Wise has filed to list its shares on Nasdaq as its primary venue while maintaining a secondary listing on the London Stock Exchange – and it’s doing it from a position of true strength.
The primary listing moves from London to the US in May 2026, with Wise’s most recent fiscal year showing net revenue of approximately $2.5 billion, up 19% year on year. For a company that listed on the LSE in 2021 as one of London’s flagship tech IPOs, the move is a landmark moment. But it’s not a clean departure – Wise is relisting in London simultaneously, keeping a secondary listing on the LSE rather than abandoning it entirely.
The dual structure is where this gets interesting – and where the lessons for UK founders thinking about exits are most useful.
Why Nasdaq, And Why Now
The logic behind moving the primary listing to the US is simple – Nasdaq offers deeper liquidity, a larger, tech-fluent participant base, and the kind of valuation multiples that London has historically struggled to match for high-growth technology companies.
Wise processes hundreds of billions of dollars in cross-border payments annually and presents verifiable revenue growth to satisfy institutional investors. In that context, listing where the largest pools of capital actively seek that kind of story is a rational decision.
The governance structure accompanying the move is also notable. As reported by the Financial Times, Wise extended its dual-class share structure as part of the US listing, preserving enhanced voting rights for founders including CEO Kristo Käärmann for up to ten years.
The protection of founder control through a public markets transition is a conscious design choice, and one that US capital markets are considerably more comfortable accommodating than London has traditionally been.
What The London Secondary Listing Actually Signals
The decision to maintain a London secondary listing rather than delisting entirely says something about how Wise views its relationship with the UK market.
The move has been framed as simultaneously a blow to London’s capital market ambitions and a pragmatic hedge: Nasdaq provides the primary liquidity and valuation engine, while the LSE secondary listing keeps Wise visible to European institutional investors, anchors the company’s identity as a UK-born business and maintains the brand presence in a market where it has significant customer and talent relationships.
The dual-listing structure isn’t a consolation prize for London. It’s a signal that London remains useful – for marketing, for European investor access, for talent branding – even when it’s no longer the primary capital markets venue. That’s a subtler and more nuanced position than the headline “London loses another fintech” framing suggests.
The Playbook For Founders
Wise’s path serves as a pragmatic model for the ambitious UK fintech founders navigating the London versus New York question.
Traditionally, this is viewed as an either/or scenario: list in London and accept lower valuations and shallower liquidity, or list in New York and largely sever ties with the UK market. Wise’s move suggests a third option is now viable – use Nasdaq as the primary capital-markets anchor and maintain London as a secondary listing that serves European investors and preserves domestic brand presence.
The timing is calculated. Wise is making this move at a point of firm footed financial strength, with revenue growing and the business operating at scale. For earlier-stage companies watching this, the lesson is less about the dual-listing mechanism and more about the underlying principle: build the business strong enough that both markets want you, then structure the listing to capture both.
The shareholders approved the move, though not without some dissent from co-founders and early investors concerned about governance and dilution. The extended dual-class structure, protecting founder voting rights for a decade, was part of how that tension was managed.
For founders thinking about the long game, that governance design is as instructive as the listing geography.
