Numbers
Figures converted from GBP at historical FX rates — see data/company.json.fx_rates for the rate table. Ratios, margins, and multiples are unitless and unchanged.
The Numbers
Wise has crossed into "real fintech profitability" territory — FY2025 operating margin of 35% and ROE above 35% put it ahead of Adyen-class peers on returns and miles ahead of legacy remitters. But the numbers tell a more uncomfortable story underneath: roughly half of the operating-income surge from FY2023 to FY2025 came from interest income on $24B of customer balances, even as headline revenue growth slid from +73% to +16% in two years. The single metric most likely to rerate or derate the stock is the trajectory of "underlying" take-rate revenue (cross-border volume × take-rate) net of interest income — if that line keeps decelerating into single digits while rates fall, the 32× P/E does not survive contact with the model.
A. The shape of the business
Share price ($)
Market cap ($B)
Revenue FY25 ($M)
Operating margin (%)
Revenue growth FY25 (%)
Wise is a regulated cross-border payments platform that earns transaction fees on $190B+ of annual volume. The "shape" of the P&L: gross margin pushed to 79% in FY2025 (up from 62% three years ago) and operating margin sits at 35%, but a meaningful portion of both is interest income earned on customer balances now that Bank of England base rate has lifted yields on safeguarded deposits.
B. Quality scorecard — built from the financials
The provider-supplied Quality Score is unavailable for this file, so we reconstruct the quality picture directly from reported financials. Three signals matter most for a payments company at this stage of its life: return on equity, balance-sheet strength, and cash-vs-earnings consistency.
*The headline net-cash number is structurally misleading — $22.8B of the cash is customer money (multi-currency balances) sitting in the matching accounts payable line. Wise's "own" net cash position is closer to $1.4B.
The quality picture is genuinely strong on margins and returns — but the "interest-income tailwind" is doing material lifting, the 5-year revenue CAGR is decelerating fast, and a chunk of reported FCF is customer-deposit growth, not earned cash.
C. Revenue and earnings power — 11-year view
The margin curve is the entire WISE story in one image: gross margin sat in the low-60s for five years, then jumped to 77% in FY2024 and 79% in FY2025. Operating margin tripled from 11% (FY2022) to 35% (FY2025). That is not an organic operating-leverage story — Wise's underlying take-rate has actually compressed slightly as it has cut prices for customers. The margin step-change is the rate cycle plus the company starting to share customer-balance interest income with the P&L (it shares a portion with customers via Wise Interest, but keeps a meaningful share).
D. The growth deceleration
The peak-to-trough deceleration is dramatic: H2 FY2023 grew 82% YoY; H1 FY2026 grew just 9%. Some of the slowdown is the lapping of the rate-driven interest-income jump (FY2024 was the cleanest year of that benefit). But cross-border volume growth — the underlying engine — has also cooled as Wise saturates its early high-growth corridors.
E. Cash generation — and the customer-balance distortion
Read this before any cash-yield calculation. Reported operating cash flow in FY2025 ($5.8B) is roughly 11× net income. Almost all of the gap is growth in customer payables — i.e., customers depositing more money into Wise multi-currency accounts, which Wise reports as cash on its balance sheet and as a financing-like inflow inside operating activities. That is not the company's own cash generation. The chart above shows reported OCF/FCF strip out of the picture; the underlying FCF line (NI + D&A + SBC − capex) is closer to what the equity holder actually receives. Conversion ratio of underlying FCF to net income runs above 110% — clean, as you'd expect with low capex intensity, but the magnitude is much smaller than the headline number.
F. Capital allocation — buybacks and rising capex
Two real shifts since FY2023: a buyback programme that retired ~$87M of stock in FY2024 and $94M in FY2025, and a 3× jump in capex (mostly capitalised software and infrastructure for the regulated entity buildout). No dividend has ever been paid; the ~$220M proposed special dividend announced with FY2025 results is the first capital return of meaningful size and is not yet in the FY2025 cash flows. Stock-based comp at ~$76M is real dilution, but small relative to a $17.8B market cap.
G. Balance sheet — own equity is small, customer balances are large
The picture above is what a payments-institution balance sheet looks like once you separate the "two pots" — Wise's own equity has compounded from $151M (FY2018) to $1.79B (FY2025) at ~45% CAGR. The $22.8B of customer balances is matched cash-for-cash on the asset side; it is not leverage in the traditional sense, but it does mean the company carries credit, operational, and FX risk on a base ~12× larger than its own equity.
H. Returns — ROE has roughly tripled since FY2022
The ROE step-change in FY2023→FY2024 is the same story as margins — interest-income leverage on a small equity base. ROE has begun easing as the equity base inflates and interest tailwinds normalise.
I. Valuation — short history, current setup
WISE only IPO'd in July 2021, so the "20-year valuation history" anchor is unavailable. Instead, look at how the current multiple reads in three frames: the post-IPO range, the implied earnings valuation, and the peer set.
P/E (TTM, reported EPS)
P/S (FY25)
P/B (FY25)
Mkt cap / underlying FCF
Consensus target ($)
Upside to consensus (%)
At $14.00 the market is paying ~32× FY2025 EPS, ~28× underlying FCF (NI + D&A + SBC − capex), and ~10× book value. Sell-side consensus target sits near $16.46 — a high-single-digit-to-mid-teens upside, with high target near $21.13 and low near $10.30, capturing a wide range of views on whether the FY2024–25 margin level is the new normal or a rate-cycle peak.
J. Peer comparison — Wise is the unusual mix
The peer table makes the structural mismatch visible: WISE has Adyen-class margins (35% vs 47%) but PayPal-class growth (16% vs 4%, 18% Adyen growth). The 32× P/E sits between PayPal's 14× (where margins and growth are both lower) and Adyen's 47× (where both are higher). This is consistent — but it means WISE has very little room for either margins or growth to disappoint.
K. Fair value — bear / base / bull
The provider Fair Value model is unavailable for this file; we anchor instead on three independent paths and report the range.
The "bear" case is what happens if the rate cycle reverses and the market re-anchors WISE's multiple to underlying-FCF rather than reported EPS — a fair worry given that interest-on-customer-balances is doing a lot of the operating-margin work. The "bull" case requires the FY2024–25 margin level to hold and revenue growth to re-accelerate above 20% as new corridors and Wise Business mature.
The single chart that explains the price most: the half-yearly growth chart in section D. Every multiple expansion thesis requires that growth line to bend back up. Every multiple contraction risk runs through that same line bending further down.
What the numbers say
The numbers confirm that Wise has crossed the chasm into a real business: the gross-margin uplift is durable (price-led, not just rate-led), the equity base is compounding at ~45%, and underlying FCF conversion is clean. They contradict the popular "compounder at scale" framing — half of recent operating-margin expansion is interest income on customer balances, and revenue growth has decelerated from +82% (H2 FY23) to +9% (H1 FY26), a steeper drop than the consensus narrative implies. The single thing to watch into FY2026 results is the disclosure split between cross-border take-rate revenue and interest income on balances; if the former is growing in mid-teens with stable take-rate, the multiple is defensible — if it slips into single digits while rates fall, the 32× P/E rerates down before anything else fixes it.