MoneyLion Inc.

Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call

11/7/2024

spk07: Standing by, my name is Mon Diep and I'll be your operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome you to Q3 2024 Ernie's Call. All lines have been placed on any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question session. You'd like to ask a question during this time, so press star, followed by the number on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to request a question, press star one again. Thank you. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Sean Horgan, Head of Investments. We may begin.
spk05: Thank you, operator. Good morning. Thank you all for joining us for our third quarter of 2024 Ernie's Conference Call. With me today are MoneyLine CEO Dee Chalde and CFO Rick Correa to discuss our results. You can find the presentation accompanying our earnings press release on our investor relations website at .moneyline.com. Please note that any forward-looking statements made in this commentary are subject to our safe harbor statement, which can be found in our SEC filings and our earnings press release. With that, I'll turn the call over to Dee.
spk02: Thank you, Sean. Good morning and thank you all for joining us for our third quarter of 2024 earnings call. Last quarter, we introduced our vision of becoming the number one destination for financial decisions. In Q3 2024, we took decisive steps towards this outcome. We delivered record performance in the third quarter, and we see that momentum continuing with accelerating revenue growth in the fourth quarter. This reflects our confidence in achieving our vision. And now let's turn to the key takeaways for the third quarter. First, we achieved record quarterly revenue of $135 million. This represented 23% -over-year growth. Building on this quarter, we're raising our full year 2024 revenue guidance to $536 to $541 million, up from $525 to $535 million. Based on our new guidance, we expect revenue in the fourth quarter of $151 million at the midpoint. This represents 34% -over-year growth, a significant increase from the comparable 23% -over-year growth in the third quarter. Second, we generated record adjusted EBITDA of $24 million for the quarter, which exceeded our guidance range of $18 to $21 million. This reflects an adjusted EBITDA margin of 18% above the high end of our guidance of 13 to 15.8%. We now expect full year 2024 adjusted EBITDA in the range of $88 to $93 million, up from our prior guidance of $80 to $87 million. This new range reflects an adjusted EBITDA margin of .8% at the midpoint. Importantly, we once again generated positive cash flow during the quarter, and we ended the quarter with a cash balance of $112 million, up from $98 million at the end of the second quarter. Third, we generated record enterprise revenue in the quarter. Enterprise revenue grew 18% -over-quarter to $45 million. This reflects continued momentum on the heels of 17% -over-quarter growth in the prior quarter. Lastly, our strategic initiatives are fueling growth by improving conversion metrics across our marketplace. This is highlighted by the launch of Moneyline Checkout, our -to-end solution that we believe will unify and simplify the financial product shopping experience in the same way that online marketplaces fit for the online travel industry. These are crucial drivers that position Moneyline for accelerating growth exiting the year. We expect this momentum to continue with enterprise revenue growth above 18% -over-quarter in Q4. Turning to customer growth, we ended the third quarter with 18.7 million total customers. Marking a 54% -over-year increase and 1.6 million new customers compared to Q2. To put this into perspective, total customers have grown about three and a half times since Q3 of 2022. We're happy with this growth, but more importantly, we're increasing the products consumed on our platform. By the end of Q3 2024, 30.7 million total products have been consumed on our platform. Importantly, we increased our product consumption from 2.4 million in Q2 to 3 million in Q3. This underscores the success of our land and expand strategy. Every time we add a customer to the Moneyline platform, we have the ability to cross-sell, retarget, and monetize these customers with our industry-leading personal financial management or PFM tools and financial offers. We added 1.8 million third-party products alongside 1.2 million first-party products. A proof point in our strategy to target an expanding target addressable market and a diverse customer base. This demonstrates the increasing scale of our Marketplace First platform, which can help all Americans make their best financial decisions. Over time, we have made Moneyline more and more relevant as a product for every American. Our technology drives better outcomes for both consumers and enterprise partners, fueling revenue growth and operating leverage. And in a word, our machinery is working. Moneyline is the ultimate financial marketplace. This is our strategic advantage as we're able to enjoy low-cost customer acquisition, and then we nurture consumers over their financial journeys and product buying inflection points. This engagement leads to higher ARPUs and lifetime value. It bears repeating because when we talk about enterprise growth, we're also talking about the integration of the marketplace within the Moneyline Consumer App, which is one of the key components of the enterprise business equation. Enterprise continues to gain momentum with 17% -over-quarter growth in Q2, followed by 18% growth in Q3, and further acceleration is expected in Q4. Our consumer marketplace is one of the fastest growing parts of our business, and it's an important lever that helps us generate high-contribution margin revenue. Our first-party products like Inks to Cash and our full suite of banking and investing capabilities continue to drive -over-year growth in our consumer business with high-contribution profit margins. Because of our large base of returning customers, consumer revenue is largely highly recurring in nature. We control the growth levers here as well. This gives us a lot of confidence to profitably acquire new cohorts of customers using our flywheel advantage. Across the digital consumer financial landscape, Moneyline is now renowned as the most full-featured personal finance platform in the industry. This is important because it provides insights and tools that keep customers returning to our platform for valuable guidance and advice, insights and content. Further, consumer marketplace conversions are increasing as customers repeatedly turn to our ecosystem for financial decisions. Our web and mobile digital products are built to engage consumers with guidance across financial inflection points. Just to name a few, we've built calculators and insights to inform product buying decisions, community features like user-generated content and commenting. We have a consumer marketplace with a broad set of third-party products and offers, and of course, our premium membership, Wow, which provides real cash back and financial decisions. So now let's turn to enterprise. Our enterprise business is thriving across both macroeconomic and fundamental factors. We are becoming the de facto ecosystem for any financial services provider in the industry looking to acquire highly vetted in-market consumers. Our network expanded to over 1200 enterprise partners in the third quarter, driving almost 90 million total customer increase. So I'll start with the macroeconomic environment as it relates to our enterprise business. In the third quarter, within our largest vertical, personal loans, we noted in our last two earnings calls that the current credit cycle likely bottomed at the end of Q1. Conversion rates, or the percentage of approved applications, improved modestly in Q3, but still remained below historical levels. We expect upside in loan conversions as interest rates decrease. We've added new partners across verticals, and in the third quarter, non-personal loan revenue was about half of the marketplace revenue, underscoring the success of our diversification efforts. So far in the fourth quarter, we've seen conversion rates trend positively. We expect continued stabilization through the first half of next year as well, as lenders revisit their acquisition strategies in a lower interest rate environment. Our focus remains on revenue diversification and providing even more software development capabilities, business intelligence and analytics, and conversion funnel optimization tools to our enterprise partners. We believe our edge in optimizing our software leads to increased revenue opportunities for all participants in our marketplace. Deepening our presence in key verticals is another strategy to grow the value of our marketplace. This is beginning to bear fruit, but we believe we're only in the early innings of penetrating these verticals. The key verticals we're focused on include credit cards, mortgages, and auto insurance. Let me touch on each of these briefly. In credit cards, we're hosting the decisioning models of our partner issuers to deliver personalized pre-qualified offers to our users. In addition, we are leveraging personalized lifecycle campaigns backed by new data sources to optimize conversions. We're making progress on our -to-market efforts for mortgage-related products like home equity line of credits, with many more features and capabilities to come. In the coming months, we plan to launch real-time mortgage pricing displays, content and widgets across the MoneyLine ecosystem. In auto insurance, we saw substantial growth in the third quarter by calibrating the right product and offers for the right segments of our vast customer base. This will grow as we continue refining the capabilities. Our goal is to grow these verticals to a similar scale as what we today enjoy in personal loans. These diversification efforts expand our revenue opportunity and smooth out our enterprise revenue, strengthening our naturally hedged business across macroeconomic cycles. We are super excited about MoneyLine checkout. It transforms the consumer experience, disrupting the industry while improving our unit economics. This brings to bear multiple facets of our technology development into one platform that reduces significant friction for the consumer. When I say that MoneyLine is a must-have partner for customer acquisition and consumer finance, this is yet another reason why. Let me explain. When consumers visit Amazon to buy something like sneakers, they expect to search, shop, compare, and complete their purchase all in one place. They don't expect to be redirected to Nike.com to finish the transaction. Consumer finance has lacked this kind of seamless experience until now with MoneyLine checkout. MoneyLine checkout lets consumers complete financial transactions across hundreds of providers in real time without leaving the MoneyLine platform. By integrating consumer and third-party data directly with MoneyLine's product partners, these providers can increase conversions and expedite onboarding. Whether a consumer is borrowing for a loan, signing up for a credit card, starting a savings account, or choosing among the dozens of other product categories MoneyLine offers, they can complete the entire transaction within MoneyLine's dynamic consumer marketplace. So how does this translate to positive outcomes for our enterprise partners? Well, we're already seeing great results. Our pilot partners leveraging MoneyLine checkout have seen increases across key metrics such as a 25% improvement in click-through rate, a two and a half times increase in conversions, and a 30% or more increase in revenue. So we're excited to continue rolling out MoneyLine checkout across our network and driving better outcomes for both consumers and enterprise partners. So with that, I'll turn the call over to Rick to provide a more detailed update on our financials. Thanks, Dee, and good morning to everyone. I look forward to sharing details about our financial performance for the third quarter ending September 30th, 2024. I will also discuss our guidance and outlook for the fourth quarter and full year of 2024. For more information, please refer to our GAAP consolidated financial statements and non-GAAP reconciliations which are available in today's earnings release and our 10Q filing. First, our customer acquisition and lifecycle strategy continues to translate into strong customer and product ads. Our top of funnel expanded to almost 90 million total customer inquiries in the third quarter of 2024, up from 85 million in the prior quarter. These inquiries converted into 1.6 million new total customers and 3 million total products consumed during the quarter, up from 2.4 million products in Q2. Our top of funnel demonstrated significant growth from an already massive base in Q3. This demonstrates that our machinery is working. As we scale and enhance our customer data platform, we deliver more personalized offers and recommendations to consumers, leveraging our lifecycle marketing engine. Over time, this formidable data advantage compounds and ultimately manifests our vision of becoming the number one destination for financial decisions. Onto our 306090 strategy. This concept is incredibly important to understand as it enables our business to scale in a way that is unrivaled in the industry. The 306090 framework demonstrates Moneyline's mix of contribution margin revenue. 306090 represents different channels through which customers can enter the Moneyline ecosystem and the approximate contribution margin associated with that channel. Importantly, these customer journey channels are not linear. They're different customer acquisition entry points along their financial journey. 30 is our B2B channel. This represents the broad distribution we have across our network of channel partners and is the engine that allows us to match customers with products across the Internet. When a customer converts in this channel, a product partner pays us an affiliate fee and we realize an approximately 30% contribution margin. This is the backbone of our massive top of funnel and creates our customer acquisition advantage. In addition, this channel fuels our data advantage. With 80 million quarterly inquiries, this channel provides deep insights into consumer profiles, including their propensity for a basket of financial products. This massive funnel gives Moneyline a fertile user base to lifecycle and remarket to at a later point along their financial journey. 60 represents our first party products. When someone downloads the Moneyline app and takes one of our various first party products, we typically earn around 60% contribution margin. We continue to innovate by developing new first party features and products, including our WoW membership and the recently launched Roar Money Black Card. 90 represents our consumer marketplace. This customer converts from an extensive catalog of third party products in our ecosystem. As Dee mentioned, our consumer marketplace is a key component of our business equation. It is one of the fastest growing parts of our business and represents revenue that typically has around a 90% contribution margin. As we continue to scale this revenue stream, our incremental revenue will drive more contribution profit dollars than it would otherwise through other channels. Our direct to consumer brand investments are a part of our high priority strategy to take market share of a large fee pool and shift our revenue mix over time. In sum, our progressive approach to being the number one destination for financial decisions accelerates our mix of high contribution margin enterprise revenue and ultimately driving margin expansion over time. Turning to our unit economics. In the last 12 months ending Q3-24, we added 6.6 million total customers. Our customer acquisition cost or CAC is under $20. This continues to be a great outcome relative to the industry. The slight quarter over quarter increase coincides with our strategy to accelerate the mix of the high contribution margin enterprise revenue related to our -60-90 strategy. Next, our payback period was approximately six months and our POO was around $32. These unit economics underscore our success in our CAM expansion strategy. Scaling our total customers to 18.7 million in the third quarter from 5.4 million in the same quarter two years ago. As Dee mentioned, our land and expand strategy is also working as we increase product consumption to 3 million in Q3 from 2.4 million in Q2. As mentioned, our technology enables us to monetize a large customer base at high incremental margins. We are excited to unlock the value of our entire ecosystem through our direct to consumer investments. Now, let me turn to our recurring revenue trends. In Q3-24, 78% of our direct to consumer revenue or revenue from our first party products and consumer marketplace came from historical cohorts of customers. We're seeing continued strength in our first party products. In the third quarter of 2024, total originations for these products were $776 million representing an increase of 38% year over year. Credit performance trends remain consistent in Q3-24. Our finance receivables provision expense as a percentage of total originations was .1% in Q3-24. Excluding first quarter seasonality, Q3 was one of our best performing quarters for provision expense as a percentage of originations. This is a great outcome and a predictable one as we actively manage our credit performance to be in a healthy range and have a high degree of confidence in our ability to continue to do so going forward. As a reminder, we historically experienced a seasonal benefit in provision expense as a percentage of originations in the first quarter of every year. As we transition into how we finance consumer originations into a forward flow arrangement, we'll no longer see this seasonal variance. We expect loss rates to remain within a healthy range. Now, turn to some of our other key financial metrics. In the third quarter, Moneyline generated a record $135 million of revenue representing 23% year over year and a 4% quarter over quarter growth. In the fourth quarter, we expect this growth to accelerate to 34% year over year, to $151 million, as implied by the midpoint of our upwardly revised full year 24 guidance. Now for an update on profitability. As it relates to the third quarter, Moneyline generated $24 million in adjusted EBITDA. This represents an adjusted EBITDA margin of 18%. Additionally, over the last 12 months ending in Q3-24, this represents $83 million of adjusted EBITDA. We are consistently generating positive cash flow. At the same time, we are reinvesting in growth and taking market share. Accordingly, we ended the third quarter with $112 million in cash, up from $98 million at the end of the second quarter of 24. As we invest in growth initiatives, we expect adjusted EBITDA margin between 14% to 18% in Q4-2024. While we can throttle back growth to drive near-term margin expansion, now is not the time. The opportunity in front of us is too big. Instead, we are focused on increasing marketing to drive acquisition and importantly, take market share. Now turning to guidance. In the third quarter of 2024, our results met or exceeded guidance across all metrics. Revenue was $135 million within our guidance range of $133-138 million, representing a 23% -over-year growth. Adjusted EBITDA was $24 million, above the high end of our guidance range of $18-21 million. Turning to our outlook. We are positioned for accelerating growth in the fourth quarter. For Q4-2024, based on our full-year guidance, we expect revenue between $149-154 million, representing 32% to 36% -over-year growth. At the midpoint, this represents growth of 34% -over-year, up from 23% growth in Q3-2024. We also expect adjusted EBITDA of $22-27 million, representing adjusted EBITDA margin of between .1% to 17.9%. For the full year of 2024, we now expect revenue between $536-541 million, representing 27% to 28% -over-year growth. At the midpoint, this represents 27% -over-year growth for the full year of 2024, compared to 25% growth in our prior guidance. We expect adjusted EBITDA of $88-93 million, representing approximately .3% to .4% adjusted EBITDA margin. At the midpoint, this represents an adjusted EBITDA margin of 16.8%, up from our prior guidance of 15.8%. With that, I'll return the call to Dee for his closing remarks. Thank you, Rick. As we look ahead to the future, given our position as the first consumer digital finance ecosystem, we're focused on taking market share and expanding the scope of our opportunity. We've seen continued -over-year growth in our consumer business with high contribution margins. This business has generated around $350 million over the last 12 months, ending the third quarter, up 30% -over-year. Moreover, despite broad economic concerns, we've grown and managed incredibly well, with loss rates averaging below .5% over the last eight quarters. We'll continue to deepen our presence across the auto insurance, credit cards, and mortgage verticals. We'll open ourselves up to serviceable revenue pools, all three of which we believe represent a billion dollars or more of annual revenue. We have the technology to serve these markets well, and we intend to capitalize on this opportunity going forward. As mentioned earlier, our new Moneyline checkout experience minimizes friction in the financial product shopping journey by offering an -to-end experience. We're incorporating new data sources through strategic partnerships, enabling us to deliver even more personalized recommendations and offers. This improves the consumer experience and adds value to our product partners. We covered our -60-90 mix-shift strategy in detail today, because it is key to our business equation. This strategy enables us to increase our mix of 90% contribution margin revenue. We'll be going direct to consumer with brand marketing investments as soon as Q4 2024, driving consumers directly to Moneyline's owned and operated properties. There, we can engage with them directly and earn high contribution margin revenue. Together, these initiatives will drive both revenue growth and margin expansion for us. We're incredibly proud of our results for Q3 2024 and the growth in front of us. And as such, we've raised our 24 guidance, implying accelerating revenue growth and healthy margins in the fourth quarter. Now is the time to lean into growth as we enter new markets and leverage our technology to enhance financial decisions for all Americans. Our technology enables our vision to become the number one destination for financial decisions within three years. To do so, we're playing offense with discipline as Moneyline embarks on the next horizon of its evolution. And with that, I'd like to thank you all for joining us today. And I'll turn the call back over to the operator for Q&A.
spk07: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad, raise your hand, join the queue. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press star 1 again. If you're called upon to ask your question or are listening via live speaker on your device, please pick up your handset and ensure that your phone is on mute when asking your question. Again, please press star 1 to join the queue. Our first question comes from the line of Kyle Peterson with Needham. Please go ahead.
spk04: Great. Thanks, guys. Good morning. Nice results. I wanted to start off on Enterprise. I appreciate some of the commentary on conversion rates and the expectations for the fourth quarter. I just wanted to see if you guys could provide any color as to either what you guys have seen since the Fed cut rates last month or any October trends that can back up the pretty robust -on-quarter outlook for the fourth quarter.
spk11: Hey, Kyle. Good morning. Thanks for the question. We've noted in our past two earnings calls that from what we see, it seems like we've reached the bottom in the current credit cycle. We're seeing conversion rates as measured by the percentage of approved applications are continuing to improve modestly. We think that going forward into Q4, as well as into the first half of 2025, they will improve even more meaningfully. That shows up in our numbers. We saw record enterprise revenue of 45 million, 18% up -over-quarter. If you look at just disambiguating from the macro, our strategy has always been to diversify the capability set. The way we're doing it is we're trying to give a differentiated value proposition to our enterprise partners. Instead of just being on our network, we're really giving them the instrumentation, the tooling. You heard us talk about Moneyline Checkout. We do see that as a really innovative sea change technology where financial institutions, lenders, credit card providers, banks, can really embed their decisioning on the Moneyline hosted environment. That allows us to really be deep in the funnel across multiple products. You know that we're very strong in personal loans. That clearly, in a decreasing interest rate environment, we'll see lots of tailwinds. We also are very excited about what we can do in credit cards. It's really changed the name of the game in terms of the technology that's available in the industry from an embedded finance perspective. Same thing with auto insurance, same thing with mortgages. We see it as a portfolio approach, but no doubt, the environment that we are in now will be favorable and will provide tailwinds.
spk04: Got it. That's really helpful. Then I want to switch gears and ask maybe a topical question on regulation. I know there's been some headlines and there was kind of a proposal from the CFPB on some oversight of earned wage access. But I know you guys have made a lot of investments in compliance and have taken this stuff pretty seriously. I just wanted to see if you guys could give us any kind of higher level views on how you guys are viewing potential regulation in the space, or how you guys are investing in compliance initiatives and preparing for potential changing seas in the space.
spk11: Sure. I'll start by stating the obvious. We're two days after a decisive election. That's no doubt going to have an impact on some of these questions. We expect regulation of financial services will look different under a new administration. We look forward to continuing to advocate for policies that promote innovation, competition. We're always in for more consumer choice in areas like EWA, as you mentioned, as well as across the financial services landscape. Because you have to remember that we are a network operator. It's not just EWA. It's how choice is really given to the consumer. But in any case, we're in a great spot with the investments we've made over the last 10 years. It's not just we woke up and we found one regulatory regime going to another. We've been making investments for the last 10 years to our regulatory and compliance infrastructure. So with respect to EWA, because we operate a marketplace, but also our own first-party instacash product, we've been pleased that over the past year plus, an increasing number of states have created laws and frameworks for codifying early access as its own product category with its own bespoke licensing framework instead of really applying a 20- or -year-old framework to a very innovative new fintech product. And so we're also glad to see recent federal regulatory developments that would create a nationwide framework for this product category as well. With respect to the CFPB's proposed interpretive rule, while we disagree with the Bureau's approach to treat the product like a credit product, we do not expect that the proposed rule, even if finalized in its current proposed form, would impair our ability to continue providing this really important financial safety net product to millions and millions of American workers. In fact, we believe that how the rule came out really codifies the importance of this product to hardworking Americans, right? So we're confident that we'll be able to continue offering instacash in a super-compliant, commercially effective manner while maintaining our unit economics. And that's an important point, that we've invested so much in the multiple delivery methods of all of our products that we actually see really tailwinds to growth into 2025 in that. And again, we'll be engaged on how this plays out as the administration changes, right? So again, just really important to remember that for 10 years we've seamlessly and successfully operated between the federal and state regulatory environments, right? This is the third administration that we've been operating under. And as we've said before, we've already built the technology. We already have the partnerships in place to offer the product in multiple different ways, compliant with the relevant jurisdiction, if you will.
spk04: Great. Really appreciate the detailed color. Thanks guys, nice quarter.
spk07: Our next question comes from a line, George Sutton with Craig Hallam. Please go ahead.
spk01: Thank you. I'm really excited to hear about the accelerating growth into Q4. And I wanted to put my question into this context. A pretty wide EBITDA range for Q4. As we're prepping for 2025 and looking for sort of branding type investments, I'm just curious how you're thinking of coming in the low end or the high end relative to your growth opportunities both short term and long term. My sense is it's largely in your control.
spk10: Hey George, great question. So if you go look at what's been happening with the business, we've been of course really focusing on our 30, 60, 90 strategies. And so while the macro is favorable for enterprise business, given the rates coming down, what we do control to your point is very much in the 30, 60, 90 strategy. And what we've been doing in addition to the investments that we've been making in terms of continuing to be increasing the number of channel partners and demand partners, we've been increasing our ability to go direct to market, to direct to the consumer. And by that we mean increasing some of our brand and marketing spend to do two things. One is to help to provide that air cover to consumers that are finding us on the internet to our channel partners and just help with the increased conversions as they continue to see us as a trusted brand in the marketplace. So that of course increases what is our very strong top of funnel. We went from 85 million inquiries last quarter to 90 million inquiries this quarter. So it continues to fuel that. It continues to fuel the increased conversions that we are expecting to see within the business. So of course that has a knock on effect into our eBitDAO margin and expansion. And then lastly, that mix shift. So as we go direct to the consumer with these new kind of marketing and brand initiatives, we're going to be able to accelerate the shift into consumers that are starting in that kind of 90% consumer journey.
spk01: Gotcha. Okay. And then I wanted to, on the checkout, you ran through some very sound like powerful metrics. How should we think through the timing and the ultimate impact on your income statement as this plays through?
spk10: Yes, so that's one where we are incredibly proud of what's been happening within just disrupting the entire consumer financial marketplace. So being able to kind of pioneer the way in which people go to market. Dee talked about it where if you're kind of looking for a pair of sneakers, the current experiences that you can search, you can evaluate and you can buy and check out within whatever marketplace you're buying those sneakers. Of course that experience until MoneyLion just doesn't exist within consumer finance. So what we're doing is we're expecting that to have a couple strong benefits. One is going to be around just the increased conversions. So we're going to have less leakage and consumers will be able to have a better consumer experience. The other is you start to kind of have more and more kind of pricing power. So the ability to be the critical partner for acquiring customers and consumer finance is where we're positioning ourselves. And so those will start to kind of manifest themselves. We started seeing it already in kind of early pilots. TechEd isn't the only kind of strategic initiative we've been working on over 2024. And so you're starting to see that come through in the numbers. You know, the 18% quarter over quarter growth in enterprise along with having a 17% growth last quarter means that management anticipates growth acceleration in enterprise. It's the first time you've seen us call that out because we don't see any headwinds to that. We're going to continue to kind of focus on being that kind of pre-enterprise for the consumer market, the consumer finance marketplace.
spk01: Fabulous. Great,
spk07: guys. Our next question comes from a line of Reina Kummer with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
spk03: Good morning, Dee and Rick. Thanks for taking my question. It's good to see Adjusted EVITA coming in ahead of our forecast as well as the streets. I was wondering if there's any cost that came in below your expectations and if there's any drivers to that EVITA exceedance.
spk10: Hey, Reina, and welcome to the party. It was great to see you initiate, Oppenheimer initiate, last quarter. I appreciate the question in terms of EVITA. You know, this is, I think, the positioning that we've been making for years now, which is being a platform. And so what that means is we're getting that operating leverage and you're kind of seeing it pretty consistently now, kind of quarter over quarter. And so, you know, a couple kind of standard items. One, as Dee mentioned, we had, and I mentioned kind of in the call, we had one of our best quarters when it comes to performance for our originations, kind of a 3.1 provision as a percentage of originations. And so that certainly is a factor. And as we've said, we kind of solve for that. And so we'll continue to expect strong performance. And as I mentioned, Enterprise was up sequentially 18%. And so, you know, that continues to be an important driver. As I mentioned, the kind of 30, 60, 90. You know, that's something that we're now seeing a lot of success around is more and more of our kind of customer journeys are ending up in that kind of 90% and importantly, kind of life cycle for our customers. You know, we have a massive top of funnel. We keep talking about it. The other number that we encourage everyone to keep thinking about is your product consumption. And so once you're on the platform, you know, we're really successful at getting customers to take that second and third derivative product. And that showed up this quarter where we had 3 million products consumed on the platform. And that was up from 2.4 million last quarter. And so those things kind of drive, of course, going to top life. But as I said, that mixed shift towards 90% helps as well.
spk03: Great. Thank you for the collar. And I know it's only been a couple of weeks, but any early indications of the uptake on Moneyline checkout?
spk11: Yeah. Hey, Raina. Good morning. It's D. Look, we were just at the Money 2020 conference in Las Vegas last week and the sort of the excitement that we're seeing from our partners is palpable. Really the adoption in checkout is going to be taking the existing client base that are already integrated to the Moneyline exchange, if you will, through an API and converting them into checkout customers, right? So we've already have really a handful of very large institutions already using checkout. As we said before, we're seeing great CTR improvements of almost over 25%, two and a half times conversions, 30% plus on the revenue per lead improvement for our clients there. So as we take those case studies, the name of the game really is to go to the rest of the client base and then kind of engage with them to get them converted from the existing integration that they have onto the checkout integration.
spk03: Understood. Thank you.
spk07: Our next question comes from line of Hal Goat with B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.
spk06: Hey Rick, can you give us any color on some of the new verticals? I know auto insurance is also in a big upswing for customer acquisition from other companies that are in the industry. There's probably a lot of overpriced auto loans out there. So auto loan refi seems to be a lot of pent-up potential demand for that in the next year or two as rates come down. And the third question is, could you just give a little color on the adjustments to EBITDA? You usually have a few other expenses, but this quarter it was a little bit more on 8 million. What did you get if you could give us some color on that? Was that related to the Ford's loan agreement expenses or something like that? Let us know. Thank you.
spk10: Thanks Hal. I'll take the easy one and then I'll give you the kind of vertical question. When it comes to the EBITDA adjustments, this was primarily just tied to one time legal expenses. I wish it was a little more entertaining than that, but that was what drove the increase to the other line with EBITDA adjustments.
spk08: Okay.
spk11: Hey Hal, I'll take your new vertical expansion question, right? So if you look at our, you look at the public peers, you'll see that these operate in these marketplaces, in these verticals, each can support over a billion dollars a year of revenue, right? So you see that the addressable markets in auto insurance and mortgages and credit cards each are quite large for us, right? So our entire strategy for the course of this year has been really a product and technology led improvement of the form factor that currently exists in the market, right? So again, you know what we're doing with checkout and decisioning and sort of the you know, data deals that we announced this quarter with the TransUnions of the world, Nova credit, Plaid, all our testament to us really being the decisioning engine
spk00: for and
spk11: really sitting between the consumer and the product provider. So that's a differentiated strategy that we're taking in auto insurance that we can actually get the consumer in consideration in market, highly qualified, vetted and deliver them to insurers really deep into the funnel, right? So our approach from a product perspective slightly different from what's in the market and we believe that ultimately it's going to lead to higher margins, higher payouts, all the things that we're seeing on the personal loan side. We want to replicate into auto insurance, mortgages and credit cards. But as we've said before, no doubt in this environment we expect there is a lot of pent-up demand, right? I mean over the last couple of years, we've been operating with one hand tied behind the back on the personal loan verticals because of the imbalance between supply and demand. You know, the loans are priced at a level where consumers just don't want to transact but now with a little bit of a change in sort of the overall sentiment, we'll find both the personal loans verticals as well as our new and thin verticals are going to all see some tailwinds in terms of consumer demand for those products and for
spk10: the substitution of those products.
spk06: All right. I'm going to ask one follow-up. You know, the cash balance continues to build. Can you give us any thoughts on your corporate debt, its interest rate and what you can do now that your cash balance continues to grow? Thanks.
spk10: Yeah, absolutely, Adam. We are proud that we continue to kind of build the kind of free cash flow, kind of quarter over quarter. In terms of our senior debt, when you think about the profile of our company, we have so many healthy financial metrics now that we can share with you. And so you would expect a company like ours to have, you know, senior debt that's somewhere in the zip code of, you know, SOFR plus 150 to 300 and say we're kind of 2X that on the high end. And so, you know, certainly we will continue to explore opportunities to have, you know, a significantly lower cost of capital.
spk05: Thanks, Rick.
spk07: Our next question comes from the line of Jacob Steffen with Lake Street. Please go ahead.
spk09: Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions and I'll add my congrats on the quarter as well. I just kind of wanted to focus on the 18% growth guidance in enterprise. Maybe you could help us kind of think about what's driving that. Is that more on the new product side, new vertical side, or is that, you know, assume some rebound in personal loans as well?
spk10: Yeah, so hey Jacob, this is one where, you know, we've been playing for this, right? The investments that we've been making, the diversification across the different verticals. Of course, you know, rates coming down helps because as a leader within the personal lending space, from a marketplace perspective, that's coming our way. And then the investments that we've been making in terms of really kind of shifting into the mix of our customer journeys, you know, from the kind of 30 and 16 to the 90. And so it's all of the above and it's what again kind of gives us so much confidence in terms of being able to kind of take our enterprise business for the first time, you know, kind of confidently say that that management anticipates growth acceleration within the fourth quarter within the enterprise business. And of course, within consumer, you know, that business was up 27% year over year. We've been continuing to be very kind of focused on shifting towards the kind of forward flow type of financing arrangements within consumer. We're through that completely within from the end to cash product. And so you'll kind of see that business kind of revert to its kind of historical growth in terms of top line growth. So we got to feel really good about, you know, the overall business and specifically enterprise now kind of hitting on all cylinders.
spk09: Okay, got it. That's helpful. And then maybe I'll just ask another question on kind of the checkout product you guys just launched. You know, can you kind of help us think about is this really going to take off from kind of, you know, first party product, third party product and essentially, you know, approve customers and, you know, match them with the correct product or kind of help us think about, you know, where this falls into the kind of the 30, 60, 90 framework?
spk11: Sure. I'll start Jacob there. Look, I think if you think about the landscape, right, there are a lot of financial technology companies, sophisticated banks that already integrated the money line through API's. What we wanted to do with checkout was really expand the target addressable market to credit card companies, midsize, small and regional banks, really to be able to use a no-code environment to get really high vetted consumers that fit their products. Because if you think about what checkout is trying to do, it's trying to give a offer that's ready to execute and transact right in the flow of the consumer when they're in consideration for a financial product buying decision. So really it improves conversion rates on both sides. It creates a much better product for the consumer because they don't get clicked out into four or five different websites where they're re-entering their information. We become the lingua franca for really kind of integrating different types of offers across asset classes. So that's really what checkout does. It doesn't necessarily replace the capabilities that we have, but it expands the number of enterprise partners that can actually now engage with MoneyLine and provide their offers deep into our funnel. Over time, whatever we offer through the MoneyLine consumer marketplace, we also offer through software development kits that any bank or financial institution can now embed inside of their own digital ecosystems, whether that's a mobile app, whether that's a website. We're starting to see a lot of success with folks taking that SDK and putting that into their own ecosystems. So I think the answer is both, right? As we increase more of the awareness of the MoneyLine brand, we've always said that this is a brand that works a little bit in the background. Now really just putting a little bit of investments into brand all inside of the guidance, all inside of the margin profile that we've illustrated here. We believe that we can now provide a little bit of air cover for the MoneyLine consumer marketplace where consumers can come here directly to make their best decision, but also everything that we're doing from a technology perspective that can be distributed through any of our partners through APIs and SDKs. So I like that business model because it gives us multiple ways to win from a customer acquisition perspective. It gives us, it really extends our surface area for engaging with more consumers than what we are just acquiring organically.
spk09: Got it. That makes sense. I appreciate the color, guys.
spk07: Our next question comes from a line of Mike Grandel with Northland. Please go ahead.
spk08: Hey guys, thanks. First question. What are you guys most excited about? Credit card, auto, mortgage, you know, which one represents the most upside for MoneyLine?
spk10: Hey Mike. Well, I think we're excited about all of it. You know, certainly when you think about the lack of personalization kind of within, you know, the entire consumer finance experience and specifically if you think about kind of credit cards, like the benefit of us now being able to have kind of checkout that takes into the ecosystem, you know, a breadth of data from our partner like we announced with TransUnion, with the slide that we announced as well, we're going to be able to kind of bring a very specific and unique approach to developing personalized offers. And of course, that's kind of how we approach things. We're not just going to go into a vertical and expand into a vertical with a meet you strategy. And so we're most excited about being able to do that within the credit card vertical.
spk08: Got it. And then on your -60-90 strategy, could you give us an example or two of how your executing the 90 that top quadrant?
spk10: Yeah, we have millions of examples, but I'll stick to a couple. So what you're seeing is that there's two ways this is happening. One is around as we mentioned, we have been increasing kind of that kind of brand and marketing spend to bring customers directly in. And so what that means is, you know, we have, you know, hundreds of partners, product partners that we are matching with kind of product offers. So kind of going direct and being at, you know, really a place where customers are starting to make their financial decisions. That's the kind of strategic positioning that we've been working on under the kind of brand and marketing spend, bring somebody in directly. They can search for a product. We use all of our kind of AI search ingenuity to be able to kind of match them with the right product. And so when that happens, that is a 90% customer return. The other, as I've mentioned, is, you know, when we talked about, you know, increase the number of products being consumed on the platform, that's really a testament to our ability now to kind of life cycle somebody. We develop deeper and deeper profiles in terms of what we understand about a person. As I mentioned, you know, their propensity to buy a kind of basket of financial products is best understood by Moneyline. And so what we've been able to do now is once they're on our platform, we're able to give them the kind of second and third derivative offers that also kind of represents that kind of 90% customer return.
spk11: Yeah, also, Mike, just reiterate what we said on the call, right, that, you know, we have built, we're always improving and really investing in the nation's leading personal financial management tool. And if you just download the Moneyline app and you look at sort of the incredible amounts of capabilities we've put into that, it really is a super app, right? What we're seeing now, a lot of success in our things like community, right? If you go into the community section of the app, there's, you know, thousands of people talking about various parts of their financial life. Then they're inviting their friends and their family to join those conversations, right? So a lot of the work that we do on the direct to consumer product perspective is all around really providing incredible premium features to the consumer for free. Mostly the Moneyline search capabilities, the link your bank account and let us give you some advice and some insights. We've just enhanced even our free credit score capabilities that's leading in the industry. Now, it's not just a free credit score. We can simulate it for you. We can give you a lot more data on your tradelines. We can link that now with what's happening with your linked bank accounts and provide even more insights. Things like smart budgeting and capabilities like that all are surrounding the consumer with an incredible toolkit to manage their daily financial lives or financial operating systems as we think about it. And then of course, we've got our first party and third party products, but that engagement keeps the consumer in our ecosystem between financial inflection points or decision-making points when they're when they're thinking about a mortgage or an insurance or a credit card. That's the part that's the best representation of the 90% strategy because we're engaging the consumer daily, weekly, monthly. We've got a lot of data. They've got their wallet all linked with Moneyline. We've got the ability now really to give them precise high converting offers that are relevant for them. They're personalized for them and they're contextualized for what's happening in their lives that day. I think together with all of that really drives, you know, the excitement that we have on the margin expansion by keeping the consumer in our ecosystem. And I don't think that there are a lot of people that could have this level of a PFM capability in sort of the peer group or the market today.
spk08: Yeah, that's pretty robust and that's helpful. Hey, just lastly, did you guys comment about October at all?
spk10: You mean
spk11: Halloween
spk08: or something more specific? How the month of October went? No. Okay.
spk07: Thanks. This concludes today's Q&A session and concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.
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Q3ML 2024

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