Wise’s primary listing leaves London for the Nasdaq Composite on 11 May, after the High Court sanctioned the scheme of arrangement that pulls one of the City’s most-watched fintech tickers across the Atlantic. The cross-border payments group will keep a secondary listing in London and remain headquartered in the UK, but the tape that sets the share price — and the index funds that follow it — will from this month run out of New York.
Justice Hildyard’s order at the Companies Court completes a process Wise’s shareholders backed in July 2025, when an overwhelming majority approved both the listing transfer and an extension of chief executive Kristo Käärmann’s Class B supervoting rights. The judge sanctioning the scheme described the governance “sub-plot” — a public objection from co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, through his Skaala Investments vehicle — as “uncomfortable”, but allowed the scheme to proceed on the basis that boardroom unanimity and the shareholder majority spoke for themselves. The scheme becomes effective on 8 May, with Wise’s ordinary shares migrating to a Nasdaq primary line three trading days later.
The numbers Wise takes to New York
Wise is not arriving on Nasdaq as a story stock. Its 13 April Q4 trading update gave the City the cleanest read it has had in two years on a fintech that has spent its public life debating whether the model truly compounds. Quarterly underlying income of £435.3m printed up 24% year on year, on cross-border volumes of £49.4bn (up 26%) and a personal active-customer base of 11.3m (up 22%). The full-year picture is similarly composed: £1.61bn of underlying income on 18% growth, £181.7bn of cross-border volume, 18.9m active customers and a take rate that has drifted gently — by Käärmann’s deliberate design — to 51 basis points from 53 a year earlier. Wise Account customer balances now stand at £29.4bn, a 37% rise that is increasingly the structural growth story rather than the headline transfer line.
Käärmann’s pitch to US investors will lean on infrastructure milestones the UK book has been quietly stacking through the year: Payments Canada membership, a UK current account launch, and the slow build-out of direct connections into national clearing systems that he frames as the company’s real moat. The numbers say the model still compounds. They do not say London should be sanguine about losing the listing.
What London is losing — and what it isn’t
The City’s near-term consolation is that London Stock Exchange Group itself is having a bumper start to 2026. LSEG’s Q1 trading update, published on 23 April, recorded total income of £2,415m, up 9.8% year on year, with the Markets division up 15.5% and more than 150 customers connected to or onboarding the company’s new MCP server for AI-ready data distribution. The plc has rarely looked stronger. Smaller candles also keep flickering — Israeli broker iFOREX completed a Main Market admission this week at a £43.3m valuation under the ticker IFRX, and a handful of energy and biotech names remain in the AIM pipeline.
But Wise is the listing London cannot easily afford to lose without a follow-up answer. Its market value comfortably exceeds the combined capitalisation of the past two years’ worth of London tech IPO debutants, and Revolut, Monzo and Starling are all watching the venue debate with quiet interest. The Treasury’s listings-reform package — building on the FCA’s December 2024 listing rules overhaul and the Mansion House Compact’s pension-capital plumbing — still has time to land before any of those firms make their own choice. After 11 May, it has rather less.
For Käärmann, who keeps his supervoting rights and his London office, the calculus is less about leaving and more about being properly priced. For the City, the harder question is whether a venue that has just printed a record quarter for the exchange operator can also keep the companies that exchange operator most needs to list.
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