Wise (LSE: WISE) is a high-quality UK growth stock that listed in 2021. Unfortunately, its debut coincided with the end of the near-zero interest rate era — a shift that sent richly priced growth shares tumbling. Wise lost more than 60% of its value in 12 months!
However, since bottoming out at 311p in July 2022, the stock has surged 233% higher. And it hit a record recently, as more investors turn bullish on the fintech disruptor.
Could Wise stock head even higher over the next few years? I believe it can. Here’s why.
What does it do?
Wise specialises in international money transfers, believing that this should work without borders. In other words, money transfers should work the same internationally as easily as they do domestically.
In reality though, there’s still a lot of hassle when people and businesses move money across borders. SWIFT payments, for example, typically take a few working days to clear. Fees can be high and opaque.
Wise’s infrastructure and products aim to improve this clunky process with faster times and lower prices. Approximately 65% of transactions being done by Wise are now completed in under 20 seconds.
In the 12 months to 31 March, underlying income jumped 16% to £1.4bn, driven by customer growth, account adoption, and higher interest rates. Active customers grew 21% to 15.6m, more than doubling since 2021.
Moving trillions
There are a number of things I find attractive about Wise. Firstly, it’s going after a massive opportunity. Each year, individuals move around £3trn across borders, and Wise currently handles about 5% of that.
Then there are small businesses, where cross-border transfers total roughly £14trn annually. Wise’s share here is even smaller, but growing. Add in the enterprise and corporate segments, and the full opportunity balloons to around £32trn a year (yes, trillions!).
Now, most of this is not directly within Wise’s app ecosystem yet. But the company is building the infrastructure to theoretically move it all. It transferred around £145bn in its last financial year, but aims to one day move trillions and become “the network for the worldʼs money”.
To this end, the firm is linking more deeply into the payment systems of Brazil and Japan, while already handling around 12% of all global remittances to the Philippines. So its scale is only increasing.
Another thing I like here is that Wise is run by co-founder Kristo Käärmann. In my experience, the best growth stocks are often run by founders that sacrifice short-term profitability for long-term market share (think Jeff Bezos at Amazon).
In Wise’s case, the company is obsessed with lowering fees for customers as it scales. It recently dropped its cross-border take rate to 0.53%, from 0.67% the year before. And Wise intends to lower it further in future.
As Käärmann explains: “This strategy of continuously lowering our fees makes it harder for anyone to compete, and it will underwrite the long-term success and growth.”
The right ingredients
In the near term, there are risks relating to a global economic downturn. That could dampen transaction volumes, meaning fewer people and businesses send money abroad.
However, over the long term, I think this stock has all the ingredients to be a big winner. It’s currently trading at a reasonable valuation, making it well worth considering.
