雅虎香港財經 Remitly Global, Inc. (NASDAQ:RELY) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
Remitly Global, Inc. (NASDAQ:RELY) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 24, 2024
Remitly Global, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good day, and welcome to the Remitly Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Stephen Shulstein, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Stephen Shulstein: Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for Remitly's fourth quarter 2023 earnings call. Joining me on the call today are Matt Oppenheimer, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Remitly, and Hemanth Munipalli, our Chief Financial Officer. Our results and additional management commentary are available in our earnings release and presentation slides, which can be found at ir.remitly.com. Please note that this call will be simultaneously webcast on the Investor Relations website. Before we start, I would like to remind you that we'll be making forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws, including but not limited to statements regarding Remitly's future financial results and management's expectations and plans.
These statements are neither promises nor guarantees and involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to vary materially from those presented here. You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. Please refer to our earnings release and SEC filings for more information regarding the risk factors that may affect our results. Any forward-looking statements made in this conference call, including response to your questions, are based on current expectations as of today and Remitly assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise, except as required by law. The following presentation contains non-GAAP financial measures. For a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP metric, please see our earnings press release, and the appendix to our earnings presentation, which are available on the IR section of our website.
Now, I will turn the call over to Matt to begin.
Matt Oppenheimer: Thank you, Stephen, and thank you all for joining us for our fourth-quarter earnings call. As we look back on Remitly's performance in 2023, we have a lot to be proud of as we delivered on our commitments to our customers and shareholders. At the beginning of last year, we laid out our commitment to deliver strong growth at robust unit economics, increase return on our investments, and deliver a fast, reliable and seamless experience for our customers. As you can see on Slide 4, we delivered on these commitments in the fourth quarter and in 2023. These results reflect the progress we have made on our strategic initiatives and our commitment to our customers to deliver peace of mind as they send money across borders.
Our revenue increased 39% in the fourth quarter and 44% for the full year. On a fourth-quarter annualized basis, our scale has reached over 1 billion of revenue. We also delivered $8 million of adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter and $44 million of adjusted EBITDA for the full year, well ahead of the goals we set for ourselves at the onset of the year. We benefited from strong execution across the business, increasing scale, the nondiscretionary nature of our service, and the resilience of our customers. We've expanded on our vision as you can see on Slide 5. Our vision is to transform lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders. This vision encapsulates a broad view of who our customers are today and who we can serve in the future.
It also speaks to the unmet customer needs that we believe we are uniquely positioned to solve by delivering peace of mind to customers around the world with cross-border financial needs. Our four strategic focus areas on Slide 6 are designed to help us deliver against this audacious vision with customer-centricity at the heart of our strategy. We believe our total addressable market is approximately 1.8 trillion, which represents the total consumer cross-border payments market. We currently have 2% of this total market with nearly $40 billion of send volume in 2023. According to the UN, this market includes approximately 1 billion people around the globe who send or receive cross-border payments, including immigrants, their families, and others with cross-border financial needs.
We remain focused on investing where we have clear advantages as a digital-first, cross-border financial services company. In addition, we believe investments in our technology platform will allow us to efficiently serve more of this market over time. We are confident our strategy will allow us to drive robust growth with this very large market opportunity for many years to come. First, we aim to delight our customers with a fast, reliable, and seamless cross-border payment experience which results in providing our millions of customers with a delightful experience. This is a key driver of improving retention, engagement and maintaining strong unit economics. Delivering a delightful cross-border payment experience in a trusted and reliable way to a highly diverse and global customer base is incredibly complex.
Our technology investments and increasing scale have resulted in significant progress across various aspects of improving the customer experience, which as a result has increased customer engagement on our mobile app and website and enabled market share gains. But there is still so much more to do to improve the customer experience and we are excited about continuing our journey to reinvent international person-to-person payments. Second, our targeted marketing investments across both performance and brand channels have delivered new customers to our platform at very attractive unit economics. Our focus remains on maximizing lifetime value for the long term while we efficiently acquire new customers and retain a growing large base of customers.
We define lifetime value as revenue-less transaction expense over five years, even though many customers continue to transact with us for more than five years. This long-term view of our customers provides us with many levers to enhance lifetime value and we are experiencing LTV improvements as customers have increased their transaction activity, particularly for digital receive options, and we have also been decreasing transaction costs. Third, we see significant opportunities to expand into more geographic markets. Our global network consists of more than 5,000 corridors and we have plans to increase our reach to thousands of additional corridors while increasingly benefiting from diversification. We will use the same disciplined corridor expansion strategy and our targeted approach that has served us so well to date.
While our customer base today is primarily customers who regularly send home to family and friends in developing countries, we believe over time, we can better serve a broader set of customers who have cross-border financial needs. Fourth, we believe there are enormous opportunities to deepen customer relationships by leveraging the unique technology platform we have built and continue to build, to efficiently scale new features and products to the millions of customers we serve today, and to make our offerings even more attractive to other customers that have cross-border financial needs. Now, let's turn to more details regarding each of these focus areas. On Slide 7, you can see that in the fourth quarter, quarterly active customers increased 41% year-over-year to 5.9 million.
The significant year-over-year increase in quarterly active users can be attributed to multiple factors, increased activity due to the holiday season from a growing base of active customers who were acquired in prior periods, as well as the acquisition of a record number of new customers during this period. Customer behavior trends remain strong, and we see transaction intensity, which we define as transactions per quarterly active customer, continued to increase as the year-over-year mix of digital receive transactions increased by more than 500 basis points in the fourth quarter. As we continue to deliver value for customers, we believe we can serve these digital receive customers in a way that maximizes retention and engagement while also reducing unit costs across our pay-in and disbursement networks.
In the fourth quarter, we also acquired a record number of new customers across all our send geographies, including the U.S., Canada, and the rest of the world. Now let's turn to Slide 8. We talked last quarter about the complexity inherent in cross-border payments experience and how our value proposition of providing a fast, reliable, and seamless customer experience is a key differentiator. Our investments in reducing complexity and eliminating all unnecessary friction in various elements of the customer remittance experience enables us to provide value to our customers, which in turn results in improved retention, increased transaction intensity, lower customer support costs, and strong word-of-mouth referrals. While we are pleased with the progress we are making in reducing unnecessary friction in our disbursement network and customer support, we continue to see opportunities to further improve the customer experience.
In this context, we are focused on improving the quality of our disbursement network, which can be enhanced by direct integrations which eliminate intermediate steps in the remittance journey. This enhances our ability to deliver instant transactions for our customers, which is a key driver of loyalty and word-of-mouth effects, as speed and reliability enable us to delight our customers. Since early 2021, we have significantly increased the percentage of transactions that go via direct disbursement routes. This now includes strategic partnerships with some of the largest banks and telcos, including M-Pesa in Africa, Alipay in China, BDO in the Philippines, and Elektra in Mexico. As a result of these investments we have made to enhance the quality of our network in the fourth quarter, we were able to disperse more than 90% of transactions in less than 1 hour, even as we onboarded a record number of new customers where the risks of delays are higher.
Our direct integrations also allow us to disperse funds rapidly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which would not be the case if we exclusively relied on intermediary payment networks. This outcome is critically important to our customers who are often sending money for immediate needs, so a reliable and fast service is of paramount importance. Optimizing the balance between a great customer experience and preventing fraud is another area that has been a key focus for us and very important to our customers. We have made significant investments to ensure that legitimate transactions can go through with the least amount of friction and that we are able to block fraudulent transactions more effectively and in real time. We are continuing to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to more accurately make risk decisions.
These models have been getting even more precise with growing customer data, which the models continuously adapt to. This allows us to operate more efficiently while improving their customer experience. This helped drive a decline in our non-GAAP customer support costs as a percentage of revenue by 260 basis points in the fourth quarter as compared to the prior year. Our customer support experience is a key driver of product differentiation. We have made significant improvements by reducing problems in the first place and with a new self-help experience to empower customers to resolve problems quickly and efficiently. We are highly focused on reducing issues the customers face during a transaction, reducing friction related to fraud that I just discussed is one example of where we made significant progress in the fourth quarter.
Secondly, we are highly focused on increasing the number of customers that can resolve issues themselves using our digital service options. As an example, we offer support in 15 languages, and after thorough testing, we are using AI to efficiently serve even more customers by translating and responding to contacts in real time. These efforts have been key drivers of more than 95% of customer transactions proceeding without a customer support contact. To make self-service a preferred method of support for customers, we recently launched a new self-help experience across both our app and web platforms. The new experience is responsive to customer needs based on aggregated insights from customer interactions and customer focus groups. Key improvements include an AI-based search that improves precision of answers to customer questions, more clearly communicates outages and delays that could impact a specific transaction, building customer trust by displaying available contact channels and customers' preferred language.
We have seen early returns from this new self-help experience with continued reduction in our customer contact rate. Finally, in cases where customers are unable to resolve problems on their own, we aim to provide an efficient and empathetic service that resolves issues the first time and builds peace of mind and trust for our customers. Now, let's turn to how our highly localized and targeted marketing strategy enables us to acquire new customers at very strong unit economics on Slide 9. We are focused on customer lifetime value, which again we define as revenue-less transaction expense over a period of five years. We use our deep knowledge of our customer lifetime value to be intentional about how much we're willing to pay to acquire new customers, and our average payback period remains below 12 months.
This gives us very high confidence in our recent marketing investments, which are expected to deliver returns this year and beyond. We have also observed that our customers' behavior over the past many years they have been active on our platform are predictable and durable. This is why we do not optimize for marketing expenses in any given quarter but rather optimize the amount we're willing to pay for a newly acquired customer with the projected lifetime value over five years and remain confident that our efficient marketing investments are generating significant value. This is especially true as we continue to scale and drive down our unit costs, thereby increasing our LTV via lower per-transaction expenses. As a result, we have been able to drive even more lifetime value on a total dollar basis.
As you can see in the chart on Slide 9, our revenue-less transaction expense remains very durable over time, primarily as a result of declining unit costs and resilient customer behavior. Following the first full year after we acquire a new customer, these same customers have provided, on average, approximately 95% of revenue less transaction expense for each subsequent year. This continues to validate that our marketing investments are expected to generate high returns for the long term. Our revenue less transaction expense grew 56% in 2023 compared with our 44% growth in revenue. We expect revenue less transaction expense to continue to grow faster than revenue in 2024 as we benefit from increasing scale across pay-in fees, disbursement fees and fraud.
Also, similar to prior years in 2023, a significant portion of our revenue less transaction expense was contributed by customers acquired prior to 2023, further demonstrating the predictability and durability of the lifetime value of our customers. We continue to benefit from scale, a multiyear focus on brand building, creative velocity and experimentation and optimization across marketing channels. We have high confidence in the return these investments are delivering in the aggregate, given the predictability and durability of the associated lifetime value from our customers. Turning to our third strategic pillar on Slide 10. We also see an opportunity to drive growth by expanding to additional markets and customers. While today our global network spans over 5,000 corridors around the world, we have plans to increase our reach to thousands of additional corridors over time, using our disciplined corridor expansion playbook.
We have demonstrated our success in growing both new and existing markets. Since 2020, we have more than tripled our revenue from North America and our revenue outside of North America has grown more than 7x to nearly 200 million in 2023. While the global market opportunity is significant for us, we are very targeted and intentional about our investments and are focused on ensuring product-market fit for our customers. We expect to go about our expansion plans methodologically and by deploying our well-established playbooks and technology as we have done for many years. Now, let's turn to our fourth strategic pillar on Slide 11. We believe there is a significant opportunity to further deepen our relationship with customers. We are excited about the opportunity to offer complementary new products built on our technology platform.
This platform additionally enables us to test and learn at scale and provide our customers with features and functionality that increase engagement and remittance transaction intensity. We are structuring our technology platform to create a multiplier effect where we improve the quality of all products, including both our remittance app and complementary new products. We are enhancing our technology platform so that can scale for even more rapid and efficient development cycles. The technology platform is also enabling us to leverage data, AI and ML models, and analytical capabilities to drive improved customer experiences. The improvements we have made in fraud management, customer service operations, reliability, including a 99.99% availability in the fourth quarter, higher quality represented by better and faster expansions at lower error rates, and better security and privacy posture are all directly the benefits of our technology platform.
To summarize, we have high-return investment opportunities over the short and long-term horizons that will help us drive strong revenue and sustainable profit growth in a large and growing cross-border market. Given the increasing scale, we also intend to drive additional focus on improving our operational efficiencies in 2024 across the business. We plan to take a similar rigorous approach we took to driving efficiencies in transaction expense and customer service costs to other areas of the business. By streamlining processes, increasing automation, and deploying technology solutions, we expect to continue to be able to make high-return-yielding investments towards growth while also sustainably growing our profits for the long term. I could not be more excited about the opportunities ahead to achieve our vision, to transform lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders.
With that, I'll turn the call to Hemanth, to provide more details on our financial results and our 2024 outlook.
Hemanth Munipalli: Thank you, Matt. I'm pleased with our strong results in the fourth quarter as results came in ahead of our expectations consistent with our strong execution throughout 2023. I will start with a review of our fourth-quarter financial highlights and then provide additional details on our 2024 outlook. I will discuss non-GAAP operating expenses and adjusted EBITDA in my remarks. These metrics exclude items such as stock-based compensation, the donation of the common stock in connection with our pledge 1% commitment, acquisition, integration, restructuring, and related costs, and foreign exchange gain or loss. Reconciliations to GAAP results are included in the earnings release and the appendix to our earnings presentation.
With that, let's turn to our fourth quarter results beginning on Slide 13 with our high-level financial performance. Quarterly active customers grew by 41% year-over-year to 5.9 million. Send volume grew 38% year-over-year to approximately $11.1 billion, all resulting in revenue growth of 39% year-over-year to $265 million in Q4. Our GAAP net loss was $35 million in the quarter and included $36 million of stock compensation expense. The strong growth in revenue combined with significantly lower transaction expense as a percentage of revenue led to adjusted EBITDA of 8.2 million in the quarter, which was above our expectations. Our adjusted EBITDA results in the quarter also reflected the targeted and high-return marketing investments that we made as planned.
We fully expect to benefit from these investments in 2024 and beyond, as I will discuss later in our 2024 outlook. Now let's turn to Slide 14 for a detailed review of our performance in the fourth quarter. Let's begin with revenue, which was up 39% year-over-year in the fourth quarter on a reported basis and 37% on a constant currency basis. Our strong revenue growth was primarily driven by a 41% increase in quarterly active customers, which includes a record number of new customers acquired in the quarter, high retention of existing customers and seasonal sending patterns. We're pleased with both the year-over-year and sequential growth in quarterly active customers, which benefited from both in-period and prior marketing investments and additional customer activity due to strong seasonal demand.
The record number of new customers we acquired in the quarter will drive growth in 2024 and beyond. Customer behavior in the fourth quarter remained very strong as we continue to deliver a fast, reliable and seamless experience and our customers remain resilient in supporting their family and friends back home. As Matt mentioned, we continue to see a shift to digital disbursement options in certain markets, which results in smaller transaction sizes and increased transaction intensity. We view this as a positive trend given our digital-first-at-scale positioning and our ability to effectively localize our product offering and drive down transaction expenses. Transaction expense as a percentage of revenue improved nearly 400 basis points year-over-year as we continue to benefit from our rapidly increasing scale, technology investments and our direct integration strategy.
Of the 400-basis point improvement in transaction expense, approximately 200 basis points were due to improved economics with payment acceptance and disbursement partners as we demonstrate scale and are increasing value to our partners across our global payment acceptance and disbursement networks. We also began to see the benefit from our recent agreements with large payment processors flow through in the fourth quarter. We are pleased with the speed of integration with our partners, which can be attributed to our technology platform and the strong execution of our teams. We also benefited from continued improvement in our year-over-year fraud loss rates in the fourth quarter, even as we onboarded a record number of new customers. Once again, we were very pleased that our fraud loss rate continues to improve, while at the same time, our customer contact rate continues to decline.
However, as we've noted before, fraud losses can be volatile, especially for new customers. However, we remain confident that we will be able to sustain improvements in fraud loss management. Turning to marketing expense, as we mentioned last quarter, we were able to take advantage of strong unit economics and make targeted incremental marketing investments in the fourth quarter, including some upper funnel investments. Marketing expense increased sequentially as planned and enabled us to acquire record new customers during a seasonally high activity quarter. While marketing expense as a percentage of revenue increased 610 basis points on a year-over-year basis, we expect the revenue and lifetime value of the new customers acquired in the fourth quarter to be predictable and durable for multiple years ahead, as Matt had also discussed.
In the fourth quarter, customer support and operations expenses were down 260 basis points year-over-year as a percentage of revenue. This is primarily driven by lower contact rates as investments in delivering a fast, reliable, and seamless cross-border customer experience continue to pay off for our customers. This was also driven by an improving self-help experience which allows customers to resolve many more issues across the transaction flow without contacting customer support. We've also invested in automating certain back-office customer support processes, which makes our agents more efficient and more effective in resolving customer issues. In the fourth quarter, technology and development expenses increased 20 basis points year-over-year as a percentage of revenue.
Our investments are primarily focused on driving a fast, reliable, and seamless experience for our customers. We have seen strong returns from these investments in the form of reducing friction to enable our active customer growth, improving fraud management with increased precision, and increased automation and other technology solutions to lower customer support costs. In the fourth quarter, G&A expense as a percentage of revenue increased 100 basis points year-over-year and was negatively impacted by the timing of certain non-recurring items. We continue to be actively focused on operating more efficiently as we have been achieving scale. Our GAAP net loss in the quarter was $35 million compared with $19 million in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Our net loss included $36 million of stock compensation expense in the fourth quarter, compared with $27 million in the fourth quarter of last year. We're actively focused on managing stock-based compensation expense and we're pleased to see our year-over-year growth in stock compensation expense moderate in the fourth quarter as compared with the year-over-year growth in the third quarter. Turning to an annual view of our progress to drive sustainable long-term returns on Slide 15. We've delivered strong revenue growth even as our scale has increased, with revenue growth accelerating in 2023 compared with 2022, as we benefited from resilient customer behavior and acquiring new customers through our high-return marketing investments, which continue to have an average payback period of less than 12 months.
We're particularly pleased with our improvement in transaction expense as a percentage of revenue, which has declined approximately 700 basis points from 2021 to 2023. This has been primarily driven by scale benefits which provide improved economics as a result of nearly $40 billion of send volume in 2023 flowing through our pay-in and disbursement partners, and vast amount of data that have improved the precision of our fraud models. Our other operating expense performance reflects both the progress we have made in customer support as well as the continuing investments in reducing unnecessary friction for our customers, building our technology platform, and ensuring we have the right infrastructure in place to ensure we're able to scale rapidly with a strong focus on compliance.
Our customer support expense as a percentage of revenue has declined approximately 140 basis points from 2021 to 2023. We see opportunities ahead to drive even more leverage in our customer support. We are planning to take the same disciplined approach to our G&A expenses and other operating expenditures to drive even more productivity and efficiency through this year and beyond. We're also seeing longer-term scale benefits from our marketing investments which are driving record customer acquisition. As our unit economics remain strong, we have continued to increase our marketing dollar investment to capture even more customer lifetime value. As Matt noted, we look at marketing investments over a longer-term horizon as the lifetime value from new customers remains predictable and durable for many years.
This is why we believe taking a longer-term view of our in-period marketing investments is key to understanding our business model and the overall profit potential as we retain on average 95% of revenue less transaction expenses after the first full year of active customer growth. Before I turn to our 2024 outlook, I'd like to discuss how we're building a differentiated long-term financial strategy. We expect that our high quarterly active user growth, reducing transaction expenses and customer service costs, and increased focus on delivering operational efficiencies will enable us to invest in marketing and technology for high returns over the short, medium, and long term, and also sustainably growing profits. We have an exciting opportunity in a large cross-border payments market, and we believe a targeted and disciplined approach to deploying our resources and capital will generate long-term value for our shareholders.
In this context, we also continue to focus on actively managing stock-based compensation and share dilution. Our outlook for 2024 reflects a disciplined approach we have been taking to generate long-term returns and recognizing that 2024 will be another year in a multiyear journey since our IPO to unlock significant value. As you can see on Slide 16, we expect revenue to be between $1.225 billion and $1.25 billion, which reflects a strong year-over-year growth rate of 30% to 32% on a large active user base. This outlook reflects the confidence we have in LTV, the returns from our marketing investments, and our plans to acquire even more customers in 2024 than we acquired in 2023. Consistent with seasonal patterns, we expect first-quarter sequential growth to moderate from the 10% sequential revenue growth we delivered in the fourth quarter.
We expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $75 million and $90 million in 2024 and for it to ramp sequentially as we benefit from additional growth and scale efficiencies throughout the year. However, factors like timing of marketing investments and outcomes of initiatives to improve our efficiency may impact adjusted EBITDA growth in any specific quarter. Our macroeconomic and FX assumptions remain relatively consistent to what we have seen in the fourth quarter of 2023 and we expect continued resilience in customer behavior across our diversified portfolio of corridors. Turning to some balance sheet highlights. At the end of the quarter, we had over $320 million of cash and we continue to have access to a $325 million working capital facility.
During the fourth quarter, we upsized our working capital facility by $75 million, which provides us with additional flexibility. This is especially relevant during peak periods such as holiday weekends as we have grown significantly since we have last amended our working capital facility. At the end of the quarter, we had $130 million outstanding on the facility, which allowed us to fund peak demand over the year-end holiday weekend. This balance was paid off the following week in early January. We are proud of our execution this year as we have delivered both higher-than-expected revenue growth, making targeted investments for the long term, and sustainably increasing adjusted EBITDA profitability. We're in a strong position to be able to make investments to sustain future growth while also delivering efficiencies that drop to the bottom line.
With that, Matt and I will open up the call for your questions. Operator?
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