MoneyHero Limited

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Money Hero Group's second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After this speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automatic message advising your hand is raised. Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I will now hand the conference over to your host, Chad Victoria, Strategic Finance Lead. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Livio. Hello, everyone. Very good morning, good evening, depending on where you are. My name is Chadwick Darai, and I am Strategic Finance Lead for Money Hero Group, overseeing our investor relations activities. We're excited to have you join us for Money Hero Group's second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Today, we have with us Rohit Murthy, our CEO, and Hao Tian, our CFO. Let's start with a few friendly reminders. First off, you can find detailed results in our earnings release located in the investor relations section of our website. Also, we are recording today's webcast. So don't worry if you miss anything. A replay and a transcript will be posted on our website under the investor relations section. A heads up during this call, we'll discuss some future projections and expectations for our business Keep in mind, these forward-looking statements are based on what we currently expect and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ. We also encourage you to look at our earnings release and SEC filings for a detailed discussion of these risk factors. Remember, these forward-looking statements reflect our views as of today and we are not obligated to update them unless required by law. Also, We'll talk about some non-IFRS financial measures today. For a reconciliation of non-IFRS financial measures to the most directly comparable IFRS metric, please see our earnings press release. And one last thing, all monetary references will be in USD unless we state otherwise. Shortly, Rohit and Hal will be discussing our Q2 performance and business strategy. With that, let me pass on the time to Rohit Murthy, CEO of Money Hero Group. Over to you, Rohit.

Thank you, Chad. Hi, everyone. Today, we share our performance update for the second quarter that ended June the 30th, 2024. As we also near the end of the third quarter, I'd like to provide some early guidance on our performance leading up to September 30th, 2024. Our core business online financial comparison grew by 26% year-on-year, and Creatory, our B2B business, grew by 13% YY. In our core markets, Singapore posted an impressive 68% YY growth to US $9 million, while Hong Kong grew 19% YY to $7.3 million. While we faced Some temporary setbacks in Philippines and Taiwan due to provider constraints, we have swiftly addressed these issues, and we are confident we'll be back on track in the upcoming quarters. Revenue from our insurance products increased by 89% YY to $2.2 million. Insurance now contributes 11% of our group revenue compared to 7% in the prior year. I think it's important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Focusing solely on quarterly results can sometimes mask the full scope of our performance and growth potential, which is much clearer when you view it from a long-term perspective. Here's what I mean by that. First, consider our first half 2024 results. We processed 970,000 banking and insurance applications through our platform. That's an impressive 100% YOY growth and nearly three times the volume of 2021. And yet our insurance engine is just getting started. I don't believe any other aggregator in the region has experienced growth at this scale. In anticipation of this, we built additional capacity and we made strategic investments that enabling us to outpace industry growth rates. Second, our industry is still in the very early stages of growth. We represent a small portion of the overall industry and there is substantial room for expansion and diversification ahead of us. Third, our strategy remains focused on growth, prioritizing long-term value over short-term profit optimization. While we could optimize for short-term profits in any given quarter, our priority remains focused on investing for future growth. And finally, efficiency gains are driving operational leverage, something I spoke about in the last two earning calls. And this will be even more impactful as we continue to scale. We're already seeing improvements across key areas of our business, from marketing to operations. Now, talking about our strategic pillars, we've made significant progress across each of our strategic pillars. Consumer pull, conversion expertise, insurance brokerage, partner relationships, and operating leverage. This quarter, we hosted Singapore's largest personal finance festival, drawing the record 5,000 attendees. We partnered with over 35 banking and insurance providers, and the event featured more than 70 prominent speakers from the financial industry and government. This marks our seventh consecutive year hosting this festival, and it was our largest and most successful event to date. I'm also pleased to share that we were recently named Personal Finance Tech of the Year at the Asia FinTech Awards 2024. Money Hero was selected from six finalists, which is a testament to our strong user connection, consumer pull, and technological superiority. This recognition underscores our market leadership across greater Southeast Asia and highlights the strong consumer demand and loyalty that continue to drive our sustained growth and success. An important thing to note is we are now pivoting from simply driving traffic growth to focusing on monetizable engagement metrics. This would include monthly unique visits to our transaction pages, conversions to applications, and registered members. This shift has resulted in a 50% increase in approved applications, with our membership rate now growing to 6.5 million as of June 30, 2024. We are now focused on driving strong repeat behavior supported by our cross-sell and upsell initiatives. In the coming quarters, we are also rolling out new capabilities to enhance engagement of our member base. These would include a mobile app, a new car insurance vertical, one-click insurance purchasing, and an improved site and content architecture. In the first half of 2024, we generated approximately $4 million in revenue from insurance products, representing 65% YOY growth. This is nearly four times our revenue from the same period in 2021, making this now our fastest growing vertical. As a licensed insurance broker in three of our four markets, we will continue to invest in this business. While insurance verticals typically have lower margins in the first year, simply due to the cost of acquiring users, these margins grow significantly through renewals. This is a high margin segment for us, and we will continue to make strategic investments focused on growth with profitability as a long-term outcome. Creatory, our B2B business, still relatively young, but has already demonstrated impressive growth. We are increasingly confident about our ability to scale this business across all our markets. The creator market holds significant potential, and we are investing in building a strong brand with the aim of becoming a market leader. We are also highly focused on building operating leverage for this business. With several actions and initiatives in place, to control our operating expenses and drive efficiency gains. We streamlined our headcount and operations, and we're investing in AI to further enhance efficiencies. As you may recall, we previously announced the addition of a head of AI, and since then, we've identified efficiency opportunities across various business functions. A couple of examples. You know, I could cite if we are now enhancing content production, creative production, we are exploring in a chatbot to automate our customer service capabilities, and also looking at AI to help us drive conversion rates on our transaction pages. Coupled with a disciplined approach to managing expenses, these efforts will keep our operating costs relatively fixed as we grow. allowing more of our top line growth to flow directly to the bottom line. As a result of this, we expect significantly lower EBITDA losses next quarter, reflecting the progress in building our operating leverage. And we are aiming for profitability in the last quarter. As part of our broad growth strategy, we continue to explore strategic M&A opportunities with a focus on market consolidation. Rather than competing head-on, we prioritize collaboration and investment. A recent example is our transaction in Malaysia, where we transitioned from being an operator to an investor in our competitor, demonstrating our ability to adapt and consolidate the market. Our acquisition of Seedly in Singapore also exemplifies this approach with the brand's thriving post-acquisition. We remain open to opportunities that provide synergies across data, technology, revenue expansion, and operational efficiency. We are more confident in our strategy and trajectory than we were three months ago, and I look forward to answering questions shortly after I hand over the call to our CFO Hao, Thank you all once again for your trust and support. With that, I would like to now turn the call over to Haotian, our CFO.