The Business Decoupling—Why Remitly’s Slowdown is Actually a Wise Commercial
The End of the "Rising Tide" Era
For much of the last decade, the fintech thesis was simple: “Anything is better than a bank.” Investors poured capital into any app that offered a cleaner UI than Wells Fargo or a lower fee than Western Union. In that zero-interest-rate environment, Remitly and Wise were viewed as peers—two sides of the same disruption coin.
However, the fiscal data from 2025 has forced a decoupling. We are no longer looking at two variations of the same business; we are looking at two fundamentally different species of economic animal.
Remitly is a Service Business. It provides a fantastic, empathetic service to migrant workers, but it pays a high marginal cost for every dollar of revenue it generates. Its recent guidance for “high teens” revenue growth in 2026 suggests the law of large numbers is finally catching up to its paid acquisition model.
Wise is an Infrastructure Business. It has spent a decade digging tunnels under the global banking system. With 70% of its growth coming from word-of-mouth and a balance sheet that generates massive interest income, Wise has built an economic engine that gets more efficient as it scales, not less.
This report breaks down the unit economics, the infrastructure moats, and the strategic pivots that define this new reality.
1. The Unit Economics of “Gravity”
To understand the divergence, you have to look at the Cost of Acquisition (CAC). In the remittance game, CAC is gravity.
Remitly: The Paid Acquisition Treadmill Remitly is a marketing machine. In Q3 2025 alone, the company spent $79.3 million on marketing, which equates to roughly 22.5% of its total revenue. While this is an improvement from previous years, it reveals a structural vulnerability: Remitly effectively “rents” its growth.
The moment Remitly stops feeding the Google and Facebook ad auctions, its growth engine stalls. As they saturate their core corridors (like US-Mexico), they must hunt for customers in more expensive, lower-volume corridors. This creates a “CAC floor” that is hard to break through. The “high teens” growth guidance for 2026 is an admission that the hyper-growth phase of buying cheap users is over.
Wise: The Viral Anomaly Wise operates in defiance of standard fintech physics. In FY2025, approximately 70% of new customers joined via Word of Mouth (WoM) . This is the holy grail of consumer tech. It means Wise effectively pays zero dollars for the majority of its growth.
Because Wise doesn’t have to give 20%+ of its revenue to Mark Zuckerberg, it reinvests that cash into what it calls “Price Investments.” In Q4 FY2025, Wise drove its average cross-border take rate down to 0.53% (53 basis points). This creates a “virtuous circle of death” for competitors:
Wise lowers fees.
The product becomes undeniably better.
Customers evangelize the product (WoM).
Volume grows (£145.2 billion in FY25).
Unit costs drop due to scale.
Wise lowers fees again.
Remitly cannot mathematically compete with this loop because their margin is earmarked for ads; Wise’s margin is earmarked for price destruction.