mortgage, you might be paying suppliers in your business. These things tend not to. It's not e-commerce discretionary spend, which we would imagine is on balance more resilient than a pure discretionary activity going into this. Also if your cost of living is getting really tight, you need to save money, we think Wise is a pretty good option for you if you're able to compare between us and your bank. At that perspective, like we're feel on balance, there's a level of like customers are really gonna keep continuing to need us through this period. If you look at what happens to remittances through the global financial crisis, this is reported. Now, it's a sub-segment definitely of the market, but it's growing quite quickly is the first thing. It did slow down, but it slowed and maybe it dropped a bit, but it kept growing quickly. There's no doubt about it, like our customers and small businesses will, some of them are going to suffer through this period. At the rate at which we're growing and the rate at which we're shipping products, you know, we're confident. You know, what's driving our growth is not the market. What's driving our growth is the rate at which, as you said, customers are joining us from an alternative. We've got inflation effectively forced in our cost base, but we also have this in our top line. There's an element of, you know, call it, protection or benefiting from this. If you step back and think about it really macro. You know, growth businesses that are investing a lot in growth in the future, we're doing that today, but we're doing it out of cash flow, and we're doing it out of a level of profitability. You know, we've worked out how to charge. We've got a business model where we're charging our customers what it costs us to generate the product. If it gets really hard, we've seen with volatility, we've trained ourselves and our customers to. Prices may go up. On balance, we want them to go down in the long run. All of this mechanic, both the relationships with the customers, the business model, and the way we've run it from a profitability perspective, sets us up pretty well to keep investing and growing, even when times, which I believe right now are very challenging for most businesses out there, as I'm sure you're meeting and seeing, pretty resilient. Hannes Leitner from Jefferies. I've also a couple of questions. The first would be around your headcount growth. We go maybe into a more economic downturn, the next couple of quarters, so how should we think about that? Is this now an inflection point for you to hire more talent and role? Then the second thing is, for example, on your business ventures, you mentioned business cashback and other features and functions and expense management, for example. Do you see they are moving more into that fintech space? I think, you know, thinking now about the Marqeta and Adyen. Is this the other competing elements driven then also by the thought process of your customers, of your businesses? The last bit is just in terms of your partner network. When we think about Germany N26, when you move into this kind of business accounts and personal enriching the features and functions, are those partners all on board? Do they use them then as well? Are you competing directly with them? Okay. I'll do the hiring question. Okay. you can cover the features, the second thing. Cool. we are hiring, but we're not hiring. I think a lot of companies have hired speculatively thinking, "Let's invest and see if we can generate some growth to pay back that cash flow in the future." We're quite more synchronous with this in that we're hiring. Yes, we're hiring operational folks to help service the demand that we've actually generated, so a lot of customer service verification agents. That's all funded by the product today. on the product area, which is the other third of the pie chart, which I showed you, actually, we're hiring in this area pretty quickly as well today. We haven't accelerated, but we're just continuing to hire and lay down, put down teams and, grow those teams to be able to grow things for the future. I don't think we'd say we're opportunistic now. Nothing's really changed in how we're managing the business through the cycle. Like, we've just got this. I talked about that GBP 350 million. That's really just incrementally growing a really strong team that's able to continue to roll out features over time, and that team's growing. Yes, if there's more talent on the market, great. We'd love to hire them. We'll keep building the team at the rate at which we can sustainably grow this and keep that discipline on the return. In terms of the features that we're rolling out for businesses, the principle is roughly that, to an extent, we'll probably be able to do a good job for businesses. At some point along the verticals that you mentioned, whether it's accounts payable or accounting or some treasury services, someone else can and will build a specialized service, and then it's more the matter of how do we integrate with that service. It's a bit of a both. A good example is maybe, we built a really good integration into Xero, the accounting tool. We can help our customers do, like, basic accounting or at least get on the way with any tool, then we build integrations with whether it's an accounts payable tool or a card issuance tool. We have a few of those as well. Therefore, there's no, like, yes or no answer to your question. We're definitely gonna increase the breadth of things the businesses can do on Wise or get their finance team's job done on Wise, then also help them use other more advanced services that are already out there. Both those ways. In fact, with your second half the questions of all these things that we build, like, are these useful for our partners? I wouldn't say. I would say that our partners mostly bring the international infrastructure to distribute their customer payments. It's really the Wise transfer feature that they mostly want and need for their customers. There might be ways how... Like, we usually expose everything that we build to our partners as well, but I don't see that being, like, too much of an interesting angle going forward. All right. Let's keep going. Yeah. Hi. Good morning. Andrew Gardiner from Citi. I had a question, Kristo, on the chart you showed about the sort of relative maturation of your product by different country. Clearly, U.K. and Singapore sort of in the upper right there. When you give us the sort of the account, Wise Account adoption, that's on an overall basis. Can you give us a sense as to where you stand in those more mature markets today, sort of the rate of adoption there? That's been on a journey. You've clearly done well here in the U.K. For those markets that have, where you've more recently launched that kind of feature set, are you seeing a similar rate of adoptions happening faster, slower? Just so that we can get an idea of where that might trend over the coming period. It's a good question. Thing is I will not give you the number now. There's a few things to think about, like where we launch a product. In some markets, we've been open a long time without those features. There's a put and take here. If you imagine like some markets we've got a lot of customers who onboarded to TransferWise over time, and that's what they do. Whereas in some markets, we launch quite quickly with these features. It might not be intuitive to look at it that way, but clearly we try and look at markets here where we have those features as to what the penetration is. I can't give you the answer, but I think it's fair to say intuitively, without having looked at that data, I would expect these to be correlated. The more the better the feature set, the more penetrative, more adoption we find for the Wise Account users. We usually wouldn't build these features if no one's using them, basically. Yeah. It's resonating similarly as you-. Would expect so. I think we'll see like small differences around whether it's like specific demand or good competition that the banks do a good job with that as well. I think there's probably some local dynamics, but generally it would expect that to be correlated. Yeah, we couldn't get that kind of lumber across the base if it's not pretty well spread, if you think about it. Given how well you understand the basis for this spread. Cool. Let's have these two questions, and then maybe we can go to the phones as it were. Please. Hi. Tytus Zurawski from Goldman Sachs. Thanks for taking my question. My first question is on volume growth. Could you help us understand how inflation contributed to your volume growth? My second question is on geographical expansion. You launched Wise Account in Brazil earlier this year. We saw healthy growth. You also had a slide on progress in different geographies where you had these metrics. I'm just wondering whether you're looking into M&A to expand to accelerate your geographical expansion plans. Okay, cool. I'll do that. On inflation, on volume growth, you look at the volume per customer. You can see definitely in the business customer base, some of that I feel is coming through from inflation. You have to do your judgment of your math as to how you think that is impacting it. There's also a currency impact in there, which we've tried to be really transparent on. There's definitely inflation in some of that growth in volume. Active customer users is not a bad proxy to keep it really clean. Do you wanna talk about M&A? In terms of M&A and things that we've acquired, we've recently announced we acquired a small company in India that carries licenses that we believe will be useful for our customers over there. I think looking forward, we just remain pragmatic about what is the additive thing that an acquisition could bring to our infrastructure really, and kind of follow from that. Yeah. Well, you remember that chart with the flags and flag. any of these radically move us up or to the right on these versus doing it ourselves and, or we has to be way up these opportunities. Let's keep going from a time perspective. Nick Anderson from Liberum. Just three questions. First of all, net credit losses, both in absolute terms and relative terms they've picked up. Is that a new normal or just some kind of aberration? Secondly, on other operating income that's also kind of picked up. Again, is there something one-off in there or is that a new normal level? Third and final question is on regulation and compliance. You sort of flagged the fine in Abu Dhabi. The question is, with regulation and compliance, do you aim to meet the standards within the jurisdiction you're operating in, or do you have the highest common denominator approach globally? Okay, let me do the top, the finance questions and then do you wanna talk- Yeah, sure. -about the regulatory one? Yeah. Actually the credit risk in the portfolio is very from a consumer or business base is we don't have credit risk on these. From time to time, we might make a loss on, sorry, actually, probably more so a while ago, we had a dispute with a partner. This was actually this is relatively low and not something that we expect to be meaningful over time. From on the other income, so in our total income, so I think you're referring to on. No, sorry. It's the kind of the GBP 7 million just above the PBT line. okay. these will be, It's just it's much higher than usual, and we just like to want to kind of... Yeah. This could be relating to. We have a bunch of movements below this. This would be maybe interest what we're seeing on. We could have interest we're seeing on not some of our own cash, on our own balances. If you think about most of the cash we hold, which if you think about the interest that we're holding in the interest that we're reporting in the top line is interest on customer balances. Effectively we can earn interest income on our own cash balances, which can help show that line, I think. Sorry, just to be clear on the net credit losses then, you're saying that it wasn't like a one-off in there like Brazil two years ago? That was a one-off. We saw that. We also see. We'll make some product losses in the product, but these are relatively small and we haven't seen anything material shift over the last 12 months or six months. In terms of your question about the regulatory footprint, the answer to that is really clear. Actually, this chart that we had with the two axes and all the countries where we operate, like this is all about taking regulatory exposure. The answer is very clear that every country has their own rules, and we operate in this country, we operate in those rules. Absolutely, we need to operate in the local regulators'. Rule set, whether we like it or not, whether we think it's effective or not, we always intend to do that. As you rightly pointed out, in Abu Dhabi, we're a very tiny operations, we didn't adapt as well into the local regime as we should have, and therefore, we were fined there. Of course, if we look at it in the global scale, the intents of the regulators are often very, very similar, if not the same. Therefore, there is a large common denominator, and when we build the systems that support that, of course, we try to take advantage of the way that we could simplify the experience. In, like, the bottom line is we're responsible in the business that we operate to the local regulator and their laws. I guess just maybe the sort of the tilt in the question is, you know, as you grow more and become more global and therefore more complicated, you know, if you look at the kind of the banking industry, people tend to use one of two models. When they're smaller, everyone always meets compliance at a local level. That's kind of a given. Sometimes they just decide, you know, it's getting so complicated, we kind of go to a kind of like highest common denominator approach. That you kind of vary the same, the highest possible standards in every jurisdiction. highly... I mean, it's kind of unlikely that we would, we would end up there. I think, we'd rather, like, follow the local complexity and then in the background, if we can make it simpler, that's fine. That's just the bonus of efficiency. Okay. Should we take some from the Zoom? I think those folks have been waiting for your question. Sure. Thanks, Matt. First question comes from Josh Levin. Josh, go ahead with your question, please. Hi, good morning. Just one question. Matt, you had said earlier this year that volatility in the FX markets had benefited Wise as it likely pulled forward some demand. What are your latest thoughts on that? Is that FX volatility still a driver of demand? If FX volatility were to subside, how do you think that might impact growth? Thank you. Thanks, Josh, for the question. I think, we do see noise or ups and downs. We see volatility in FX market relaying into customers sending more, typically more with us, in short, over short time horizons. What that means is if you see rates move, people maybe with the larger payments might decide, right now is the time to do this, or maybe now is not the time, but tend to be like, now's the time to do this in certain directions. Whenever I see this volatility, some kind of start, I'm always cautious in that this could be short-lived. I was definitely starting the year. It's the very first, very, very kind of strong first quarter and saying this could move away. That volatility has hung around, but actually, over time, I would expect this to be Over the very long term, I think this phenomenon doesn't exist because people only have a finite amount of money to functionally move around the world, if that makes sense. That bring forward would largely have happened, if that makes sense, and I think we'd have seen some of that. I think we do, Josh, have some very good underlying strong growth in our, in our product, in our business, which has given us the confidence to shift our outlook for the year from up to this 55%-60%. I do think this volatility will have driven some extra volume this year, and there's maybe some more people to look for solutions, and maybe they find Wise. We don't change our long-term outlook as to growth. I think if this was like a one-time pull forward, which, you know, I think largely we'd have seen that already, Josh, if that makes sense. You know, over the, you know, six to nine months now that we've seen this volatility, I think we've, you know, a lot of people will have moved that money, pulled it forward already by now. Thank you. Thanks, Josh. Thanks, Matt. Next question comes from Aditya at Bank of America. Hi, Aditya. Hey, Kristo. Hey, Matt. Thanks for taking the question. On the operation side, you said that you hired about 1,000 people in the first half. I guess could you maybe talk about how much of that was related to the ramp-up in newer markets, let's say Brazil or Malaysia? As you expand into newer markets in the future, do you have to ramp up on the operation side sort of proportionate? That's the first question. Second, you did speak about from a macro perspective that it's not purely discretionary flows. Could you maybe give us a breakdown of actually the flows in terms of how much is discretionary versus non-discretionary, or maybe a breakdown of some of the use cases on the platform? Then on one last point, you are seeing some emerging markets, let's say India, trying to, let's say, facilitate low-cost cross-border transfers to a market like Singapore through their sort of local payment network, UPI. As you see some of those more initiatives in EMs especially, what does that mean for Wise's expansion in those markets? Operation impacts of new markets. I'll talk about breakdown of payments, maybe talk about faster payment systems. Okay. Aditya, on the headcount growth. I agree the expansion into new markets is one driver. Oftentimes it's actually the language that is the driver. If we go into the market that is served, it's usually served in a different language. Building up the operating capacity in that language takes a little bit of extra work. Often the markets where we enter, they take a bit of while to get to the scale where the, like, operations need to be at scale as well. I wouldn't consider this as the main driver of our intent to build operating capacity. I think if we just really think about us onboarding 60% more new customers than we did, same time last year, there's a lot of work to be done across not just the new markets but also the old markets. That's kind of driving the. Yes, but it's not really the significant driver of this headcount expansion. The second- On use cases, we haven't disclosed a mix of what is. It's very hard for us to judge for each customer what's discretionary and what's not. We definitely see a mix of payments across our customer base. One way to think about this is it probably doesn't look that different to if you looked at your own direct debits that go out of your account and your payments. A lot of our customers just need to do that across currencies and across borders. Actually, there's clearly an element of it which might be discretionary. There's, you know, if you think about the big ones that go out of my account are the ones that pay my mortgage and other things that customers really depend on us on, just like for businesses. You know, they might be paying their AWS bill or their staff. Coming to your question on payment systems, it links up with what Omar was asking before, I think. For sure, the silver bullet which kind of we're using is, we have these local, really good domestic networks developing. What Wise is building is the overlay across them so that you can use... You can get the benefit if you're not in that country, from the instant payments that are happening around the world. Of course, I would expect or hope that others, if they are working on cross-border payments, they would use the same method because it's a no-brainer. Therefore, I would expect that there's more, more development in that area. I still think that we do the best job of that, and that's kind of seen in our growth as well. So yes, you're right. I think it's interesting, and that's generally how it should be, that these good local networks are being put to use to international transfers as well. Very much. Thanks, Aditya. We have one more question, on Zoom that comes from Grégoire Hermann at AlphaValue. Hi, Greg. Hi, everyone. Can you hear me well? Sorry. Yeah. Okay, great. Thanks for taking my question. The first one, sorry if you already addressed it, but on the free cash flow conversion, I think in the press release you mentioned a one-off item. Could you please expand on that and just telling where does that come from, please? The second one, sorry again if it's redundant, but trying to ask the question differently on the guidance on the top-line growth. I mean, could you sort of clarify what are the moving parts that underpin some kind of I would say conservatism on the guidance there? Is it a basis effect from this year's growth, which is expected to be quite high, or you expecting to shrinking the costs charged to customers quite heavily over the next years? Could you just clarify that again, please? Thank you. Sure. Just on cash flow, we try and clean this. There's a bunch of... We talk about working capital movements in this. You know, we have some lumpy movements where we recognize a gain, and then you'll either see the cash flow come through or maybe the other way around. Where these are, like, not purely describing the operational flows of the product, we try and we show it for transparency in the top number. Actually, if you, if you clean for those, you can see more of the underlying dynamics. They might be, like, a working capital movement for, like a clash of payment or a... We offer rebates with some of the. Sorry, we get rebates from some of the card, two of the card schemes. Where those are lumpy and around and maybe fall either side of the financial year, you know, in one year versus the other, we try and clean that out so that, you know, we get a clean view of what this looks like. Sometimes it will help us, sometimes it won't. I think for what we're trying to get across to the investors is just to understand the underlying dynamic and if you are interested in modeling this. On guidance, really, like, I mean, we were guiding to 30%-35% this year on the top-line growth. We've seen much stronger volume growth than we expected this year. Early on, we thought maybe there's this one very early volatility. We're really continuing to invest in, as we've tried to share with you today, like you know, we're continuing to invest in long-term growth. We've got a lot of stuff to build, as you've seen. We guide. We have confidence we're going to be growing, you know, this above this kind of 20% CAGR and we very much focus that on the medium term. You know, we will drive down the cost of cross-border transfers. We will focus very much on driving the volume growth. You know, obviously we want to maximize that long-term growth. No further updates on the medium-term mechanics. I think those were the two questions. I'll call... pull stumps there, as we say in the U.K. Thanks very much for those that have joined us in person. It's very cool to see people in the office. Enjoy any of the pastries that get left. Thanks everyone online for dialing in, especially if it's been early for you. I appreciate, you know, around the world, people have been getting up a little bit early to listen in. We'll speak to you again in a few months. No doubt speak to some of you in between. Thanks very much. Thank you, Raj.