Italy to Stay on Path of Fiscal Prudence, Finance Minister Says
'The government confirms its serious and responsible attitude toward public accounts, while at the same time supporting investments' that can help boost growth, he said in Rome on Wednesday. The minister confirmed that the deficit will continue to shrink, and will land at 3.3% of economic output this year.
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1 top growth stock up 233% to consider buying in July
Wise (LSE: WISE) is a high-quality UK growth stock that listed in 2021. Unfortunately, its debut coincided with the end of the near-zero interest rate era — a shift that sent richly priced growth shares tumbling. Wise lost more than 60% of its value in 12 months! However, since bottoming out at 311p in July 2022, the stock has surged 233% higher. And it hit a record recently, as more investors turn bullish on the fintech disruptor. Could Wise stock head even higher over the next few years? I believe it can. Here's why. Wise specialises in international money transfers, believing that this should work without borders. In other words, money transfers should work the same internationally as easily as they do domestically. In reality though, there's still a lot of hassle when people and businesses move money across borders. SWIFT payments, for example, typically take a few working days to clear. Fees can be high and opaque. Wise's infrastructure and products aim to improve this clunky process with faster times and lower prices. Approximately 65% of transactions being done by Wise are now completed in under 20 seconds. In the 12 months to 31 March, underlying income jumped 16% to £1.4bn, driven by customer growth, account adoption, and higher interest rates. Active customers grew 21% to 15.6m, more than doubling since 2021. There are a number of things I find attractive about Wise. Firstly, it's going after a massive opportunity. Each year, individuals move around £3trn across borders, and Wise currently handles about 5% of that. Then there are small businesses, where cross-border transfers total roughly £14trn annually. Wise's share here is even smaller, but growing. Add in the enterprise and corporate segments, and the full opportunity balloons to around £32trn a year (yes, trillions!). Now, most of this is not directly within Wise's app ecosystem yet. But the company is building the infrastructure to theoretically move it all. It transferred around £145bn in its last financial year, but aims to one day move trillions and become 'the network for the worldʼs money'. To this end, the firm is linking more deeply into the payment systems of Brazil and Japan, while already handling around 12% of all global remittances to the Philippines. So its scale is only increasing. Another thing I like here is that Wise is run by co-founder Kristo Käärmann. In my experience, the best growth stocks are often run by founders that sacrifice short-term profitability for long-term market share (think Jeff Bezos at Amazon). In Wise's case, the company is obsessed with lowering fees for customers as it scales. It recently dropped its cross-border take rate to 0.53%, from 0.67% the year before. And Wise intends to lower it further in future. As Käärmann explains: 'This strategy of continuously lowering our fees makes it harder for anyone to compete, and it will underwrite the long-term success and growth.' In the near term, there are risks relating to a global economic downturn. That could dampen transaction volumes, meaning fewer people and businesses send money abroad. However, over the long term, I think this stock has all the ingredients to be a big winner. It's currently trading at a reasonable valuation, making it well worth considering. The post 1 top growth stock up 233% to consider buying in July appeared first on The Motley Fool UK. More reading 5 Stocks For Trying To Build Wealth After 50 One Top Growth Stock from the Motley Fool Ben McPoland has no position in any of the shares mentioned. The Motley Fool UK has recommended Wise Plc. Views expressed on the companies mentioned in this article are those of the writer and therefore may differ from the official recommendations we make in our subscription services such as Share Advisor, Hidden Winners and Pro. Here at The Motley Fool we believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. Motley Fool UK 2025
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How school run led CEO to 'coffee roulette' with staff and billion pound vision
Lyndon Stickley tries to 'scare a lot of people away' when he oversees first interviews for roles at cloud-accounting start-up iplicit. Yet Stickley, who bills himself as a go-to-market evangelist after successfully scaling and selling six previous companies, is far from your ruthless CEO. For the zest in which he describes his involvement with iplicit and why he won't be exiting a business for a seventh time – one of his previous projects includes London's largest graveyard – makes him a particularly charismatic leader. Hampshire-based Stickley is aiming to take the remote-first firm — he takes part in daily 'coffee roulette' mornings with employees — to unicorn status by 2030, by making it the "on-premises salvation" for mid-market businesses and their 'outdated' finance systems. Read More: Meet Britain's 'king of billboards' who sold his business for £1bn Launched in 2019, iplicit gained a top 20 place among UK firms in the FT1000 list of Europe's fastest growing businesses. Last year, the firm was one of the Sunday Times' medium business top places to work. So, to those job interviews. 'I say it might not be for you and tell them that this a place for really passionate, slightly unhinged mountain climbers,' says Stickley, who built and sold his first company, an ISDN tech firm, for £40m before turning 30. 'If you say we are off on a mountain climb which will take three months and you might lose a finger to frostbite but we will stick a flag at the top, we are looking at the one person who will lean in where the other 19 won't.' The fact he is even discussing iplicit's marketplace rise is, he says, down to luck. 'Happenstance has been the foundation of everything,' he adds. Stickley tells the story of how Ian Andrews, an engineer by heart, spent 20 years running a company called Concept Software and becoming one of the UK's leading implementation consultancies for the likes of Oracle. He had been introduced by a friend on the school run who said he should look at Andrews' accounting software business. Shortly afterwards, Andrews spent two hours explaining to Stickley about large scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) – an area in which the serial entrepreneur had no experience. Once vendors had concluded software deals, Andrews would place people on site for up to two years and charge hundreds of thousands of pounds for implementation work. 'It was a world that blew my mind,' says Stickley. 'After 20 years, he told me, he realised he was part of the machine that was stacked against the customer, who was also getting mugged rather than it being implemented out of the box,' Stickley recalls of their first meeting. Read More: The boss who has found 'nature's answer to plastic' 'He said to me that he decided to build a better system by investing £1.5m of family savings and a friend who did the same. They carved off some engineers and created an accounting solution [iplicit] which could be deployed in days and compile reports in hours not weeks, with low disruption.' Stickley asked how many customers iplicit had, to which Andrews replied none. It was, however, the start of an unlikely relationship, given that Stickley would usually have refrained from any reckless decisions in previous investments. Having promised his friend, Stickley made some calls and was told to give it a wide berth. One final network call to a co-founder of legacy finance firm Exchequer, who he knew over 20 years previously, changed the direction. After looking at the software, he was left enthused by its power and low touch. With Stickley investing £1m into Andrews' business, iplicit swelled to around 20 staff, went to market in 2019 and immediately started winning top accountancy awards they hadn't entered. Iplicit's plan had been how to overcome the issue of customers buying finance software off an unknown player in the market. COVID not only levelled the playing field, with video meetings and iplicit's shorter implementation times, but also propelled the appeal from mounting customers who had non-cloud system issues. Iplicit realised that it could serve 100,000 sites, often multi-company locations, with a 25% market share goal and a £500m a year business. 'We couldn't have possibly contrived that [accounting software giant] Sage would drop a royal ball and not have something for the vast majority of its base,' says Stickley. The industry had also taken notice. Stickley was told by Oystein Moan – the executive chairman of Visma who took the company to unicorn status – that iplicit was a multi-million pound opportunity in the UK alone. Last year, Moan and Nic Humphries, one of the biggest private equity players in the business-to-business software space, joined iplicit's advisory board. Read More: 'Why we set up a sustainable mobile operator to save people money' Stickley's entrepreneurial spirit had been gained from his father, who had a chicken farm at 16, ran a nightclub in his twenties and worked with artists like Lulu and the Rolling Stones. Aged 17, Stickley junior took Wednesdays off sixth form college to sell kitchenware at the local market, earning £200. At university, he ran five club nights across Portsmouth in the late 1980s before his penchant for scaling businesses. 'The worst and the best I have been involved in is the most human connected and impactful business,' Stickley says of Kemnal Park, which he describes as the UK's first cemetery to celebrate life and built for people to return. 'The 'thank yous' were non stop,' he says, 'when you can see week in, week out people come back and be inspired by the place where they have buried a loved one.' Stickley met Andrews as the former was leaving the cemetery business, with iplicit planning for two years before launch. From 2006 to 2022, Stickley worked part-time three days a week. He took the helm as CEO when he realised that the business wouldn't be sold and is now working as if 'back in my twenties'. The firm has one office in Poole, Dorset with 25 employees, and around 135 working remotely. Stickley says iplicit's growth has been down to lifting the barriers of geography and has U-turned on seeing recruitment agencies as 'the enemy'. 'Getting a good recruitment pipeline means you have talent on tap when you need it,' Stickley adds. 'There's no way you can grow fast like this and do the recruitment function as you can't afford mediocrity to creep into the camp.' Iplicit's goal, he says, is to become the de facto standard in the UK before any entrance into the US. It currently serves over 43,000 daily users in over 3,000 organisations. 'We have the best tech, team and trajectory and an advantage that no one else has in the market right now,' he adds. All thanks to that school run chat and Andrews being a few months shy of running out of money before meeting iplicit's future CEO. 'What doesn't make him bonkers is he didn't go bust, so now he's a genius, right? Because he really was," says Stickley. "But if it had gone bust, he was bonkers. It was a fine line.' Coffee roulette and remote-first You value the relationships more when you don't have them on a plate every day. We get together six times a year and we all hug across 150 people as we aren't in the office getting bored with each other. The video efficiency is unbelievable. I can have 15 meetings in a day and include coffee roulette in that, which was invented by one of our techies where a random name generator pairs two people to have 20 minutes together. I found it so insightful I now have around 25 coffee roulettes a month virtually across the country. It takes the drudge out of the work and makes meetings more concise. We don't recruit younger people typically; they deserve a right of passage in an office. We are heavily biased towards over 35s as we suit the young families and older, experienced employees and appeal to an audience who don't want to commute. We measure trust by measuring outputs, not by checking in on people. Read more: The life lesson behind a 335-year-old funeral business? 'Never sleep on an argument' Meet the company that finds 'must-haves' to make everyday life easier Impossibrew CEO says Dragons' Den failure sparked alcohol-free brand's rise
Yahoo
2 hours ago
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Why you should start planning for retirement in your 20s
Experts are urging people to start planning for retirement as early as their 20s. This may seem premature, but early planning is said to lead to greater financial security in later years. life insurance experts, alongside retirement finance specialists, have pinpointed how sensible savings habits and timely protections can contribute to a strong financial footing in the future. READ: Majority of savers unhappy with interest rate on savings accounts According to new data, buying life insurance in your 20s could save you up to £440 annually compared to starting a policy closer to retirement. Independent financial planning consultant, Asad Khan, was enlisted by to help people understand the steps to take at different life stages. Asad said: "Planning for retirement can be beneficial from the moment someone enters the workforce, around the age of 21, for example. "Starting early allows more time for pension contributions to potentially grow through compound returns and investment performance over the long term." READ: Experts share 5 mortgage myths, and one that's actually true Asad mapped out the key actions for each decade of life: In your 20s, join your workplace pension scheme, understand your employer's contributions and start consistent saving. In your 30s, increase your pension contributions, consolidate old pensions and set retirement goals. In your 40s, assess your retirement progress, review investment strategies and consider ISAs. In your 50s, prepare for income drawdown, reduce investment risk and finalise your retirement timeline, all while getting advice from an FCA-regulated financial adviser. Tom Vaughan, a life insurance expert at highlighted the lack of focus on protection at the retirement stage. READ: Calls for council pension fund to axe investments linked to military action in Gaza Tom said: "There's often a lot of focus on saving for retirement, but not enough thought goes into what protection looks like at that stage of life. "Retirement doesn't mean your financial responsibilities disappear, they just take a different shape. "That's where life insurance can still play a valuable role. It's not just for when you're raising a family or paying off a mortgage. "Including it in your later-life planning can help tie everything together, giving you a bit more clarity and your loved ones some added peace of mind." Explaining the cost-effectiveness of early life insurance purchases, Tom said the younger and healthier you are, the lower the risk is considered to be. As a result, buying a policy in your 20s is more cost-effective than purchasing one in your 60s. The average monthly premium for someone in their 20s is just £13.74 compared to £50.47 per month for those in their 60s. This is a difference of more than £440 annually. READ: HMRC to change some pensioners' tax codes to take back Winter Fuel Payments Tom said: "Crucially, getting in early doesn't just offer short-term savings. "Many life insurance policies come with fixed premiums, meaning once you've locked in a low monthly rate, it stays the same for the duration of the policy. "That long-term value is what makes early planning so worthwhile." Recent changes in UK pension policy also mean one should stay informed and regularly review their pension plans. Key policy updates include the value for money framework to improve workplace pension transparency and government plans to consolidate small pension pots.
