The Greatest Investment of the Next Decade?

The next Amazon is here

Truly great companies are incredibly rare. Businesses like Amazon, Costco, or Home Depot. They changed their industries and created enormous wealth for investors.

What did they have in common? A fanatical dedication to their customers. An unwavering drive to be the best, the cheapest, and the most innovative. They were led by visionary founders who built a culture of excellence from the top down.

This article is about a company that shares this same DNA. It is using these timeless principles to disrupt a global industry of immense scale, creating an extraordinary opportunity for those who see its potential. This British-born company has the potential to become the continent's first trillion-dollar enterprise. This could provide visionary investors with an amazing investment opportunity and truly transformative returns.

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A Modern Playbook for Global Disruption

The company poised to embark on this remarkable journey is Wise PLC. Its birth, like many great disruptive ventures, was not in a boardroom strategising market capture, but from the personal frustration of its founders. Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus, two Estonians working and living internationally, experienced firsthand the opaque fees and infuriating delays that characterised traditional international money transfers. This shared grievance prompted them to ask: what if sending money across borders could be as simple, cheap, and transparent as sending an email? This fundamental questioning of the status quo, and the subsequent drive to build a solution from the ground up, echoes the customer-first principles championed by legendary business builders like Costco's Jim Sinegal, who relentlessly focused on delivering value, or Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who prioritised long term growth and customer experience over short term profits.

Bezos, in Amazon's early days, famously sketched out a virtuous cycle, a growth flywheel. It began with lower prices leading to increased customer visits. More customers attracted more third-party sellers, which expanded the selection and convenience. This, in turn, fuelled a larger, more efficient operation, allowing Amazon to lower prices further, spinning the flywheel faster and faster, creating an ever-widening competitive moat.

Amazon Flywheel

Wise operates on an uncannily similar dynamic. By relentlessly driving down the cost of transfers, improving speed, and offering radical transparency, they attract more customers. This growing volume allows Wise to negotiate better terms with banking partners and achieve greater operational efficiencies through its infrastructure. Crucially, these savings are then passed back to the customer in the form of even lower fees and an improved service. This creates a powerful, self-reinforcing loop: lower prices attract more users, more users create more volume, more volume allows for even lower prices and a better service, which in turn attracts yet more users. It is a playbook that systematically dismantles the high-margin, low-innovation model of incumbent banks, building not just a company, but a new standard for how money should move around the world.

This commitment to the customer and the relentless pursuit of efficiency is not merely a marketing slogan for Wise; it is the core of their strategy, deeply embedded in their operational DNA by founders who, like Bezos, understood that true competitive advantage is built by consistently delivering superior value.

The Wise Flywheel

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A New Global Standard

In the following section, each paragraph will end with a recent quote from CEO, Kristo Käärmann that gives a sense of scale and opportunity that Wise is addressing.

The story of Wise begins, as many innovative solutions do, with profound dissatisfaction. In the late 2000s, Estonians Taavet Hinrikus (Skype’s first employee) and Kristo Käärmann found themselves on opposite sides of a common currency conundrum. Taavet, paid in euros from Estonia but needed pounds in London. While Kristo, working in London and paying in pounds, needed to send money back to Estonia to cover a mortgage. They incurred hefty bank charges on both sides. They realised the absurdity: their needs were complementary, yet traditional banking channels forced them both through expensive, opaque processes. Their elegant, personal solution bypassed the banks entirely and saved them a considerable sum. It involved checking the mid-market rate, Hinrikus putting euros into Käärmann's Estonian account, and Käärmann putting an equivalent amount of pounds into Hinrikus's UK account. This peer-to-peer insight was the seed from which Wise grew, with a mission to make international money transfers cheap, fair, and simple for everyone.

“…cross-border payments already add up to £32 trillion moved across borders each year”

To truly appreciate the revolutionary nature of Wise's approach, one must first understand the archaic system it seeks to replace: the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT. Established in the 1970s, SWIFT itself does not move money. Instead, it is a messaging system that provides standardised codes for financial institutions to communicate securely about fund transfers. When you send money internationally via your bank, your bank sends a SWIFT message to the recipient's bank. However, if your bank and the recipient's bank do not have a direct relationship, the payment must hopscotch through a series of intermediary banks. Each bank in this chain can add its own fees and can take its own time to process the transaction. The result? Transfers that can take anywhere from two to five working days, sometimes longer. They are accompanied by costs that are often unpredictable, and bloated by hidden charges within the exchange rate mark ups and multiple handling fees. It is a system designed in a pre-internet era, clunky, inefficient, and demonstrably not fit for the fast paced, interconnected modern world.

“We’re working to handle trillions, not just billions, and become ‘the’ global network for the world’s money.”

Wise, by contrast, built an entirely new infrastructure from the ground up, designed for the digital age. The conceptual brilliance lies in its simplicity and elegance. Instead of routing money through the labyrinthine SWIFT network, Wise has established its own network of local bank accounts in countries around the world. When a customer in the UK wants to send pounds to someone in the United States to receive dollars, they pay their pounds into Wise’s UK bank account. Wise then instructs its US bank account to pay out the equivalent amount in dollars (calculated at the real, mid-market exchange rate) to the recipient’s US bank account. No money actually needs to cross a border in that specific transaction; it is a sophisticated system of internal reconciliations and local payments. This model circumvents correspondent banks and dramatically cuts processing times with a significant and growing percentage of transfers now arriving instantly or within the hour. It allows Wise to offer transparent and significantly lower fees that are often up to one tenth the cost of traditional banks for many currency routes.

“Our growth over the past year is a testament to the Wise team’s laser focus on our long-term goals.”

But Wise's ambition extends far beyond simply being a cheaper way to send money. Kristo Käärmann, now CEO, envisions Wise becoming "the international bank account for people and businesses". This is not mere hyperbole. The company has been methodically expanding its product suite to serve a wider range of financial needs. The Wise Account allows users to hold and convert money in dozens of currencies, complete with local bank details for receiving payments and a debit card for spending globally. Wise Business caters to the needs of companies, from sole traders to larger enterprises, offering batch payments, expense cards, and API integrations. Furthermore, Wise Platform allows other businesses, including banks and financial technology firms, to leverage Wise's infrastructure, effectively offering "Wise as a service". This platform approach is critical: it embeds Wise deeper into the financial ecosystem, creating network effects and high switching costs, thereby entrenching its competitive advantage. Each new user, whether personal or business, and each new platform partner, adds value to the entire network, making it more efficient and attractive.

“It’s clear that whoever builds the lowest-cost, highest-quality infrastructure will move the world’s money.”

The scale of the market Wise is addressing is almost difficult to comprehend. The total value of cross border payments runs into many tens of trillions of pounds annually and encompasses everything from individual remittances to large corporate transactions. Wise has already achieved impressive scale, processing over £145 billion in cross border volume in the last financial year for its 15.6 million active customers. Yet, its share of this colossal market remains in the low single digits. This signifies an enormous runway for growth. Wise is not just capturing market share from slow moving incumbents, but instead through its transparent and low-cost offering, it is arguably expanding the market itself by making previously prohibitive transactions viable. Its lead is not just in price and speed, but also in technology, brand trust built on transparency, and a singular focus that larger, diversified financial institutions struggle to replicate. This is not a company content with incremental gains; it is methodically building the global infrastructure for a new era of international finance, with decades of potential high growth ahead.

‘Our growth is fast and sustainable, with capital generation allowing us to comfortably reach our profitable medium-term targets and invest continuously towards the massive, long term opportunities still ahead of us.’

At its core, as I discussed on a recent podcast, this entire strategy hinges on a fundamental business philosophy that separates the truly great from the merely good. There are, I believe, two types of company in the world. The most common, by far, are those that constantly seek to maximise the amount they can charge their customers. They focus on margin expansion and optimising prices upwards. Intuitively, this sounds appealing to an investor, but these businesses live in a state of perpetual vulnerability, always at risk of being undercut by a leaner, more aggressive competitor. The much rarer, and ultimately superior, type of company is the one that relentlessly tries to minimise what it charges. By focusing on volume, efficiency, and giving value back to the customer, they build a model of trust and scale that high-margin incumbents simply cannot compete against without destroying their own profit models. Wise is the epitome of this second approach. This philosophical commitment to customer value is not just a moral stance; it is a strategic weapon, and it is the foundational principle that powers the company's growth engine.

‘Looking at the massive opportunities ahead of us, I am confident that our continued focus and disciplined, long-term oriented investments will only accelerate our path to become ‘the’ network for money around the world.’

The Wise Platform

The ultimate expression of this strategy, and the key to its near-absolute competitive advantage, is the Wise Platform. This is the part of the business that answers the crucial question: why can't other banks or financial technology firms simply replicate the Wise model? The answer is that Wise is now actively helping them to not have to. With the Wise Platform, other businesses can integrate Wise’s best-in-class payment infrastructure directly into their own services via an API. This means a traditional high-street bank or a modern neobank, rather than spending hundreds of millions and many years attempting to build its own global payment network, can simply 'plug in' to Wise and offer its customers instant, low-cost international transfers under its own brand.

This move is strategically brilliant. As I explored in a previous MoneyWeek article, it is analogous to the difference between train companies and the owner of the train tracks. Wise is not just running a train service; it is building and owning the essential tracks, signals, and stations of a new global financial railway. Now imagine a new set of tracks that allows a train operator to offer its customers a journey from London to Manchester that is not only instantaneous, instead of taking over two hours, but also costs just £25 instead of £250. Furthermore, imagine that £25 fee is set to decrease over time, not increase. For the train operator (the bank), the choice is simple: continue using the old, slow, expensive tracks, or switch to the new infrastructure to offer its customers a radically superior service. By allowing these other 'train operators' to run their services on its rails for a fee, Wise embeds itself as the fundamental infrastructure, gaining volume from its would-be competitors and making its network the undeniable industry standard.

No one can compete with super fast and free - so they won’t

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The Anatomy of Future Returns

When analysing a business of Wise's calibre and ambition, conventional valuation metrics can be misleading. The real value does not lie in the impressive profits reported today, but decades into the future, when the seeds of relentless investment and compounding growth truly begin to bear fruit. While the company's recent financial results are robust, they represent merely the early output of an engine still being built. Wise is channelling its resources back into the business at a formidable rate, committing to invest around £2 billion over the next two years to broaden its scale, enhance its infrastructure, and perfect the customer experience. This is not speculative spending; historically, the company's investments in its core platform have yielded exceptional returns, creating a more efficient, faster, and lower-cost service that fuels the flywheel.

Paradoxically, Wise is actually earning 'too much' money at the moment. A significant portion of its recent reported profit comes from interest earned on customer deposits, a windfall from higher global interest rates. Because of regulations, the company cannot yet pass all of this benefit back to its customers. Management is transparent about this, guiding the market to focus on its sustainable, long-term underlying pre-tax profit margin target of 13% to 16%. This demonstrates a laudable and rare discipline: a focus on building a permanent, structurally sound business model rather than maximising fleeting, cyclical profits. The core earnings power, driven by transaction fees, is what truly matters for the long-term thesis.

The potential for revenue expansion from this core business over the next two decades is immense. While the company guides for a strong 15% to 20% compound annual growth rate in the medium term, the increasing dominance of the Wise Platform suggests that even this may prove conservative. As the 'train tracks' of global finance become more entrenched, there is an argument that growth could even accelerate. This is no longer a theoretical concept. Major global financial institutions are now choosing to build on Wise's infrastructure rather than compete with it. Recent partnership wins with giants like Morgan Stanley, Standard Chartered, and Brazil's Itaú are testament to this. These banks are not just customers; they are a powerful endorsement that Wise is becoming the default network for modern international payments.

So, how does one value such a prospect? While we can never know what the next twenty years will bring, we can look for historical parallels. Consider that two decades ago, Amazon was viewed by many as little more than an online bookseller, yet it possessed the same foundational DNA: a visionary, customer-obsessed founder relentlessly building a platform for seemingly limitless growth. Wise, today, is in a similar position – already highly profitable and growing rapidly, yet only scratching the surface of its ultimate potential to become the global infrastructure for banking. For shareholders with the vision and patience to stay the course, the trajectory could be similar. Over the last twenty years, Amazon's stock has delivered a 11,500% return to its shareholders. It requires patience, but for those who understand the scale of the mission, Wise could deliver a truly life-changing level of investment return.

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Big Returns Might Come Soon

Wise’s current share structure creates a rare opportunity. Because of how it is set up, it is temporarily ineligible for major indices. That means many passive funds, which make up around 45% of the market, cannot buy it. This is a huge pool of capital that has yet to be tapped.

We believe a clear catalyst is coming in July 2026, when the current structure expires. At that point, Wise should become eligible for index inclusion. This would trigger large forced buying from tracker funds, alongside new demand from active managers who have so far been kept out. We see this as a major driver of returns.

That alone could be a strong tailwind. But there is more. In June 2025, Wise announced it would move its primary listing to the US, keeping a secondary one in the UK. This shift could open the door to US growth and tech investors who are more familiar with companies like Wise. UK investors often overlook potentially transformative businesses like this, but in the US they are better understood.

These changes could unlock a great deal of value in the near term.

Details of the share structure and the proposed changed to a US listing are in the Appendix.

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A Foundation for the Future

Wise is an incredibly special business. It is not just another promising growth stock, but a genuine contender to join the pantheon of truly great, category-defining enterprises. Its power lies in a simple yet profoundly effective flywheel: by relentlessly driving down costs and improving service for its customers, it builds a scale and a trust that becomes almost impossible for high-margin incumbents to challenge. Operating within a global market measured in the tens of trillions, its runway for growth is not just long; it is generational. This is a company methodically building the indispensable infrastructure for the future of global finance, and it has a very real possibility of one day becoming the first trillion-dollar company born in Europe. For shareholders with the foresight to recognise the scale of this mission, the rewards could be immense.

The blueprints for a trillion-dollar company are on the table; is it time to take a stake in the foundation?

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Disclaimer: The author of this Wonder Stocks Deep Dive owns shares in Wise.

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Appendix

1. Capital Structure: The Founder's Share and Index Exclusion

When Wise listed on the London Stock Exchange in July 2021, it did so with a dual-class share structure. This structure is common among founder-led technology companies, designed to protect the long-term vision of the business from short-term market pressures.

Specifically, while the publicly traded shares are Class A shares with one vote per share, a special Class B share was issued to its co-founder and CEO, Kristo Käärmann. This single "golden share" gives him significant voting power, far in excess of his direct economic interest, ensuring he retains control over the company's strategic direction.

However, this structure came with a significant trade-off in the UK market. The rules for inclusion in the FTSE UK Index Series (including the FTSE 100 and FTSE 250) require that companies on a premium listing adhere to a "one share, one vote" principle. Wise's dual-class structure automatically disqualified it from inclusion.

The consequence is that Wise has been excluded from the enormous and growing pool of capital allocated to passive investment funds. These funds, such as index trackers and ETFs, automatically buy shares in companies that are constituents of the indices they follow. By being ineligible for the FTSE indices, Wise misses out on this significant, non-discretionary source of demand for its shares, which can act as a structural headwind on its valuation relative to peers who are included.

Crucially, this founder control mechanism is not permanent. The enhanced voting rights attached to the Class B share are set to expire on the fifth anniversary of the company's listing, which will be in July 2026. At that point, the dual-class structure will collapse, and the company will revert to a standard one-share, one-vote system.

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2. The Strategic Shift: US Listing and Pathway to Inclusion

In early June 2025, Wise announced a significant strategic pivot: a plan to transfer its primary stock market listing to a US exchange, while maintaining a secondary listing in London. The company's stated rationale is compelling. The move is designed to:

• Increase the company's profile and brand awareness in the United States, which it identifies as its single largest and most important growth market.

• Gain access to the world's deepest and most liquid capital market, attracting a broader and more diverse pool of global investors, particularly those with a focus on high-growth technology firms.

• Achieve a stock valuation more in line with US-listed technology peers, which historically trade at higher multiples than their European counterparts.

This decision must be viewed in conjunction with the impending expiration of the founder's share in July 2026. The timing is critical. Once the dual-class share structure expires, the primary barrier to major index inclusion will be removed.

By moving its primary listing to the United States, Wise is positioning itself to become eligible for inclusion in the major US indices, most notably the S&P 500. A key requirement for S&P 500 inclusion is that a company must have its primary listing on a US exchange. Therefore, the move is a necessary precondition.

Upon the expiration of the golden share in mid-2026, assuming Wise meets the other S&P 500 criteria for profitability, market capitalisation, and liquidity, the company will be in a prime position for consideration. Inclusion in the S&P 500 would be a transformative event, instantly creating massive structural demand for its shares from the trillions of dollars in passive funds that track the index. This strategic repositioning, therefore, creates a clear and powerful potential catalyst for a significantly higher share price.