Tag Archives: Fintech

Wise Plc – The “Costco of Currency transfers” ?

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Investment Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!

AI Disclaimer: This post has been written entirely “by hand”. I do use LLMs as a research assistant but not for generating any parts of this post.

Introduction:

Wise Plc has been on my to do list for some time. A long time ago, part of my professional duty was to monitor and execute (large) international payments and I was always perplexed how slow and cumbersome the process was even for large Financial Institutions. Back then we made the joke that it would be much faster to travel by plane with the cash in a suitcase instead of wiring it through the SWIFT system.

The final push to look deeper into it came when Wise moved into the “Top 10” of my newly created watchlist.

Initially I planned to write a shorter post as a couple of really good write-ups already exist (see appendix), but I had so much fun looking into Wise that I decided to give it the “full treatment” however with a stronger focus on business model, competition and uniqueness.

Here is “the full monty” in PDF form.

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Update Handelsbanken – HOLD

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Handelsbanken Update:

2018 was on the surface a solid year for Handelsbanken. According to the 2018 annual report, operating profit increased by +5% and net income by +8%, top line by +5%. ROE was 12,8% which is below my assumed 15% but still a remarkably good number for a large bank.

Just looking at the bottom line, the first quarter of Handelsbanken looks great:  Net income up +19%, operating profit up +18%. However top line only grew at +4% (vs. Q1 2018).

However this is solely a function of the fact that the bank reversed their provision into the Oktogonen pension fund for employees which they clearly state in the quarterly report:

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