Block Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the block fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Mr. Nikhil Dixit, head of investor relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining our fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. We have Jack and Amrita with us today. We will begin this call with some short remarks before opening the call directly to your questions. During Q&A, we will take questions from our customers in addition to questions from conference call participants. We would also like to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by our forward-looking statements. Reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. Please take a look at our filings with the SEC for a discussion of the factors that could cause our results to differ. Also, note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today's date. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. During this call, we will provide preliminary gross profit growth results for the months of January and February. These represent our gross profit growth results for January and our current estimate for February performance as we have not yet closed our accounting financials for the month of February and our monthly results are not subject to interim review by our auditors. As a result, actual January and February results may differ from these estimates. We will also provide preliminary unaudited financial results for after pay in the second half of 2021. These results have not yet been audited or reviewed by our auditors. Actual results for afterpay may differ materially from these preliminary results. Our remarks discuss losses on consumer receivables for afterpay. Losses on consumer receivables represent an assessment of expected credit losses over the term of the receivables, which is 14 to 56 days. We believe losses on consumer receivables is comparable to afterpay's previously reported metric of gross losses. Also, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures during this call. Reconciliations for the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the shareholder letter on our investor relations website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. Finally, this call in its entirety is being audio webcast on our investor relations website. An audio replay of this call will be available shortly on our website. With that, I would like to turn it over to Jack.

Thank you for joining us today. We wanted to start by acknowledging what's on everyone's minds, the Ukrainian people. Our thoughts are with them, our employees and customers with ties to the area, and all those affected by war. Turning now to our quarter. 2021 was a busy year for us. We found new ways to connect our Square and Cash App ecosystems through the acquisition of Afterpay. We added new ecosystems with Tidal to serve artists and TBD to serve Bitcoin developers. And we announced two new hardware projects to advance Bitcoin as a native currency for the Internet, a non-custodial hardware wallet and a Bitcoin mining system. We've been wanting to dedicate the Square brand to our seller business unit for some time, so we made that move too and renamed the overall company Block. Block now contains four business units, Square, Cash App, Tidal, and TBD. And now for some updates on our business. In Cash App, we saw strong engagement and adoption from both new and existing customers. In the fourth quarter, we added to the peer-to-peer functionality that has made Cash App so popular with an update that lets customers send fractional shares and Bitcoin from their Cash App balances to friends and family. We're also launching new features to position Cash App as a platform that can serve all of our customers' financial needs. In January, we introduced Cash App Taxes, where customers can file for free from a phone or computer and can receive their tax refund up to two days early if deposited through Cash App. Historically, we have seen customers bringing their tax refunds into Cash App, and with Cash App taxes, we hope to encourage customers to bring more inflows into our ecosystem and expand awareness of our direct deposit capabilities. Turning now to Square, we delivered on our priorities of expanding internationally, growing up market, and building out our omni-channel capabilities to create cohesive experiences between sellers and their customers. For example, we know that photos are crucial for selling successfully online, but many sellers struggle with the time and cost required. To address this, in the fourth quarter, we introduced the Square Photo Studio mobile app, which makes it easy for sellers to take high-quality photos and directly sync them to their catalog or online store. Between both ecosystems, in January, we closed our acquisition of Afterpay and introduced Afterpay Buy Now, Pay Later for Square Online sellers in the US and Australia, an offering that's been long requested by sellers and customers. Looking ahead, we intend to integrate Buy Now, Pay Later more deeply in our ecosystem over time, and we believe Afterpay will accelerate the connections between our Square and cash ecosystems. We have a strong foundation to build upon in 2022, and we want to share more with all of you during Investor Day we plan to host on May 18th, where we'll go deeper into our mission, products, strategy, and long-term goals. We'll share more details as we get closer to the date. And with that, here's Amrita.