Wise, previously known as TransferWise, is a company that’s created a global cross-border payments network that replaces traditional international banking for 13 million personal and business customers.
In this deep dive into $WISE I’m joined by Simon Erickson, Founder and CEO of 7investing. We explore Wise’s disruptive approach to international money transfers, which bypasses traditional banking fees and delays. From instant, low-cost transfers to multi-currency accounts, Wise is redefining the future of finance.
We discuss Wise’s innovative products, global partnerships (including with NuBank $NU), and ambitions to drive transfer fees down to zero — all while offering strong returns for investors. Tune in to hear our insights on Wise’s business model, growth potential, and what makes it a standout opportunity in fintech today!
Segments:
00:00 Introduction
01:25 Wise at a Glance
07:07 How Wise is Creating as Better Tomorrow
08:30 Wise Platform
10:35 Financials
15:58 Valuation
20:21 Investment Conclusion
25:41 Final Thoughts
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[00:00:00] Introduction
[00:00:00] Luke: Hi, and welcome to the Telescope Investing next deep dive. Now, if you’ve been following my social media, I did two of my very favorite companies in the world over the last couple of months, Axon then Intuitive Surgical. Well, I’m coming right back for part three this month with Wise PLC, and it’s not just me. I’m joined by a special guest, Simon Erickson, founder, CEO of 7investing.
[00:00:24] Simon: Luke, it’s a real pleasure to be here with you. Kind of fun doing a podcast with Telescope again here today.
[00:00:29] Luke: Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Delightful to have you on and joining us. Fantastic. And a fantastic company we’re going to discuss today. And I really wanted to bring you in because you’ve been on the other side of this, like you were paying me using Wise, you’ve got some perspective on the company and its products.
So let’s just get a feel for the company and whether we think it’s a good investment today. let’s bear in mind, earnings are coming up in just a few days time on the 6th of November. So going into earnings, like how do we feel about this company?
[00:00:57] Simon: Luke, if I might jump in there too, you know, we, we had chatted several years ago on the Telescope Investing Podcast with you, then actually I hired you as an advisor with 7investing. And then here we are back in the Telescope Investing Podcast again. One, it’s fun to just keep in touch with you.
And secondly, like you said, we have personal experience. With this company, with your background, you know, as a banking executive, you know, you’ve really modernized a lot of these things that needed modernizing. It’s really interesting to see you and bring this one to the table. glad to discuss it with you here this morning.
[00:01:25] Wise at a Glance
[00:01:25] Luke: Fantastic. And actually that’s a great place to start because if you haven’t heard of wise, let’s just take a minute and explain like why they are wise, why they’re different now. Simon, if you wanted to send some money to me and we didn’t have Wise or some of the other fintechs that are doing a similar model today, you’d have used something called the correspondent banking system.
So typically this takes a couple of days, it’s expensive and it’s error fraught because what happens is. You would send your dollars to a correspondent bank in the U S and then they would find their intermediary bank somewhere in the UK. And then that bank in the UK would find my bank. So the money potentially is going through like three or four hops and each time it moves, there’s time, there’s costs, there’s potential for errors.
Things get reversed. Sometimes even you think you sent me like, say a thousand bucks. I might only get 900 and something dollars because fees were incurred along the way. not very good for consumers. Wise completely reinvented that model and I’m going to massively simplify what they do here. It’s a bit more complex, but essentially they’ve got like a pot of money in the US and a big spreadsheet like a ledger of all of their US customers and how much money those guys have.
They’ve got another pot of money and a spreadsheet in the UK. And if you want to send money to me, well, Wise just deducts your US balance and credits my UK balance. Like the company’s joins everything up. It cuts out all the intermediaries. No money actually flows. They just debit you, they credit me and the transaction’s complete.
And what that means is, they can transact Almost instantaneously for the majority of routes, they can transact much cheaper, they can make it much more transparent, and it’s just a better proposition for customers at all parts of the value chain.
[00:03:14] Simon: It’s, it’s really an inefficient process as you know, better than anyone does Luke. And when you find just these pockets of inefficiency that are global markets that are also highly fragmented, where you don’t have a majority share, just completely controlled by one or two companies. It’s a recipe for a company like Wise to go out there and come up with a better solution. So great job framing the problem here.
[00:03:35] Luke: Great stuff. what I’d like to do is start these off with, like, at a glance, what’s the company all about? So here’s an extract from one of their investors decks, and they talk about their three key products. I actually think there’s four products really. but the company talks about the wise account, and there’s really two flavors of the wise account, the account for personal customers and the account for business customers.
If you’re transacting with Wise, you might just be using their transfer service, Wise Transfer, and that’s how the business originally started off. But the company realized that it could build a longer term relationship with its customers. So instead of just getting Coming online, making a transfer and then , your interactions done, you can actually leave money on deposit with Wise.
So that’s the wise account on the wise business account. And then there’s also Wise Platform and Wise Platform because they’ve built this industry leading technology and they spent quite a lot of money on R&D to build. interfaces with payment systems all around the world to ensure they’re complying with complex and evolving payment regulations in so many different countries.
Well, the Wise Platform allows partners, typically small banks to plug into the wise network and kind of white label it. So you’ve got small regional banks in the U S local banks in the U S and around the world. Now that are really actually a wise behind the scenes. If you domestic banking, you’re using that bank, but you do an international transfer, actually Wises Network is doing that transfer for your bank.
And so you get all those benefits around efficiency and transparency.
[00:05:12] Simon: It really worked well for us to Luke. like we mentioned a little earlier, you know, you’re based out there in London. I’m here in the United States. Just make this so seamless and so simple with very, very few fees, if any fees, as opposed to this traditional way of doing it, which we saw firsthand was going to 200, 300, maybe 400 basis points of each transaction.
Super easy, super lower cost win win for customers,
[00:05:34] Luke: and if you’ve got a wise account, actually it’s money in the pocket for customers because they have now something called their savings and their assets product. So I’ve got a business bank account with wise and a personal account. I’m actually flying to Vietnam to meet my buddy Albert from telescope investing days.
We’re going to hang out by the pool this week while I’m using my wise card and I’ve got a wise Vietnam account. Any money that I have in my wise accounts, I’m earning interest on those right now at a market leading rate. To bring it to life. I’ve got one account. I want to keep pretty low risk.
So I’m using wise interest product. So on my euros, my sterling and my dollars balance, I can earn about four and a half to 5 percent interest. That’s very competitive compared to like a bricks and mortar bank, my regular bank. I have a, VIP type account, they still only pay me like 2. 3%. So why is this paying me double the interest on if I just choose an interest product? And if you want to get a little bit more exciting, and if certainly if you’re an investor, of my accounts, I’ve turned on their full assets product where my balance is fully invested in the MSCI World Index. So actually I’m earning index like market returns.
[00:06:47] Simon: pretty fantastic to, you know, worth pointing out to, I believe Luke, you know, avoiding the foreign exchange, you know, the, the conversions and things like that, because you’re just debiting one account and crediting the other, you know, just a transfer like that. You mentioned all the intermediary fees between the banks, but also, you know, you can avoid a lot of foreign exchange. , risk and things that are associated with that too. So good points.
[00:07:07] How Wise is Creating as Better Tomorrow
[00:07:07] Luke: what I like to do when I look at these investments is I think about how these companies are creating a better tomorrow. That’s really the, ethos of almost everything I invest in. And so two key slides that bring this to life for wise, significantly faster, Payments. So now 95 percent of payments sent on Wise across all different payment corridors, even the most complex ones, happen in under a day.
And 62 percent of payments are instantaneous. And I’ve seen that anecdotally myself. When I started using Wise, I was sending money to my bricks and mortar US bank account. It took about two days. I did a transfer a few weeks ago and it was instantaneous. So they’re clearly turning on these integrations and making it faster.
And then key, and we’ll come back to this at the end of the conversation, they’re reducing the cost compared to banks. So right now, they have a 0. 67 percent take rate. So that means if I were say transferring 100 to you, it’s going to cost me 67 cents. To do that FX before I send my, foreign exchange transfer, it’s actually cheaper for some currency routes, a bit more expensive for others, but it averages out a 0. 67%. And you can see that little arrow trending down. The company’s mission is to reduce that take rate and eventually. Bring it down to zero. And let’s talk about what that means in a moment.
[00:08:30] Wise Platform
[00:08:30] Luke: I want to touch on the Wise Platform just while we wrap up the thesis around this company. And these are all of the many, many partners, over 85 now, that Wise are interfaced with as they grow and they plug in their payments capability to other banks and they enable financial institutions to get the benefits of the Wise network.
I think a really interesting addition here is NuBank, which is Brazil’s, , neobank and actually now the largest fintech in Latin America. It’s got over 93 million customers in Brazil and another 8 million customers in Mexico and Colombia. NuBank have just plugged Wise quite recently into their network.
So it means that they’re Ultravioletta customers, I guess that’s like their VIP tier, now have all of the Wise capabilities if they’re banking internationally. And we’re seeing lots of other partners come on board. It’s really quite an interesting model that’s allowing Wise to make that little bit of take rate on a vast quantity of money that transfers every day.
[00:09:32] Simon: You have thoughts on this slide, Luke? I mean, you see such a presence in the United States and Europe and kind of develop markets. It’s kind of neat to see Southeast Asia growing. It looks like they’ve got some partners out there. And like you mentioned, NuBank down in South America and Latin America, it just feels like it’s.
It’s starting to embrace the concepts that we take for granted you know, digital bankings, digital wallets, you know, even, even the concepts of finance, a lot of cash, it was just sitting in, in accounts before. is this a growth drive? You see South America is kind of where the assets are going to be coming from, or is it still going to be kind of focused on those developed markets?
[00:10:03] Luke: Yeah, for real. I know you and I are both fans of MercadoLibre, like essentially the kind of Amazon slash eBay of Latin America, like it’s so early in the fintech and the online commerce growth story in that whole region of the world. And so as consumers become more technologically aware. Start doing more and more of their purchasing online as they are doing and start doing more of their banking online.
Well, NuBank is set to benefit and as a result of this partnership, Wise is set to benefit too.
[00:10:35] Financials
[00:10:35] Simon: Really interesting. I think, you know, when you think about it, you break down the Fiat currencies and the local currencies, you know, everything that just used to be country specific, hard currency, you’re breaking down those walls of countries. As we go digital, there’s no need to have it existing system. I love what they’re doing.
[00:10:49] Luke: That’s right. Let’s take a quick look at some financials and then we’re going to touch on the valuation and you and I had quite an interesting debate about the valuation just before we hit the record button today. So these are the most recent set of results announced by the company. but we do have more complete results coming in just a few days time.
And at the end of today, I’ll share some things I’m looking at in terms of what we’re hoping for in the next set of results. But the company’s cross border volume, like the amount of money it transacts is now 35 billion pounds, up 20 percent year over year. Underlying income is up 17 percent year over year, and the cross border take rate is down 8 basis points.
And that’s interesting, because the company is striving to reduce its take rate. Essentially, like, the take rate is the money that Wise hangs onto when they’ve completed this transaction. The money’s moved. How much did they earn from supporting that transaction? And the company’s goal, in fact, they have something called Mission Zero is to deliver eventually free transfers.
Now, if you’re a shareholder, you can think, what the hell? Like, what is this company like a charity? Why are they trying to do all of their business for free, but Wise still make a lot of ancillary income and the eventually free mission, like it’s pretty hard to compete with free. From the bricks and mortar banks, especially the banks that have like a much higher cost base.
And as Wise can increase its market share, and it’s doing a great job of that right now, it’ll increasingly have more money on balance in Wise accounts and Wise business accounts. And they make money there. So they take interest income on customer deposits. They earn some portion of the fees on an asset balance, like my money’s invested in the account.
MSCI World Index. Wise actually takes the first 1 percent of the interest plus 20 percent of the rest, but that means I get still the lion’s share of the interest, but they’re taking their chunk.
They also make a little bit of money on ATM withdrawals. If you draw more than 200 pounds a month wise, get a small fee there and they charge that, take rate, which they’re trying to drive down. So even if the trend rate got to zero, the company’s still gonna make great money essentially from.
All the money that they have on their books that they’re holding in Wise accounts.
[00:13:12] Simon: Yeah, it’s interesting. The auxiliary income, you know, the, um, the, the other things that you just mentioned, look outside of just the take rate itself for the cash itself. It’s kind of like a bank, right? In a lot of ways, you kind of got the interest income that they’re making from the loans, but then you’ve also got the other fees, the dreaded other fees, the non interest income that we always see from banks.
and like you mentioned, you’ve got some stuff that Wise has those ATM withdrawals, you know, conversion between currencies. Debit card transactions of your business customer could be things for payments and invoicing. I think that to be fair, they’re being very transparent about what they’re charging, right?
These are not free. Services for them, but they’re just saying, you know, straight up front, everything’s not available everywhere. And the fees that we’re charging are transparently disclosed and they’re less than what you’re getting in competitive offerings. And I think that’s fair. You know, this is just kind of land and expanding.
They’ll get as many assets as you can take a little bit as low as you possibly can with the core service, make that as valuable as possible. And then as people start using it more often. Debit card transactions, ATM withdrawals, whatever it might be, just take a little bit and that kind of adds up over time with more and more transactions.
At the core though, you’re keeping it as low cost as possible for your core customers. That’s a good model to have it.
[00:14:23] Luke: exactly. And that, transparency is really key to their mission. Like if you’re listening to this and you don’t know what your own bank charges you to, maybe you go on vacation and you buy something at a store with your credit card or with your debit card, you make a withdrawal maybe you go look at your bank’s website and it will say fee free.
So you think, Oh, this is great. I’m not being charged anything. Well, they’re getting you on the FX rate. They’re and maybe a zero. dollar fee but the exchange rate your bank is charging you punitive compared to the 0. 69 percent that wise would be charging you or other competing fintechs like if you haven’t looked at this for your own bank account go check it out and uh compare to else you could earn by maybe using a different kind of banking proposition, perhaps Wises next time you go on vacation,
[00:15:14] Simon: Yeah. And Luke, we shouldn’t underestimate too, you know, how much work is involved with this, how much software development to just get this into the app with all these considerations packed into, you know, the company has got 800 engineers. They’re pushing out a thousand software or feature upgrades every single week.
So just to have everything, , completely updated, , as user friendly as possible, it’s not something that’s just so simple. You’ve got a lot of talent and it that’s going into making this user
[00:15:38] Luke: that’s absolutely right. And actually Krzysztof and I had the great opportunity. We visited Wises offices in Austin earlier this year, had a chance to meet with their acting CEO, who’s now their CTO and chat to the policy team. So, yeah, they’re really making a big investment in North America and trying to build out the team and the expertise there, but
[00:15:58] Valuation
[00:15:58] Luke: let’s bring it on to valuation.
Simon, this is a. This is really an interesting question. Now, before we met today, I shared this live with you and I said, is this right? Have I got this right? This company seems so cheap. What am I not understanding? Well, let me just break down why I think it is remarkably cheap, given its market positioning.
A market cap of about 7. 5 billion pounds today, so just under 10 billion dollars, trading at 15 times free cash flow and 22 times earnings. But if you really just do a simple reverse discounted cash flow model, and I would say if you try and do this yourself, be cautious about using the numbers that you’ll find on websites like YCharts and FinChat, they typically get it wrong for financial institutions like this.
They calculate the free cash flow incorrectly. But if you go to the investor deck, Wise’s most recent true free cash flow is 486 million pounds. Well, if you use a pretty conservative 11 percent discount rate. The current valuation only demands just over a five and a half percent free cash flow growth over the next 10 years.
That’s cheap. Like the company more than doubled its free cash flow in the most recent year over year period. And you only need 5 percent growth over the next 10 years for this to be a reasonable investment. What do you make of that, Simon?
[00:17:21] Simon: Uh, incredibly undervalued what you just said. We should listen to on rewind three times, you know, it tripled its free cashflow year over year. And yet the market is expecting that it’s going to grow 5 percent for a decade, even at 11 percent discount rate, which I think is even kind of high. I think you’d probably double it.
Sub 10 percent of it, of a discount rate should push it even higher. I mean, there’s not a whole lot of expectations. I think this is an under a misunderstood opportunity. , so it looks attractively valued, you know, when you consider that, uh, not only that you’re selling it only 15 times free cashflow, that’s the cashflow generated by the business from the fees that take rates, all the other things you said, like there, and then you see a business that’s just growing.
I mean, look at the free cashflow growth. You’ve had from fiscal 2021. One. 58 million pounds. I got to make sure I’m reading the dollar sign correctly. That other funny dollar sign that pounds went to 486, just within three years. You can see the scale of how this is generating, not only in terms of the growth and the top line, but how that just, you know, gushing cash, that’s now almost an order of magnitude in three years, and the market is only expecting 5 percent a year, uh, we did use a 3 percent conservative terminal growth rate after 10 years, Luke.
Uh, which I think we could even push the window even farther. I think they’re going to grow faster than, than three years, 3 percent after 10 years. But to me, um, this is an attractive valuation. This is something that I think the bar is too low.
[00:18:44] Luke: I agree. I’m glad you agree too, phew, Simon. I thought I’d screwed something up.
[00:18:49] Simon: We both put a good look at it, Luke, and we couldn’t break it. You know, it’s, it’s undervalued apparently.
[00:18:55] Luke: But let me try and rationalize what it is I think the market is concerned about. And I think it ties back to that conversation we just had about eventually free transfers. Because Wise has a lot of money. in customer balances right now. And actually because it’s not a bank, it’s struggling to give that money back to customers.
So it’s got this nice problem today where it’s earning too much interest income and it wants to like give that back to its customers because it’s trying to be super customer friendly, great value and thereby grow market share. So the market’s probably concerned that free cashflow growth is going to slow down dramatically as wise.
Sort of leans into that aspiration to reduce the income it’s earning, but you take a very long view, 5 percent growth over a 10 year period, 5 percent annually. That still seems incredibly conservative to me.
[00:19:49] Simon: Yeah. Luke, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this too, about the, influence of the macro, you know, we’ve, for most stocks have been in a pretty challenging two years, right? Very high interest rates, which translates into higher discount rates. It’s more expensive for companies to raise capital, uh, tends to pull back on their growth projects, right?
They lay off divisions, they slow their growth. it’s kind of a contraction period. we’re coming off of that. Now the Fed has said, Hey, we’re going to pull back 50 point reduction here in the United States basis points in the Fed funds rate. That tends to be pretty good for most companies.
How does that translate to financials?
[00:20:21] Investment Conclusion
[00:20:21] Simon: Is, is lower interest rates going to impact any of the income that can be generated by Wise?
[00:20:27] Luke: Yes, it is. you’re absolutely right. The way you set that out, Simon, a lower rate environment is typically good for companies, particularly small cap companies, because like they’re leaning on debt, they’re raising more money and they can do that at better rates. A low rate environment is typically bad for banks, big banks, but also the fintechs like Wise.
So yes, as we come into a lower rate environment, and I think there are legitimate questions about whether the reducing rates will be sustained. the rate cuts quite recently last month could get reversed. Which will play into a company like Wise’s favor, but let’s be optimistic well optimistic as investors and assume that we are going to come into a lower rate environment for a sustained period.
Yes, that would be a headwind for a company like Wise. And if we think about some of the other risks the company is exposed to, if you get wild foreign exchange movements, volatility could impact their profitability because remember they’re carrying like a bit of currency risk because their model is they don’t send the money.
They just hold the money. If we go into a recession, which is. Looking, perhaps, likely, I don’t want to be the doom monger, but we could be going into maybe at least a mild recession in 2025, well that’s going to reduce people’s expendable income, maybe mean families take fewer vacations, maybe businesses are a bit more conservative with their international spending, so that’s going to hurt Wise.
They might reach a licensing condition, you know, these licensing rules are very complex and they change very frequently. so it’s hard and it’s expensive to keep up with the payment services regulations all around the world. And then also customers are price sensitive I’ve got my Wise account and my Wise business account, and I feel like a real affiliation with this brand.
I find it really easy to use and I enjoy using their products. Your typical customer is going to come to Wise because it’s the cheapest option in most cases. And if suddenly someone else can offer a cheaper option, well, those customers are probably not going to stick around. They’re probably the smart, price sensitive customers who are going to bounce around and get the best rate wherever they can.
[00:22:32] Simon: Yeah, there’s one more that I want to add to this Luke. It’s a little bit more ethereal and philosophical. feels like it’s something that’s always 10 years out, but we still need to discuss which is the potential impact of Crypto. one of the reasons this is a potential risk is that Bitcoin in the United States is the same as a Bitcoin in the UK, which is the same as a Bitcoin in Zimbabwe.
There is no exchange required. You can just use a platform transfer those. And so this has been a constant, risk to the remittance companies, you know, who are used to. Like you said, the legacy fees that are charged by the banks and the host banks and all these things. you don’t need any of that if you’ve just got crypto account.
and I guess my question is maybe I’ll frame it this way that I have not seen mainstream crypto the way that we were talking about, it was going to be five years ago, and I think one of the biggest reasons that we aren’t using crypto for cross border transfer and ribbons is just because there’s, there’s no recourse if you get hacked.
Like if your account has got a lot of Bitcoins and somebody figures out how to get in there and take them out of there, there’s no FDIC insurance. There’s no protections against something like this happening. You’re out of luck. And so while it might be okay to have a little bit of crypto on the side, you’d like to see the price of Bitcoin go up in any week, for really moving money around.
I think that that’s a huge risk factor that people are still kind of a little bit skittish about. Now we’ve seen that. We’ve seen this progressing, right? We’ve seen the safety progressions, you know, you’ve seen the wallets and things like this. Make a lot of progress, but, I guess I wanted to ask what you think about crypto as a long term potential risk to
[00:24:01] Luke: I’m kind of on the fence with cryptocurrency personally. And I own some Bitcoin. I do think it’s probably the future of money, but I think that day is. at least 10 years away, maybe longer for all the reasons you set out. It’s still the wild west very much. And I know there are some great companies trying to evolve the regulations.
You know, maybe it’s not Bitcoin. Maybe it’s like a government backed cryptocurrency, like a digital dollar or the Brit coin, you know, whichever currency becomes, internationally accepted. Um, wise have said they haven’t really updated on this position, but they have said in the last year or two. They personally don’t see cryptocurrency as a risk, but I think this is definitely something for an investor to monitor.
[00:24:46] Simon: Do they have a crypto capability in their wallet? If you want to hold some Bitcoin in your wise account, you can choose that. Is that an option yet?
[00:24:53] Luke: No, that’s not, and I don’t believe that’s on the roadmap.
[00:24:56] Simon: Yeah. It could be interesting to see how they play that. I agree with you. It’s still a long way out. It’s just something worth kind of keeping in mind. I don’t see it as an immediate risk.
[00:25:02] Luke: Yep. Great stuff. Well, we do have, , their H2 results coming in just a few days time. I guess the key things I’m watching that I think really drive the thesis here are the penetration of the Wise account on Wise Business Accounts. Wise earns so much of its revenue from its account holders, if we see the proportion of total customers increasing, then that’s gonna be great for the company.
And then also more platform partnerships, as you said, there’s still like bits of that map that seems somewhat underpenetrated. And as we see more partnerships come into place, that’s really going to be a massive accelerant for the business.
[00:25:41] Final Thoughts
[00:25:41] Simon: Yeah, Luke, you know, I went back and I did some, some number crunch, you know, you, you brought this to the 7investing scorecard back in 2022. It’s actually one of the few FinTech companies we’ve done well with no surprise that you’ve had a history in financial services. Uh, that you, you pick the winner.
So great job on that. But also since 2022, you know, two years since then, you’ve seen kind of the great one, two punch of not only an increase in transfer volume, which is up 50%, around 50 percent since 2022, but also the customer count itself. Also have 73%. So it’s not just a handful of customers that are using this more and more.
It is that, but also you’ve got more people joining in, like you said, more partnerships, more regional banks. I mean, the combination of, of more customers and customers using it more often tends to do pretty good when you have FinTech transactional based platforms like this,
[00:26:30] Luke: Yeah, I think it’s a great business. And if I look at legacy banks, I really don’t see how they survive over the next 10 years. Certainly the bank I used to work for seem to be really struggling. They’ve been disintermediated in retail banking. It’s happening in their commercial banking arm, what’s left other than maybe some boutique, , M& A type activities, investment banking type activities.
Maybe if you really fancy like a private bank for wealthy customers, but if you want to compete with some of these guys like Wise, like NuBank, that are offering incredibly low rates and they have such a low cost base, the landscape has changed, very hard to keep up if you have thousands and thousands of branches and staff that you have to support.
[00:27:14] Simon: it’s just such an interesting opportunity. You know, I’ve, focused a lot in my professional career on disruptive innovation. You know, this is Clayton Christensen, you know, innovators, dilemma. Uh, there’s certain things you look for that tend to support disruption, you know, and this is the kind of things like Elon Musk has made his career out of, you know, but it’s just, if you can look at the things.
That this checks the boxes for, right? I mean, in addition to the customer account increasing as quickly and the transfers increasing quickly Transfer service costs about a fifth of what competitive solutions are charging customers. So it’s lower cost It has less than five percent of its core market market share and two thirds of its new customers are coming in from referrals No advertising or marketing required for that.
I mean, that’s a lot of checks for a disruptor And I think this is an industry that needs disruption. Really, really appreciate you bringing this one to our attention, Luke. And also for anyone listening to the Telescope Investing podcast, it seems like a pretty good opportunity, kind of hitting that inflection point you want it to see.
[00:28:10] Luke: Absolutely. Yes. And thank you, Simon, for joining me for this deep dive into Wise, one of my favorite companies and hopefully one of our listeners favorite companies to anything you’d like to say about 7investing before we wrap up today.
[00:28:23] Simon: Yeah, it’s been fun. You know, we’re coming on five years now, it’s hard to believe that, uh, March, 2025 will be our fifth birthday for 7investing in just every single month. You know, find the stock market’s best opportunities. If you’ve got 4, 000 publicly traded companies out there, you know, we’ve done diligence on more than 200 of them.
And then from that, trying to just boil it down to what are the top five Best Buys each and every month. Those are the ones we think you should be paying attention to. And then investing is personal, right? If you’re an income investor, we want to have options for that. If you’re a growth style investor or anywhere on the continuum of styles of investing, just kind of putting a buffet of options available led by conviction, highest conviction ideas, best buys.
I like to do a lot of the legwork and the behind the scenes, just like what you’re doing here with Telescope, Luke. Um, potential and abilities and rewards of long term investing.
[00:29:16] Luke: Absolutely. And I will just say thank you because I recently pivoted some of my mega cap investments. I bought about 10 small caps. I wanted to expand my portfolio. I went straight to the 7investing latest best buys. I bought three of those five and two of those three. One is nearly a double already just in a month.
So great job on your best buy process, Simon
[00:29:40] Simon: Thanks Luke. Love it.
