MoneyHero Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Money Hero Group first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you would need to press star 11 on your telephone, and you will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. And to withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would like now to turn the conference over to Gretchen Kwan, Corporate Communications Lead. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Money Hero's 2026 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. I am Gretchen Kwan, Corporate Communications Lead at Money Hero. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that today's call will include forward-looking statements which are inherently subject to risk and uncertainties and may not be realized in the future for various reasons as stated in our earnings press release which was issued earlier today and is also available on our investor relations website. In addition, please note that today's discussion will include both IFRS and non-IFRS financial measures for comparison purposes only. For reconciliations of these non-IFRS measures to the most directly comparable IFRS measure please refer to our earnings release and SDC filings. Lastly, a webcast replay and the script of this conference call will be available on our investor relations website. Joining me on the call today is Danny Leung, interim CEO and CFO who will go over our strategy, business update, operation highlights and financial performance for the first quarter of 2026. This will be followed by a Q&A section. With that, let me turn the call over to Danny.

Thank you, Gretchen. Good day, everyone. And thank you for joining us to discuss My Hero Group's first quarter 2026 financial results. When we closed out 2025, we signaled that our multi-year strategic turnaround was complete. Today, I'm very pleased to report that our first quarter 2026 results reflect continued progress towards sustainable, profitable scaling. While we deliver encouraging revenue growth and improved operating efficiency during the quarter. We remain highly focused on executing against our broader full year 2026 objectives while navigating a dynamic operating environment. We deliver total revenue of $16.5 million for the quarter, up a solid 15% year over year. More importantly, what stands out is the quality of that growth. Our discipline focus on optimizing unit economics have translated into meaningful operating efficiency gains and stronger monetization across our core markets and verticals. For the next few minutes, I want to take you on a deep dive into the mechanics of this performance. I'll walk you through our geographic markets, breakdowns of vertical product mix, highlight the structural leverage we are unlocking through our AI initiatives, and conclude with a review of our financial positions and capital allocation strategy. Let us begin with our geographic performance. Our strategy over the last year has been to ground our growth in the most mature high-yielding markets while optimizing emerging markets profitability rather than chasing low margin volume. This quarter, our performance was driven by our two core markets, Hong Kong and Singapore. which together accounted for over 85% of our group revenue. Hong Kong had a particularly strong quarter. Revenue surged 33% year over year to 8.5 million, further satisfying our market leadership. We are capitalizing on stronger consumer demand for higher margin wealth and insurance products. And the real story is our unit economics. Because of our disciplined customer acquisition strategies, Cross profit in Hong Kong grew substantially. We are acquiring high intent users at a lower cost, resulting in meaningful margin expansion. Singapore delivers steady revenue growth of 11% year over year to 5.6 million. This market is highly competitive, but our deep commercial partnerships and localized campaigns allowed us to also improve on GP. We view Singapore as a highly stable, cash-generated foundation that funds our broader regional innovations. But perhaps the most compelling evidence of our strategic maturity is found in our emerging markets, Taiwan and the Philippines. In previous years, these markets were characterized by aggressive marketing plans designed to capture market share, often at the expense of profitability. We have moved away from that approach. Taiwan and the Philippines continue to recover, supported by the structural leverage created through our strategic pivot to these regions. In Taiwan, we successfully optimize our localized product use, driving enhanced conversion efficiencies across our core verticals. In the Philippines, we prioritize core profitability by pulling back on lower margin volume. These initiatives led to respective year-over-year revenue declines of 17% in the Philippines and 12% in Taiwan, reflecting our prioritization of margin quality over volume to accelerate our path toward group-level profitability. We are doing more with less, and this is driving adjusted EBITDA optimizations. Turning to our product verticals, That same quality over quantity discipline applies, and it continues to accelerate our margin expansion story. For years, the personal finance comparison industry within our markets has been heavily reliant on credit card acquisitions. While credit cards remain vital to our business, they carry lower margins due to the heavy rewards and promotional costs required to drive volume. Our thesis has been to compound our earning profile. We must transition our users into higher margin verticals such as wealth and insurance products. That thesis is now being validated by our results. Combined revenue from our higher margin wealth and insurance verticals grew 31% year-over-year to $4.7 million. These categories now represent over 28% of our total group revenue. up from 25% in the prior year period. Our wealth vertical was the highlight this quarter. Revenue expanded by an impressive 53% year over year to $2.5 million. This growth is being driven by successful, compliant partnerships with licensed digital asset platforms and top tier retail brokerages, which are highly efficient and require minimal customer acquisition subsidies. Insurance revenue grew 12% to 2.1 million. This is a direct result of our transition toward end-to-end real-time pricing journeys. By utilizing embedded architecture, such as our partnership with Botech, we keep users on a platform to complete the purchase. This reduces frictions, eliminates drop-off to third-party sites, and lock in high-margin recurring renewal revenue. Meanwhile, our core banking products continue to perform well. Personal loans and mortgages delivered 13% revenue growth, rising to $2.8 million. Because we are targeting high-intent borrowers, GDP in this segment grew substantially. Finally, credit cards generated $9 million, growing 10% year-over-year and remains our primary volume engine. As part of our reward optimization strategy, we intentionally recalibrated our promotional spend here. While this slightly compressed credit card GP, it ultimately drove a much healthier, more sustainable lifetime value for the accounts we acquired. I would like to then dedicate a few minutes to our AI transformation strategy, which has become the backbone of both our day-to-day operations and Long Term Product Development Roadmap. Over the past two years, our AI investments were primarily focused on driving incremental operational efficiencies. Today, we are witnessing a far more meaningful structural shift. AI is reshaping how we build products, the solutions we develop in-house, and how we deepen exclusive, direct customer relationships. AI has become the primary engine of our engineering work. Our team spent the time directing, revining, and validating AI-generated rock streams rather than writing code by hand. These shifts enabled our team to deliver product updates and new features at a materially faster cadence. And it's a core driver of our sustained load technology and employee cost-based even as we scale development output. Importantly, every AI-generated deliverable undergoes engineering testing and sign-off to the same standard we have always applied. To put a number on it, around 90% of our new code is now written by AI and then reviewed and approved by our engineers. This reporting methodology aligns with the standard disclosure framework adopted by a large global technology peers. Consistent with industry practice, we feel this metric as directional rather than a precise fixed figure. Our results speak for themselves. We shift faster. Our technology costs are lower, and we can do more without adding people in proportion. The practical impact matters more than any single number. Work that would have required a small team multiple months to complete can now be finished in weeks, sometimes just days. AI is also reshaping our internal workflow. Traditional boundaries between product design and engineering teams are blurring. More team members can independently build functional prototypes while our engineers spend less time on manual coding and more time designing system architectures that led the broader organization build products safely. Our biggest challenge is no longer technical development itself. It is redesigning internal workflows and upskilling our product to leverage, our people to leverage AI effectively. All within straight compliance and control frameworks required for our regulated financial service business. With in-house development becoming far cheaper and faster thanks to AI, Our focus has shifted to internal development. Insurance is one vertical we are reviewing closely. Greater ownership of insurance workflows enable faster product launch, higher retained margins, and better customer journeys, powered by our own first-party data. This remains an ongoing assessment rather than a fixed formal plan, and we will advance any such change cautiously on a market-by-market basis. Even so, it illustrates how AI can broaden the scope of work we can build internally. Second, AI reinforce the strategic value of owning direct customer relationships. Our membership ecosystem represents our own channel independent of third-party search engines or external AI platforms. This channel brings together repeat engagement personalized recommendations, and a full suite of financial products. So we are investing heavily to expand it. We are evolving memberships from a one-off product comparison tool into an ongoing customer relationship. We will roll out these expanded capabilities in phases across individual markets. These strategic directions align naturally with our established capital-light, member-centric business model. Our next key AI priority is group-wide cross-functional integrations, moving beyond silo AI deployments within individual product teams to embed intelligent automation across every layer of the organizations. That requires unified data sharing, streamlined cross-functional handoffs, and AI automation across all internal operations, including legal and compliance. As a regulated fintech operating across multiple greater Southeast Asian markets, all AI deployment must operate within our existing governance and control structures. Much of this work centers on unlocking additional value from our internal member data set, and we are collaborating closely with our data platform partners to standardize and structure data assets for scalable AI use case. This work is still in early stage and we will adjust our roadmap based on measurable operational outcomes. Let me address the question we receive frequently. Does AI pose a threat to our comparison platform like Money Hero? We believe the opposite holds true. Generic static product list can be easily replicated, but a trusted relationship cannot. especially one that aggregates offerings from dozens of banks and insurers, retains direct ownership of its member base, and runs on in-house AI technology. Consumers still rely on trust guidance to navigate fragmented, complex regional financial markets, and our commercial partners' efficient, high-intent consumer acquisition channels. AI shrinks our performance on both fronts, When deployed responsibly with our ecosystem, AI enhances our competitive position instead of creating risks. Most of the AI progress I've covered deliver tangible efficiency gains, but the larger long-term opportunity lies in revenue growth. The same tools that have driven structural cost optimization are now being deployed across our consumer acquisition funnel. and conferred high intent users. Our strategic direction is clear. AI will evolve from purely a cost reduction lever into a meaningful driver of sustainable top line growth. The cost saving we generate will largely fund further AI iterations. So we do not expect our size incremental capital expenditure to execute our roadmap. This is how we translate AI driven operational efficiencies into a lasting, defensible, competitive edge for Money Hero. This progress is already reflected in our results. Our combined technology, employee benefits, and advertising and marketing costs fell by 13% year over year to $8.5 million, down from $9.8 million in Q1 of last year. Let me break that down. Technology costs declined through full-stack Simplification and AI-accelerated engineering workflows. Employee benefit expenses declined because our AI automation now handles up to 70% of all frontline consumer services inquiries, allowing us to absorb significant volume spikes without adding proportional headcounts. Advertising and marketing expenses declined through data-driven AI-accessed targeting that concentrates spent on higher converting traffic. Despite this lean marketing framework, our approval rate increased meaningfully from 36% a year ago to 48% this quarter. And total approved applications still grew year over year, reaching 156,000. We are also capturing these users into highly defensible data modes. Money Hero Group members grew by 24% year-over-year to 9.8 million registered users. We leveraged our first-party data assets together with AI-enabled analytics and recommendation capabilities to deliver more relevant and personalized product recommendations. Consequently, all of this leverage flowed directly to our bottom line. Our adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed sharply by 68% year-over-year to $1.1 million, setting a clear near-term path toward sustainable profitability. Turning to our bottom line, it is important to address our net loss, and it is important for our shareholders to understand the mechanics beneath the operating line. While our net loss of $6.7 million for the quarter widened compared to the 2.4 million loss in the prior year period. This was mainly driven by non-cash and currency adjustment. Specifically, we have stopped at 1.1 million non-cash fair federal accounting adjustment from warrant liabilities and a 2.4 million unrealized FX loss resulting from regional currency fluctuation against a strong US dollar. I want to be clear, these are macroeconomics Non-cash accounting adjustments. Once you look at the actual cash generating power of the business, our underlying core operational metrics remain robust. From a balance sheet perspective, we are operating from a position of significant growth, significant strength. We ended the quarter with a debt-free balance sheet, $28 million in cash and cash equivalents, and $32.8 million in net current assets at the 31st of March. These financial runways give us strategic flexibility. It allows us to comfortably fund our organic roadmap and the regional rollout of our AI-exceeded insurance journey without needing to raise dilutive capital. Furthermore, having a strong balance sheet in the current macroeconomic environment is a meaningful competitive advantage We are proactively evaluating business expansion opportunities in a disciplined manner. In closing, the first quarter of 2026 proves that the foundation we built is solid. We are growing our top line organically by double digits. We are compounding our GDP by shifting our mix towards wealth and insurance. We are utilizing AI to structurally optimize our operating costs driving significant improvement in adjusted EBITDA. These results also reflect the strength of the team and leadership structure behind them. The recent board changes are aligned with this next phase of Money Hero's journey. As we move from restructuring and cost optimization into profitable growth and scale, the board is focused on building a more efficient, scalable, and profitable platform that can create long-term value for shareholders. Every new board member brings deep experience in fintech scaling, digital consumer platforms, and capital allocation, precisely the capabilities this chapter demands. On the ECEO search, as previously disclosed, the process remains active. with a focus on finding a long-term leader to steer Monhero through its profitable scaling phase. Someone who will bring disciplined execution, product innovation, and sustained shareholder value creation. We will share updates at the appropriate time. In the meantime, the management team remains fully focused on execution. Our strategy has not changed, and the Q1 results demonstrate that clearly. We enter the remainder of 2026 with confidence in our long-term strategy and growth opportunities while continuing to focus on discipline, execution, talent retention, operational efficiency, and the successful implementation of key strategic initiatives. I want to thank our incredible team for their dedication, our commercial partners for their trust, and our shareholders for their continued support. Thank you. And I will now hand the call back to the operator to begin the Q&A session. Thank you.