Reduced pricing plan sees Wise shares slump despite profit surge
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Shares of fintech Wise tumbled more than 23% Thursday even after the money transfer service reported a surge in profit for its fiscal year 2024, with shareholders left disappointed over a weaker-than-expected outlook for the next upcoming year. For the full fiscal year ended Mar. 31, Wise reported underlying pretax profit of £241.8 million, compared to £74.3 million for the prior year period. Underlying income, meanwhile, grew 31% to £1.2 billion. The company calculates underlying pre tax profit as annual profit, “excluding the impact of interest income from customer balances above the first 1% yield and benefits paid relating to customer balances,” per its earnings results.

For fiscal 2025, however, the company is expecting underlying income growth of between 15%-20%, a forecast falling short of the past year’s 31% growth. Part of Wise’s strategy is to work to reduce prices “sustainably over time” for its customers, according to its earnings results, and the impact of such reductions is reflected in its forecast, interim CFO Kingsley Kemish said.

The company will “have more opportunities” to continue its investment in pricing by scaling with its infrastructure investments over the next few years, Kemish told CFO Dive in an interview together with Wise’s Chief Technology Officer Harsh Sinha.

Dive Insight:

Wise’s plan to reduce pricing is a continuation of the entity’s existing strategy, Kemish said.

“Fundamentally, we see that banks are expensive as well as being slow and inconvenient,” he said. “And what we're trying to do is provide a much fairer and lower cost solution to customers, and clearly over time, we've been able to reduce our fees as we scale.”

Over the course of the past fiscal year, the fintech dropped prices by over two basis points, and will “continue to invest in providing a lower cost to customers because we know that this is the number one reason why customers choose Wise,” he said.

For its full year 2024, active customers grew by 29% year-over-year to reach 12.8 million, according to Wise’s earnings results. A rising number of its customers are coming via referrals, Sinha said, and a growing amount are becoming users of multiple Wise products.

Of the 5.4 million new customers Wise gained this year, 3.5 million were recommended by existing customers, Sinha said. The company is also “appealing to a much broader set of customers,” he said, with the fintech also seeing a jump in the number of users of its Wise account product.

Wise is “pretty proud” of its customer growth, Sinha said, with 48% of consumers and 60% of its business customers using multiple account features. Collectively, customers held over £16 billion in cash and assets in their accounts, according to Wise’s earnings report.

The fintech has undertaken several initiatives to keep up its growth momentum; last year, Wise announced it would be integrating with payment service SWIFT to enhance its cross-border payment function’s availability, for example.

In addition to keeping its eye on sustainable pricing, the fintech has also taken steps to return interest income to consumers; under its interest income framework, Wise intends to retain 20% of its interest income, while returning the remaining 80% to its customers. However, the fintech has run into challenges doing so in certain markets like the U.K., where the terms of its license prohibits it from paying back cash interest to Wise Account holders in the market.

Should there be a change by U.K. regulators that would enable the company to pay interest in the market, then “clearly we would then be happy to pay interest,” Kemish said. While the company cannot pay out cash interest, U.K. customers can choose to have high-quality government bonds rather than cash as the underlying units in their accounts, allowing them to see an “interest-like” return, he said.

Sinha joined the company in 2015 as Wise’s CTO and has served as a board director since 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile. Kemish is a three-year alum of the London-based fintech, serving as its senior group finance director.

This is Kemish’s second round in the interim CFO seat for the money transfer service, after acting as interim for a four-month period in 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile. He stepped into his current interim role in March, after the company announced finance chief Matthew Briers would step down to fully recover from a cycling accident, CFO Dive previously reported.

Delivery Hero CFO Emmanuel Thomassin is set to take Wise’s top financial seat on Oct. 1, according to a March announcement by the company.