Dave Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Dave's financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31st, 2024. Today, we are joined with Dave's CEO, Mr. Jason Wilk, and the company's CFO, Mr. Kyle Baumann. By now, everyone should have access to the fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings press release, which was issued yesterday afternoon. The release is available in the investor relations section of Dave's website at investors.dave.com. In addition, this call will be available for webcast replay on the company's website. Following management remarks, we'll open the call to answer your questions. Certain comments made during this conference call and webcast are considered forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to certain known and unknown risks and uncertainties as well as assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected in these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are also subject to other risks and uncertainties that are described from time to time in the company's filings with the SEC. Do not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements which are being made only as of the date of this call. Except as required by law, the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements. The company's presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, non-GAAP variable profit and non-GAAP variable margin as supplemental measures of performance of our business. All non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation charge and other important information in the earnings press release inform 8K furnished to the SEC. I would now like to turn the call over to Dave's CEO, Mr. Jason Wolk, Please begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. I'm excited to share that we closed out 2024 with a record-setting fourth quarter, delivering another period of exceptional growth and profitability. This quarter marked a significant milestone for Dave, as we surpassed both $100 million in quarterly revenue, as well as more than $30 million of quarterly adjusted EBITDA for the first time, capping off a year of strong execution and outperformance. As we entered 2024, we had high expectations, and I'm proud to say that we not only surpassed our original guidance from last year, but also exceeded the updated guidance provided in Q1, Q2, and Q3. This outperformance was driven by strength across all key areas of our business. Multi-transacting member, or MTM, growth remained strong, supported by stable CACs and enhanced member retention, demonstrating the efficiency of our acquisition model and the product market fit we continue to achieve. ARPU exceeded expectations as well, fueled by expanding average extra cash sizes and improved engagement in day banking. Credit performance also improved throughout the year. With our V5 cash AI underwriting model, better separating risk is our extra cash portfolio scale. When taking all this together with our discipline on fixed costs, which declined in 2024 compared to 2023, we drove another year of significant operating leverage and our first full year of profitability since 2019. This strong performance continues to underscore the scalability of our model, the value we provide to millions of Americans, and sets the stage for what we believe will be another year of record performance in 2025. I also want to share the optimism we have regarding our transition to the new fee structure for extra cash. The new structure is a simple 5% fee on all extra cash transactions with a $5 minimum and a $15 cap with no additional transfer fees at Dave Checking. This replaces our optional fee model, which allowed members to access credit for as little as $0 per transaction and included optional tips, which are no longer part of the experience. We're confident that this new fee model creates better alignment between us and our members as the more durable monetization allows us to expand credit access through higher limits and unlock further product optionality for us moving forward. Through our testing, we observed favorable conversion, retention, and monetization trends for new and existing members. delivering both business and member wins. Given these results, we completed our transition with our previously disclosed early 2025 timeline, and as of February 19th, we're fully migrated to the new fee model. These product improvements are aligned to our mission to level the financial playing field, and we believe will be welcomed by all stakeholders, including members, investors, and regulators. Turning to our growth strategy, I'd like to provide an update on our three strategic pillars, acquiring new members efficiently, engaging them through extra cash, and deepening those relationships through the day-to-day card experience. We continued to efficiently acquire members at scale, reflecting the power of our credit-first value proposition and its synergies with our banking product suite. In Q4, member acquisition grew 12% year-over-year based on 26% higher marketing spend, which was partially offset by a 12% increase in CAC at these higher levels of investments. We increased marketing spend given the more significant investment returns we are generating as a result of monetization improvements, which can be observed in our MTM ARPU, which expanded a double-digit year-over-year rate for the past six quarters. Our returns remain strong, and with the added monetization from the new fee model, we believe that we can sustain favorable returns at higher potential tax in the future, adding to the scalability of our growth engines. Given these facts, we plan to moderately expand marketing investment throughout the 2025 period while maintaining a disciplined focus on investment returns in order to further drive profitable growth. Our second strategic pillar centers around continuing to strengthen engagement with our MTMs. Extra cash remains the key entry point for building long-term relationships for our members by addressing what is typically their primary need, short-term liquidity for gas, groceries, and bills. MTMs rose 17% year-over-year in Q4 to $2.5 million based on the new member acquisition growth I mentioned a moment ago, in addition to continued enhancements to new member conversion and retention. In Q4, extra cash originations reached a record $1.5 billion, up 44% year-over-year and 9% quarter-over-quarter. Even with the $1.5 billion in extra cash originations in Q4, our net receivables balance was just $176 million at quarter-end, further highlighting the capital-efficient nature of our balance sheet. As we progress through the first quarter, we anticipate the typical seasonal impact as tax refunds provide important liquidity for our members, reducing their need for extra cash. This growth in originations was fueled by greater MTMs, average extra cash size, and the number of disbursements taken per MTM. Average extra cash size grew 17% year over year as a result of two factors. First, this is the early impact for our new fee structure, which we began rolling out in Q4. Second is the impact of our V5 cash AI underwriting model, which we implemented last spring. Both of these factors allow us to offer higher extra cash approval amounts to our members, which provides the additional benefit of supporting member conversion and retention. We plan to continue to optimize cash AI in order to further enhance the extra cash experience for our members. Moving to extra cash performance, our Cash AI underwriting engine allows us to enhance credit access for our members while continuing to improve credit performance. In Q4, Cash AI drove a 53 basis point or 24% year-over-year improvement in the 28-day delinquency rate. Our 28-day delinquency rate is a reliable leading indicator for our 121-day charge-off rate, which improved 65 basis points or 32% on a year-over-year basis to 1.38% for the most recently available quarterly vintage. Credit performance has steadily improved over several years, even as subprime credit card delinquencies have worsened beyond pre-pandemic levels. This divergence highlights the strength of our proprietary Cash AI underwriting model, which leverages real-time bank account transaction data rather than lagging FICO scores. Unlike subprime credit cards, which rely on an initial underwriting decision for long-duration credit exposure, Extra Cash's short-term nature allows it to continuously reevaluate customer risk with each transaction. With over 125 million originations to date, this high-frequency, fully automated underwriting approach has enabled superior credit risk separation and ongoing optimization, positioning Extra Cash as a structurally advantaged product to successfully navigate various economic backdrops. Additionally, as we've improved member retention, the average tenure of our MTMs has increased. In Q4, the average tenure of an MTM was over 19 months, up 22% from Q4 2022. This important dynamic is worth underscoring. Credit performance typically improves as MTM season on our platform, which should support ongoing strength in credit performance as we continue to scale the business. The third and final pillar of our growth strategy focuses on deepening member relationships by enhancing engagement with the day of cart. Our strategy leverages the power of our market meeting extra cash offering to build deeper long-term banking relationships with our members. In Q4, Dave card engagement continued to grow with spending up 24% year-over-year to $457 million, driven by a combination of strong growth in banking active customers as well as card spend per banking active customer. Extra cash remains a key driver of trialing the Dave card as customers have instant access to their funds versus transferring money out to external accounts. There are also no additional fees for sending extra cash to the Dave card in our new fee model. We plan to further increase our focus on debit card adoption this year with new product initiatives as the LTV benefits of customers who use both the card and extra cash are meaningful. Between the continued momentum we are seeing in extra cash and demand for the day of card, we generated another quarter of double-digit ARPU expansion, which was up 18% year-over-year. This is our sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit ARPU expansion on a year-over-year basis, given the progress we've made increasing extra cash disbursement amounts which was up 17% year-over-year and 4% sequentially in Q4. With our new fee model structure fully implemented last month, we anticipate further ARPU expansion in 2025. Before I provide my closing remarks and turn it over to Kyle, I want to provide an update on two other important topics. First, as we announced yesterday, we finalized our new strategic partnership with Coastal Community Bank, one of the most highly respected sponsor banks in the FinTech ecosystem. This new partnership will enable Dave to leverage Coastal's scale experience and strong compliance and risk management capabilities to sponsor our extra cash and banking products. We believe the partnership will also strengthen our position to launch next generation products that support Dave's mission of leveling the financial playing field for everyday Americans. Next, I want to briefly touch on the litigation originally filed by the Federal Trade Commission on November 5th, 2024, and then refer to the Department of Justice, which filed an amended complaint on December 30th, 2024. On February 28, we filed our motion to dismiss the lawsuit, outlining what we believe to be the technical deficiencies in the amended complaint. We expect a ruling on this motion as early as Q2 of this year. We remain confident in our legal position and are prepared to vigorously defend ourselves throughout the legal process. The lawsuit does not challenge our business model, but rather focuses on consumer disclosures and the process for obtaining consent for associated fees. While we strongly believe we have always operated within the law, we have implemented product changes that aim to improve member experience while addressing the areas in the DOJ amended complaint that relate to consumer disclosure and consent. Moving on, it should be clear that our strategic focus on expanding access to extra cash through product and underwriting enhancements, increasing wallet share of our members with DaveCard, and growing our member base has positioned us well for continued growth and profitability over the coming years. We're proud of the strong execution from our team and the meaningful product improvements we've implemented to increase member value and engagement, leading to higher ARPU and lifetime value while remaining disciplined on cost. As we enter 2025, we are building on a foundation of record-breaking performance, strong operational momentum, and a clear roadmap for continued growth. Kyle will walk through our financial guidance in a moment, reflecting our expectations to deliver another record year of revenue and profitability. Thank you again to our team for their dedication and execution and our investors for their continued support. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kyle to take you through our financial results. Kyle.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. As Jason highlighted, our fourth quarter and full year 2024 results set new record highs across nearly all metrics, reflecting the strength of our business and the impact of our continued focus on enhancing our members' experience. Our record MTM performance underscores the increasing value we're delivering to members, while our disciplined approach to operations has driven meaningful operating leverage, further expanding profitability. Today, I'm happy to walk through our Q4 and full year highlights, discuss the key drivers behind our results, and share our outlook for 2025. Turning to the fourth quarter, total revenue reached $100.9 million, a 38% increase year over year. This strong performance was driven by 17% growth in MTMs and an 18% increase in ARPU, reflecting increased engagement and monetization from both Extra Cash and the Dave Card. As Jason highlighted, our disciplined approach to member acquisition has amplified the impact of our marketing investments, driving a 12% year-over-year increase in new members while maintaining our focus on MTM conversion and retention. The ARPU increase was fueled by higher engagement and monetization of Extra Cash, supported by cash AI optimization, as well as stronger DaveCard adoption and higher levels of card spend. We believe that our product roadmap across Extra Cash and DaveCard will continue to drive ARPU expansion this year. During the fourth quarter, our non-GAAP variable profit increased 58% year over year to $72.6 million, a 72% margin relative to total revenue, a new all-time high. Our sustained improvements in variable margin have been driven by lower provision expense as a percentage of revenue, reflecting significant improvements in credit performance powered by Cash AI. These enhancements have allowed us to improve loss rates while increasing revenue per extra cash origination. Additionally, we benefited from ongoing optimization of payment processing costs and favorable renegotiations of key vendor contracts that were fully realized in the fourth quarter. As I'll describe in more detail in a moment, we incurred a one-time benefit in our processing costs. Excluding this impact, our non-GAAP variable profit and variable margin would have been 71.3 million and 71% respectively. Now turning to operating expenses. Our provision for credit losses increased 15% year-over-year to $16.6 million from $14.5 million due largely to higher origination volumes, which increased 44% over that time period, partially offset by our improved credit performance. As a percentage of extra cash originations, our provision for credit losses fell to 1.12% in the quarter from 1.41% in Q4 last year. We believe this underscores Cash AI's enhanced ability to better predict credit risk by incorporating additional model variables and leveraging data from the over 125 million unique extra cash transactions we've originated since inception. On a sequential basis, while our 28-day delinquency rate improved by 12 basis points, or 6% in Q4, our loss provision as a percentage of extra cash originations increased from 1.01% in Q3 to 1.12% in Q4 as a result of the calendar dynamics related to quarter end, which we've highlighted in prior calls. Q4 ended on a Tuesday, which is typically the intra-week peak for receivables balances. As a result, our increased receivables balance drove an increase in allowance for credit losses and an increased loss provision. With respect to seasonality, we typically experience the lowest delinquency and loss rates during the first quarter, given the additional liquidity that tax refunds provide to our members. Thus far, credit performance in Q1 has been strong and aligns with our seasonal expectations. Processing and servicing costs in Q4 decreased 16% year-over-year to $6.3 million, compared to $7.5 million in the year-ago period. Included in these costs is a one-time rebate benefit associated with a successful vendor renegotiation. Excluding this one-time benefit, processing and servicing costs in Q4 decreased 2% year over year to $7.3 million. As a percentage of origination volume, these costs, excluding the aforementioned benefit, improved to 0.5% from 0.7% in the year-ago period as we benefited from a full quarter impact of two vendor contracts, which were renegotiated in Q3 of last year. During Q4, advertising and marketing costs increased 25% to $12.6 million, up from $10 million in the prior year period, reflecting our stronger appetite to invest based on the conversion, retention, and unit monetization improvements we've achieved. As Jason mentioned, we plan to moderately expand marketing spend in a disciplined manner throughout 2025 to further take advantage of the stronger LTV to CAC returns we're generating. We believe this approach will result in the greatest amount of profit dollars and value creation, even if it results in slightly higher CACs. In terms of compensation and headcount, our compensation related expenses grew to 27.2 million in Q4 from 23.5 million in the prior year period due largely to an increase in stock-based compensation related to certain performance-based restricted stock units during the quarter. The specific impact related to these awards in Q4, which were tied to the achievement of certain adjusted EBITDA targets, was 3.8 million. Excluding stock-based compensation expense, compensation and benefits increased by 1% year-over-year and on a percentage of revenue basis decreased to 17% from 23% in Q4 of last year, further highlighting the operating leverage that we're achieving. Other operating expenses increased 9% to $17.2 million in the fourth quarter from $15.8 million in the year-ago period, primarily due to amortization expense related to the change in useful lives of certain intangible assets in addition to legal fees incurred related to the FTC and DOJ litigation. As a percentage of revenue, other operating expenses declined to 17% of revenue in the quarter, down from 22% in the same period last year. GAAP net income improved to $16.8 million, an improvement of $16.6 million versus Q4 of last year. Adjusted net income, which excludes stock-based compensation, as well as changes in fair value to certain non-cash liabilities, was $29.6 million in Q4. compared to $6.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2023. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $33.4 million. Excluding the one-time benefit and processing and servicing costs I mentioned a moment ago, adjusted EBITDA for Q4 was $32.3 million, which is over 3x compared to the $10 million that we generated in the same period last year. The step change in profitability was driven by revenue growth, variable margin expansion, and improved operating leverage on our fixed cost base. Through consistent execution, we have achieved adjusted EBITDA profitability for five consecutive quarters with a 35% sequential increase relative to Q3. Looking ahead, we expect continued adjusted EBITDA profitability, although the growth trajectory may be uneven as we plan to strategically allocate marketing investments based on the returns that we're generating and as we make modest and highly disciplined investments in product development, data, and marketing capabilities that are expected to come online in mid-2025. Turning to the balance sheet, as of quarter end, we had approximately 91.9 million of cash and cash equivalents, restricted cash, and other highly liquid securities compared to 76.7 million as of the end of Q3. The increase was primarily attributable to free cash flow generation, offset by an increase in the extra cash receivables balance. The amount drawn on our credit facility remained at 75 million as of the end of the year, as we continue to rely on our own balance sheet cash to fund extra cash originations versus funding externally. At quarter end, we had 75 million of undrawn capacity on our credit facility, bringing our total liquidity to nearly 167 million. Last week, As part of our RSU releases under our incentive compensation plan, we performed a net settlement of the related tax withholding obligation. Specifically, we withheld shares corresponding to the payroll tax liability and used approximately 14.5 million of balance sheet cash to make the required tax payments related to the awards. This transaction effectively reduced the number of shares that would have otherwise been sold in the market to cover employee tax obligations by approximately 132,000 shares, thereby mitigating dilution. We believe our stock remains undervalued in light of our strong performance in 2024 and promising prospects for 2025 and beyond. And as such, this transaction represented an attractive capital allocation opportunity. Moving forward, we will continue to evaluate net settlement transactions as an effective means to manage dilution and optimize our returns on capital. And now, to turn to our guidance. For full year 2025, we expect GAAP revenue to range between 415 and 435 million, reflecting growth of 20 to 25% compared to 2024. We also expect adjusted EBITDA to range between 110 million and 120 million, representing approximately 27% to 39% growth relative to 2024. Our 2025 outlook reflects the strong momentum in our business and our ongoing commitment to driving sustainable and profitable growth. Our focus remains on expanding ARPU and member lifetime value through further engagements and enhancements to our extra cash and DaveCard offerings, as well as building next generation products that supports Dave's mission of leveling the financial playing field for everyday Americans. Between our growth trajectory, strong variable margins, and fixed expense discipline, We expect to drive another year of record performance in 2025. And with that, we can now open up the line for questions.