With CEO Under Cloud, Wise Reports Revenue Growth, ‘Business as Usual’

It’s been a mixed couple of days for Wise. Following Monday’s (June 27) news that the company’s co-founder and CEO, Kristo Käärmann, had been named as a tax defaulter by U.K. tax authority HM Revenue and Customs, Wise reported strong revenue and insisted that it was “business as usual.”

According to a Financial Times report Tuesday (June 28), Wise revenues had increased by a third in the year to March 31. This is the first year the business has had to release its earnings, having listed publicly for the first time in 2021.

By the close of the tax year, the company reported total revenues of £559.9 million ($682.6 million), amounting to a 33% increase from the previous year. Profit before tax increased by 7% to £43.9 million.

Wise has been one of the U.K.’s most high-profile FinTech companies and was valued at £8 billion upon its initial public offering (IPO). Käärmann, who founded the company alongside fellow Estonian businessman Taavet Hinrikus in 2010, owns around a fifth of all Wise shares.

“This year we’ve seen volume growth but also we’ve launched new products and new markets, and nearly half our payments are instant,” Wise’s Chief Financial Officer Matt Briers said, per the report.

Wise, which was formerly known as Transferwise, provides cross-border transfer services to consumers and businesses. The company recorded a 40% increase in cross-currency transactions in the year to March, bringing the total value of the transactions to £76.4 billion.

Having seen its initial success drawing largely from European and U.S. users, Wise has expanded aggressively into new markets.

Much of the company’s recent international growth stems from extending the service it offers into new countries and adding new currencies. However, the company has also increasingly partnered with banks and financial institutions to integrate the Wise platform into their own cross-border money transfer services.

When PYMNTS spoke to Steve Naudé, head of product, Wise Platform, he said that better cross-border infrastructure will require collaboration across the payments industry.

Read more: Lackluster Rollout of SEPA Instant Stymies EU Payment System Success, Says Wise Product Chief

In the European context, he highlighted the slow rollout of SEPA Instant and IBAN discrimination as two things that continue to hamper progress.