Wise plc: CEO History

Wise reduced its cross-border take rate from 0.67 percent in fiscal 2021 to 0.53 percent in fiscal 2025 — a 21 percent price reduction over four years — while expanding gross profit margin from 65 percent to 75 percent. Cutting prices while improving margins is not the typical SaaS playbook. It works at Wise because the cost of processing a payment is falling faster than the price, and reinvesting that efficiency into lower fees drives volume growth that more than compensates. The company processed $184.4 billion in annual cross-border volume for 15.6 million active customers in fiscal year 2025, generating $1.54 billion in revenue. Founded in 2011 as TransferWise by Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus in London, the company built its infrastructure around direct connections to domestic payment rails in eight countries — 65 percent of Wise payments now arrive in under 20 seconds. The $21.7 billion in customer balances is a structural fact that changes the economics. These balances, held in cash, money market funds, and sovereign bonds, generated $754.8 million in interest income in fiscal 2025. In high-rate environments that interest income becomes a significant profit contributor; in low-rate environments it contracts. Wise retains 20 percent of interest above the first 1 percent yield and returns 80 percent to customers — though UK regulatory restrictions on paying interest to e-money account holders prevented full compliance with that policy in fiscal 2025. The proportion of "card-only" customers — those using the Wise card for cross-border spending without completing traditional transfers — rose from 3 percent in Q1 fiscal 2021 to 17 percent in Q4 fiscal 2024. These customers have lower average transaction volume ($11,725 per customer) but lower acquisition costs, and their growth is changing the customer economics in ways that matter for long-term revenue modeling.