Marqeta Inc (MQ) 2024 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Marqeta first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, we will open the lines for your questions.

As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Stacey Finerman, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you, and you may begin.

Thanks, operator. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today's call may contain forward looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our filings with the SEC, which are available on our Investor Relations website, including our annual report on Form 10-K for the period ended December 31, 2023, and our subsequent periodic filings with the SEC.

Our actual results may differ materially from any forward-looking statements we make today. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the time of this call, and the company does not assume any obligation or intent to update them except as required by law.

In addition, today's call includes non-GAAP financial measures. These measures should be considered as a supplement to and not a substitute for GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in today's earnings press release or earnings release supplemental materials, which are available on our Investor Relations website.

Hosting today's call are Simon Khalaf Marqeta's CEO; and Mike Milotich, Marqeta's CFO. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Simon to begin.

Thank you, Stacey, and thank you for joining us for Marqeta's first quarter 2024 earnings call. Our first quarter results demonstrate how the strong foundation we built in 2023 is leading to growth with new and existing Marqeta, our customers and speaks volumes to the strength and depth of the Marqeta platform.

We started the year strong with net revenue, gross profit and adjusted EBITDA outpacing expectations. Total processing volume or TPV was $67 billion in the first quarter, a 33% increase compared to the same quarter of 2023. In Q1, we had a day where we process over $1 billion in TPV, a significant milestone for the company. Our net revenue of $118 million in the quarter contracted 46% year-over-year, which included a decrease of 58 percentage points from the revenue presentation change related to our Cash App contract renewal.

Gross profit was $84 million in the quarter, a contraction of 6% versus Q1 2023, primarily due to the catch-up renewal pricing. Our gross margin for the quarter was 71%. Our non-GAAP adjusted operating expenses were $75 million, a 20% decline year-over- year due to our restructuring in Q2 2023 city and operational efficiencies. This resulted in a, adjusted EBITDA of $9 million in the quarter.

Q1 was a solid quarter indeed -- first and foremost, the accelerated bookings we started in late 2022. And our relentless focus on converting them to gross profit are starting to pay off. For example, we launched a program with great Republic and new customers signed in late 2022. Today's Republic is Europe's largest broker and leading savings platform headquarter in Germany.

Great Republic uses Marqeta to power an innovative consumer debit card that combined spending and savings for their 4 million customers across 17 markets. The company chose Marqeta due to our ability to reliably deliver innovation and easy geographic expansion. Over 1 million people joined the waiting list for the highly innovative card in just a few weeks.

Second, in addition to launching and scaling new customers, we continue to focus on expanding with our existing customers. Uber Eats recently expanded with us into Latin and South America, Canada and Australia, bringing to nine the number of markets served. Also, Florida announced the Klarna card has been open to all US Klarna users.

The offering is built into Klarna's app and provides flexible payment options with no revolving credit, personalized spending and budgeting recommendations and up to 10% cashback beyond geographical expansion. Our customers are growing with Marqeta by leveraging our deep payments and program management expertise. Previously, several of our customers, namely fintechs, chose to take program management and other services in-house only to reverse course later, given the complexity and regulatory requirements associated with scale.

Now many customers look to Marqeta to ease a significant amount of operational burden during the first quarter, about 20 of our existing customers added program management products add or optional services from our programs like disputes, compliance reporting and 3D Secure. Going forward, we believe compliance-related services in particular will be a key selling point and differentiator for our platform.

Many competitors do not offer the same level of service and many prospective customers don't want to do this work themselves, especially when we have the advantage of both expertise and economies of scale while ramping our previously booked programs as a top priority, we'll also focus on the significant embedded finance opportunities right before us like the $2 trillion market for accelerated wage access (AWA).

As we look to capture this tremendous opportunity, we're working with multiple distribution partners to increase our reach and expand our offering. While we've seen tremendous growth from early large adopters like over and Walmart one finance, we are approaching other channels to bring our solution to a broader market. In April, we announced our new customer Reign, a financial wellness benefits provider that uses technology to help companies give employees greater control over their finances.

Range customers include local brands like McDonald's, Taco Bell, Hilton and Marriott out rain brings the technology and Pedro acumen that come from integrating with multiple payroll provider or providers to determine the proper withholdings along with what the employee has earned. This relationship delivers value for a Marqeta on two fronts. First, rain will offer a plug-and-play AWA solution for employers, including the range spending card, which Marqeta will power.

Second, we are working to offer a more comprehensive AWA solution that seamlessly combines our experience, scale and reliability in modern card issuing with the technology and payroll acumen of AWA specialists and the rain partnership is a significant step in achieving that end state.

Another way, we're approaching the accelerated wage access market opportunity is by working with labor marketplaces like the deal we announced with worthwhile labor marketplace for shift workers. This offering is slated to go live in the next few months. This brings me to an important point for many of our customers.

A specially labor marketplaces offering accelerated wage access is only the beginning of that embedded finance journey. In fact, they believe that accelerated wage access is part of a comprehensive new banking solution for their workforce to increase retention in this tight labor market. As a result, these customers are coming to us for additional services such as banking and money movement.

We believe that this conversions is not an isolated event, but rather part of a broader conversions and personalization trend giving consumers expect from of integrated payment options, including debit, installment pay and revolver with a global and personalized experience across all merchants. We believe that our platform, which has been strengthened with the addition of credit positioned us extremely well to capitalize on this trend.

In summary, we're starting the year strong and seeing the foundation we laid over the last year start to deliver solid financial results. Our revamped sales efforts are beginning to pay off as the new embedded finance customers gain traction. In addition, our strong existing customer base continues to expand with us a testament to the value they get from our platform.

Before I hand it over to Mike, I must mention Jason Garden's decision to step down as Executive Chairman of the company next month after one and a half years in the position as our largest shareholder, Jason has always been focused on where he can contribute to maximize shareholder value.

His persistence in value creation continues this tradition, which Mike will touch upon in his comments. He has contributed significantly to the company over the past 14 years, and this is just the latest chapter as we set our strive towards sustainable, profitable growth for long-term value creation.

Since late 2022, we have made changes to mature and evolve the business, Jason felt that the company no longer required the ongoing support and governance that his Executive Chairman role provided as a Board member going forward. Jason plans to focus his role as Chair of the Board's new payments innovation committee, helping oversee Marqeta's platform capabilities and the acceleration of our innovation agenda. I am excited to work with Jason and the rest of the board on the massive opportunities ahead of Marqeta as the embedded finance market growth. Over to you, Mike.

Thank you, Simon, and good afternoon, everyone. Our Q1 results represent a strong start to the year with all of our key metrics exceeding our expectations. TPV grew 33% with broad-based outperformance, particularly in BNPL, on-demand delivery and financial services stronger than expected TPV growth drove net revenue to the high end of our expected range. Gross profit meaningfully outperformed due to those volume gains and the benefit of capturing additional network incentives, which I will discuss later in more detail.

Finally, continued execution of efficiency initiatives, particularly the streamlining of technology costs when coupled with our higher gross profit, led to significantly higher adjusted EBITDA of $9 million in the quarter. Q1 TPV was $67 billion, a year-over-year increase of 33% for the fourth straight quarter. Non-black TPV grew approximately 15 points faster than block growth. The financial services vertical grew in line with the company overall as new banking, which some of our customers combined with accelerated wage access solutions, continues to resonate with consumers.

Lending including buy now pay later grew faster than the overall company due to the continued adoption of our BNPL customers pay anywhere card solutions. On-demand delivery growth remained in the double digits accelerating quarter-over-quarter as our customers expanded into new merchant categories and geographies. Q1 had our highest on-demand delivery TPV growth in the last two years.

Expense management growth accelerated for the second straight quarter, growing on par with the overall company, driven mainly by strong performance from our top customers. In fact, one of these customers had been increasing the share of their volume on our platform after seeking platform diversification with a competitor in the past.

Q1 net revenue was $118 million, a contraction of 46% year-over-year. Key elements of our net revenue results are as follows. The most significant impact was the 58 point growth headwind related solely to the revenue presentation change resulting from the cash up renewal.

As we've described before. This change in revenue presentation is related to the bank and network fees associated with Cash App's primary payment network volume, which previously were included in net revenue and cost of revenue starting in Q3 '23. These costs are netted against revenue.

There is an additional 10 percentage points decline in net revenue growth due to the catch-up of renewal pricing. There was one additional revenue presentation impact related to our Cash App renewal. This quarter, we renegotiated a platform partner agreement with reduced pricing that went into effect for this quarter due to the terms of the Cash App renewal, we pass through the proportional savings to Cash App based on the revenue presentation changes, we made last year. This reduced pricing impacts, Cash App net revenue, but not gross profit.

The impact was approximately 4 million, lowering our Q1 growth rate by approximately 2 points. This partner agreement impact was not contemplated when we last shared our 2024 expectations in February, non-bulk revenue growth accelerated quarter over quarter by 3 points as we lap some of the prior year renewals.

We continue to see increased contributions from fast-growing solutions such as BNPL PayMe work cards, on-demand delivery, category expansion and Neo Banking, combined with accelerated wage access block net revenue concentration was 49% in Q1, decreasing 2 points from Q4. The declining concentration is helped by the broad outperformance from other customers on our platform, particularly larger customers, excluding block, our top 10 customers increased net revenue by 30% year-over-year.

Our net revenue take rate of 18 basis points declined 1 point from last quarter due to seasonality as the mix of our TPV during the holiday season typically has a higher take rate. Q1 gross profit was $84 million, a gross profit margin of 71% outperforming our expectations, primarily due to higher network incentives in the simplest terms. Our stronger TPV trajectory across multiple networks over the last couple of quarters led to this benefit in the case of one partner. In particular, in the final days of the quarter, we reached another incentive tier generating a gross profit benefit for the quarter before our incentive tiers reset in April.

As a reminder, our two largest network incentive contracts run April to March, which results in Q1 being our highest incentive quarter and Q2 being the lowest on a year-over-year basis our gross profit contracted 6%. While we are starting to see the newer higher gross profit cohorts begin to contribute, renewals continue to weigh on gross profit growth. The cash up renewal lower gross profit growth by mid 20s percentage points.

As a reminder, the Cash App revenue presentation changes do not impact gross profit. In addition, although renewals lowered growth by mid-single digits. Roughly half of this impact is driven by renewals completed between Q2 2022 and Q1 2023, which will lap in Q2. The remaining impact is driven by the square renewal which own anniversary until Q4.

Non-Block gross profit growth accelerated quarter-over-quarter by 7 points, helped by the higher incentives. Our gross profit take rate was 13 basis points, consistent with the last 2 quarters. Q1 adjusted operating expenses were $75 million, a decrease of 20% year-over-year due to realized savings from our restructuring in May last year and efficiency initiatives targeting our technology and professional service expenses.

We continue to find opportunities to optimize our operations and execution while maintaining high reliability. On a sequential basis, expenses shrank 6% quarter-over-quarter, largely due to a decrease in professional services which tend to be higher in Q4 due to the timing of audit fees as well as product and security assessments.

Q1 adjusted EBITDA was positive $9 million, resulting in a margin of 8%. Interest income was $14 million, driven by continued elevated interest rates. The Q1 GAAP net loss was $36 million, including a $10 million noncash post-combination expense related to the Power acquisition.

Within Q1, we exhausted the $200 million buyback authorization announced in May of 2023. In the quarter, we purchased 5.2 million shares at an average price of $6.22 for [$32.7 million]. We ended the quarter with $1.2 billion of cash and short-term investments.

Now let's shift to our Q2 and full year outlook. We expect Q2 net revenue to contract between 47% and 50%. This is in line with the expectations we shared last quarter with the exception of the 2 point revenue presentation impact related to the renegotiated platform partnership consistent with what we have seen in the last three quarters, we have assumed a 65 percentage to 70 percentage point negative impact of the cash up renewal.

Future gross profit is expected to contract between 7% to 9%, a little better than our expectations at the start of the year. Based on our current trajectory, we expect gross profit margin to be in the low to mid 60%s as our network incentive tiers with our two largest network partners reset every April. Therefore, Q2 is always our lowest gross profit quarter. Q2 adjusted operating expenses are expected to grow in the low single digits as we start to lap our restructuring from last May.

This is also better than our expectations at the start of the year due to optimization initiatives, but we will continue to reinvest in headcount and enhanced platform resiliency to support the growth of our scaled customers. Therefore, Q2 adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be in the negative 5% to 7% range, 2 points better than our expectations at the start of the year, although the reset of our network incentives will lead to negative adjusted EBITDA in the quarter, barring unforeseen macroeconomic events, we expect this to be our final negative adjusted EBITDA quarter as we move forward on our path of sustainable profitable growth.

Our expectation for the full year 2024, have been increased for adjusted EBITDA and growth profit remains largely unchanged while reducing network in growth we now expect net revenue to contract 24% to 27% this is 3 to 4 point reduction from what we shared previously driven by two factors neither of which our impactful of growth profit.

First, the revenue presentation impact related to the renegotiated platform partnership is approximately 2.5 points for the year. Second, we now expect the mix of our TPV to be more heavily weighted toward the powered by our Canada business, which materially impacts net revenue, but has a much lesser impact on gross profit. This will lower the revenue growth by approximately 1 point.

Gross profit is now expected to grow 7% to 9%. Lifting the bottom of the range from what we have shared previously. TPV year to date has been a little stronger, helping the first half gross profit growth. But the majority of the Q1 gross profit upside was related to incentives that are specific to Q1 because of the way our incentive contracts are structured.

Our expectations for the second half gross profit growth remained unchanged for now at 23% to 26%. These changes in our net revenue and gross profit expectations highlight why we focus on gross profit as the measure of value we deliver for our customers. Our net revenue can be noisy based on our business mix and revenue presentation.

Based on our continued success with cost optimization and efficiency initiatives, we are raising our full year adjusted EBITDA margin to positive 1% to 3%. We still expect positive adjusted EBITDA for three out of our four quarters in 2024 with Q2 being the exception.

Before we wrap up, I wanted to address our stock-based compensation and the impact of Jason's election to step down as Executive Chairman, as we discussed during our Investor Day late last year, we are being more thoughtful in our deployment of stock-based compensation and are managing to a dilution target of below 3%. We are on track to meet our target in 2024, but it will take time for our increased discipline to impact our stock based compensation due to the vesting of grants from prior years.

For the past several quarters, approximately 30% of our stock-based compensation is driven by the accounting for Jason's pre IPO long term performance award, which consists of seven equal tranches that vest upon the achievement of company stock price hurdles ranging from $67 to $173 for this award to be earned and included very specific service requirements as the CEO or Executive Chairman, therefore, Jason's decision to step down from the Executive Chairman role or resorting him forfeiting award and the reversal of previously recognized expenses.

This reversal will occur with the transition in June, resulting in a $158 million one-time benefit to stock-based compensation in Q2. In addition, we will no longer expense, $32 million of stock-based compensation that we would have booked from Q2 to Q4 of this year. Therefore, this change will lower our 2024 stock-based compensation by $190 million compared to what was expected at the start of the year. This will also lower our 2025 expense by $18 million.

While this does not change the timing of sustained net income profitability, it does substantially reduce our net income loss over the next two years. In fact, we now expect 2024 net income to be around breakeven to slightly positive due to the accounting of this forfeiture and then going negative again in 2025 before reaching true and sustained profitability exiting 2026 as we laid out in our Investor Day late last year.

In addition, Jason has elected to voluntarily convert a portion of his Class B shares to Class A. shares on a one-for-one basis. Therefore, our Board has authorized another share repurchase program of up to $200 million. While we are not ready to commit to being a systematic buyer of our stock going forward, we continue to believe that our current valuation does not properly reflect the market opportunity, our differentiated and comprehensive offering and the expense discipline we have instilled in our business.

This attractive path to sustainable profitable growth, combined with our strong balance sheet and limited cash burn, make this buyback program a great opportunity to reduce our shares outstanding at our current valuation as we continue to manage the business for the long term in conclusion, we are starting 2024 with solid results and continuing to generate the momentum we have built over the last 18 months to deliver sustainable growth, profitability and innovation in 2024 and beyond.

Once we lap the catch-up renewal impacts at the end of Q2, our second half financial metrics will begin to reflect what we believe is our true performance trajectory. Our success with efficiency initiatives is expected to deliver positive adjusted EBITDA in 2024 for the first time as a company while continuing to enhance our platform capabilities to capture the immense opportunities ahead with new and existing customers.

I will now turn it over to the operator for Q&A.

Thank you. At this time we will be conducting question and answer session (Operator Instructions)

Tien-Tsin Huang, JP Morgan.

Sure. Thanks a lot. Thanks for all the detail here. I just wanted to ask on the bookings front. Any update there? How did it start the year? What are you seeing from a pipeline standpoint any changes? I know last year was up nicely, up 50%?

Yeah hi, Tien-Tsin. Thank you for the question this is Siimon. Things are looking good. And I'd say we had a plan. I think last year, we spent a lot of time disclosing bookings number because it was a problem before I'd say, in '21 and '22. That problem is way behind us right now. So we're doing really well. And in terms of pipeline, the pipeline is growing strongly in both fintech as well as embedded finance. So, we don't track, I'd say, slightly ahead.

Good. And then just my follow-up, just I think on the expense management side, you talked about where you're doing some split processing. You did see some higher share for one of your partners there. Can you discuss why that's the case? I know it's common for us to just assume is pricing, but I'm sure performance is a part of it. So just maybe walk us through what changed there and how you win those jobs, both situations?

Yeah, what happens is it particularly when in expense management, there can be a lot of single use commercial card and that is a more competitive areas, our business. But when you look at our comprehensive offering and all the different value that we can provide our customers over time, what we're seeing is in this case is they're starting to see that value and are adding just more volume to our platform and growing much faster with us now.

So it's just a tribute to the breadth and depth of the platform and the value proposition we offer.And we obviously would like this to happen with many of our other customers who may have also sought diversity.

Got it. Thanks for taking the questions.

Timothy Chiodo, UBS.

Great. Thank you for taking the question. And I was hoping we could spend a little bit more time on the RAIN partnership. You mentioned some of those large employer logos that are part of Raines network or customer base. Maybe you could dig into the mechanics of how you go about penetrating those employers. Is there co-marketing that you do alongside rain or the employers? Are there any revenue share mechanics that we should think about timing, really anything that you could help us on a better better understanding the RAIN opportunity. Thank you.

Hi, Tim. Simon here. I'll spend time on that just to kind of frame the broader market of I'd say that this is a very large market. As I as we discussed in our Investor Day, it is a $2 trillion market, and I'd say, shift [10 gig] workers in the United States are almost 83 million people. So and they're distributed between very large organization, a big economy as well as some regional players that either serve consumers for sort of businesses.

So we decided to take a three-tiered approach to the market given its size and the requirement that comes from our customers. So in the high end of the market that I'd say, especially with the gig workers where they have the vast majority of their labor force at 1099 contractors, we've taken a direct approach to them or highly skilled ISVs. So I put the Ubers in that category and Walmart one.

And so what that's one segment of the market, the other segment of the market and a fast-growing segment of the market would be labor, open labor marketplaces in which a company goes in and rather than hiring a shift sorry, 11 and higher shift worker, they hide a shift and these labor marketplaces feel that shift on their behalf. That's one of those deals we announced last year is worthwhile and those labor market bases are growing fast.

Now the third tier would be your traditional employers such as large franchisees, so on and so forth. And they have a combination of W-2 as well as 1099 A related workforce and our partnership with rain will address that, that market so you can consider us and RAIN have you can consider a rain as a highly specialized and extremely fast-moving ISV that plugs into the payroll systems and cannot tap into the right flow with the creation of the rain debit card that's powered by Marqeta.

So between I think those two, I'd say, go-to-market initiatives. We feel good about our opportunity in this space.

Excellent. Thank you, Simon.

Ramsey El-Assal, Barclays.

Taking my question this evening. Maybe I'll follow up on Tim's question about earned wage access is interesting, how you kind of contextualize that as maybe that fit into the wedge into more new banking type services. Maybe you can give us a little more detail on that opportunity and how you can position yourselves to benefit from it?

Sure, Ramsey. This is Simon. Again, look, this is not new. I'd say that, at the turn of last century, he our credit new credit union started emerging because they could support a certain workforce. And the employer cannot like wants to offer a lot of these services to their employees to increase labor retention when there was a very, very tight labor market and the growth of a company is limited by the number of employees they have. And we're seeing the same thing materialize now.

So that you can think of accelerated wage access as like a credit New Credit Union, but the credit union actually applies to folks that are not direct employees of that entity. So I'll give you an example. Like let's say, if I'm a new bank and I want to offer accessibility to wage access. I can do that to a broad swath of the population. But for specifically, the employees or workers are leaders of that company. I can offer instant wage access. So one will get paid immediately.

The other one will get a day two days or anything below 15 days is actually a bonus to about 60% of the US population. So I think that's what's creating the conversions. But Ramsey, I'll say that conversions is not just unique to that space. We're seeing it like we're seeing the same conversions that happened in embedded finance. I mean, day one, everything from us. We're seeing fintechs starting to look almost the same as embedded finance no longer focus on a single use case, their focus on a consumer or a business and offering all their financial services to them.

So that trend example. I mean, no one will benefit from BNPL more than the underbanked that accelerated wage access provides. So we are extremely excited about this conversions because honestly, we are that we are, but a very, very very few competitive set that can offer these combined solution with the right program management on a global basis, including pay now pay in installments, revolver, secured credit on the consumer side, as well as commercial and at consumer on the credit side. So I think we're looking good there.

That's fantastic. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Darrin Peller, Wolfe Research.

Guys. Nice job. Thanks. Listen, on just the new bookings, you obviously have talked to over bookings being more material contributor in the back half of the year for those that you've already.

But just curious if you could touch on how the colors are trending, any variance you guys are seeing with regard to those customers ramping.

And then just a quick follow-up on SaaS together on ready and maybe a little more on what the pipeline looks like there and excuse me, spent conversion there.

Sure. So on your first question, Darrin, thanks for the question. So far, what we're seeing is we're a little bit ahead of schedule. So we had said we expected about $20 million in revenue coming from these new cohorts for 2024 and then that ramping to $60 million next year. And in Q1, it's obviously early, but we are a little bit ahead based on a couple of customers launching a little more quickly than we expected, and one or two also ramping a little faster than we had projected.

That being said, because of, as you can imagine, the ramp of a card program, it takes a little bit of time. So we're, I guess, encouraged by the first couple of months, but you know, the real value will be generated, you know, say four to six, four to seven, eight months after the launch. When you really start to see what kind of momentum those programs have and what kind of volume they can generate. But we're off to a good start a little bit ahead of schedule.

And there's not a lot of branded Simon on the on the credit side. Again, like I like we said, our focus is to do a hell of a job on the initial accounts and partners that we have established. I'd say we're looking really good on the consumer credit side, I'd say for one particular reason, which is most of the brands that align with our vision on credit are thinking about a co-brand as an engagement tool and not just a loyalty tool and and kind of like addressing that, the top of the funnel, which is bring me more users or regain neither uses that I've lost versus making my loyal customers more loyal. So that is -- that fits exactly with with how we perceive the credit market going.

And also is it is a great thing for our platform because it operates in real-time and the rewards engine could be change in a real-time basis in order to increase engagement and not just loyalty. And on the on the commercial side, it's actually better than we had expected. We did not anticipate such strong demand in commercial credit, and most of it is driven by, I'd say, the aggregator marketplaces that have great visibility into the performance of a small to medium size business.

So just to give you an example out of all lending that JP Morgan has done last year, only 2.6% of that went to small businesses, but small businesses account for like 53% of our GDP. So I think I think we should have anticipated this great demand, but we didn't. But I think it's actually a very good, very good sign for us.

That's great. Thank you .

Andrew Bauch, Wells Fargo.

Hey, thanks for taking the question. I wanted to speak about the expense management customer that you highlighted in the prepared remarks. I mean, you said that this one customer was looking at other competitors, but then decided to come back to use. Maybe if you could just extrapolate what went on there.

Sure. So I'd say that this Simon by the way, and thank Andrew for the question. So as a expense management players start adding more feature, more features and start up reaching scale. They they will look at Marketo asset, a platform of choice. I'll give you an example is very simple like expense management is part of his set that that a finance department takes. There's like invoicing. There is bill payment. There's many things. So as we see this conversion trend materialize.

And like I said, it's not just in the consumer space in the commercial space, which is where expense management land up. We're seeing a lot of players come to us and say, look, I can do more with your platform and you have all the program management that I need. You've got all the relationships that I mean I'm coming back to you and up, and that takes us away from as Mike mentioned, the onetime virtual commercial card, and that is almost a commodity or heading in that direction. So I think that I would attribute these things to the conversion to the convergence trends.

And the only thing I would add to that, I think the only thing I'd add is that it also is this is where I think we are benefiting from our focus on issuing specifically. So the as these as our customers get bigger and bigger. And so therefore, they become we are more sophisticated and looking at a lot of different capabilities they would like and B2B delivered at very high reliability and high level of service. That's something that we're just well positioned to do given our sole focus on the issuing business where a lot of our competitors have a broader remit and therefore may not have the breadth of capabilities and focus that we have.

In the relations that's getting deeper. I wanted to just talk to the adjusted EBITDA outperformance in the quarter. Nice to see on the EBITDA positive in the cash that Taiwan is kind of coming to an end and in units in the third quarter here. So how should we think about the ramp of EBITDA margins as we progress beyond these headwinds that you guys have been experiencing, meaning the amount of flow through or in your ways you want to invest in the business?

Yeah. So thank you for your question. The the way we've thought about it is that we believe we can grow our gross profit rate in the 20% plus, so in the 20%s. And we also believe that if we're growing at that pace that we only need to grow our expenses sort of in the low double digits, that there should be at least a 10 point gap. Once we sort of lap all this and things we kind of get a normalized base to grow off of starting in the coming in '25 and '26 that there should be about a 10 point gap, at least between our gross profit growth and our expense growth. And that's just the benefit of a platform business in achieving and reaching our economies of scale.

And so when you when you start to look at that 10 point gap in growth and you and you start to grow that out a year or two, you'll see that the the EBITDA comes in pretty significant chunks. It doesn't just sort of drip in it. So it becomes a meaningful gap as our volume and business just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And so that's really the formula we're looking at, I mean, and just to get a little more specificity because we're so headcount and technology driven our cost structure, what we see is between merit increases and things we give to our employee base as well as the variable costs we have of running our platform with cloud costs and other data tools that we use just those two things.

Our expenses would probably grow in the like mid to high single digit range, assuming we continue to compound at this kind of clip in terms of volume. And so with that, then it's all a matter of how much more are we going to be investing incrementally to drive additional capabilities on the platform.

And that's where we've said, we think that anywhere from, say, 3 points to 5 points of growth should be enough in investment on top of the existing investment capacity we already have, which includes over 300 people who are focused on our platform today. And so that's sort of the model that we are projecting our business going forward.

Nice said that line-of-sight, thanks Mike.

Gus Gala, Monness, Crespi, Hardt.

Thank you for taking my questions. Last couple of days, we talked about ramps coming down about 100 days were here, you know, a third of the way through the year. How are these faring now? What are we making progress on tangibly? That's allowing this to happen.

And last one I'll layer in there is can you dig in on the progress, maybe penetration and market them a box, helping drive that down? Appreciate all the comments.

Hi, Gus this is Simon. You're absolutely right. I mean, we made a lot a lot of progress, and I'll attribute all these to the market on a box solutions in addition to engaging our solutions team early on in the process and not when the MSA signed. So in a more concrete way throughout the whole thing, as in like from the moment, we touch a customer all the way to -- realizing the gross profit, right? We've made tremendous improvement north of 10%, which is material.

If you actually look at at how this compounds. And I'd say that there's a Marqeta on the box and that made a huge difference in gauging the solutions team working on a good blend between commercial and consumer commercial moves much faster than consumer. And last but not least, focused on the, I'd say, more expansion into the existing base that reduces a lot of the upfront cycles.

So they know us, they've worked with us, our bank partners know them. So I would say overall, there's a there's the it tailwinds that are helping us because our customers land and we expand with them, but also we've made significant operational improvements that have helped tremendously.

And one thing I would add is the last several quarters we've had a couple of flips per quarter and where that helps us not only are those customers already very experienced, so they're not sort of learning as they go there. They already know how to run the card program. But as the cards move, the volume obviously comes very quickly because they already have existing volume. And so that's also something that's contributing to the the time it takes to to realize that gross profit is collapsing.

Right? I'll add one more thing is we've been able to do this without adding more operating operational expenses. So if we add them it's extremely small. So it's operational efficiency.

Great. Appreciate all the color, guys.

Nice quarter.

Bryan Keane, Deutsche Bank.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask about international selling, Uber Eats expanded internationally. Maybe you could just talk to us about what you're seeing in the pipeline and growth of TPV. Is it still Europe and Canada, the big opportunities you see right now? Thanks.

Hey, Brian, thank you for the question. So look, there's demand everywhere. But we have to remain focused. So there's two parts of international. I'd say the first part is our domestic customers like US-based customers that want to expand overseas. And we've done well there. I mean over it's just one example. And what is good news here is kind of all of them want to go to the same countries. So our so it doesn't give us that divergence in terms of where we need to put the effort.

And then the second part of International is in the EU in which we see, I'd say the pace of innovation accelerating in Europe. As the consequences of that are our volumes, all be smaller than you than US are outpacing the growth of the US. So but I'd say those are two healthy trends.

Got it. And then my other question, you talked about adding value-added services in particular, you highlighted compliance. I just think it. Is that is that help with retention? Does it help kind of with the gross margin and profitability? Just thinking about how you add on these products where we see it in the P&L?

Yes. Yes. And yes. So I'd say in terms of retention, of course, I mean, the more they engage with us, the better it becomes and also from a gross profit take rate?

Yes, it does help in examples would be our managing dispute, whether it's related to Reg E or Reg Z or 3DS, which is really two factor authentication that just pile on to our gross profit take rate and despite the growth in volume that it was either keep the gross profit, take it take rate flat or inches. It up. That's how it will reflect and to our to our bottom line.

And the last thing is economies of scale, right, with the way, mark it up the way we have our team has handled and managed disputes and the reduction of cost make it attractive for us, but also attractive for our customers. So it's kind of like membership has its benefits everybody benefits from the economies of scale achieved by market, and that's something that is extremely hard to achieve, especially on the consumer programs. So it might be easier on commercial programs but in order to get that economy of scale across both debit and credit on a global basis, it's a huge moat for us.

So we are excited about it because it's like a win win win. So we win our partners win, but more importantly, our customers win. And honestly, the embedded finance customers don't want to deal with this at all on the fintech players like to dabble in these services, but not with the economy of scale is going to be hard for them to beat our economy scale. But the embedded finance services. I'd say from day one, they have pleaded with us that they want this to be to be done by us and they're happy to pay for it.

Yeah. I think this is an area where sort of everyone's in the marqeta's and the marqeta's focus on profitability is something that really helps us quite a bit because of that economy scale advantage and expertise advantage. A lot of our even existing customers like Simon mentioned, we have 20 programs that added some sort of service in the quarter. Everyone is evaluating know are these really my core competency.

Should they really be doing these things are myself or should I on make this a variable cost and utilize someone who has more expertise and scale than I do. And as that continues to happen in the market that should benefit us and the more it happens than we get even more scale and it becomes a young sort of feedback loop.

Yes, sounds good. Appreciate the color.

Craig Maurer, FT Partners.

Yes, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions on My first is on the excuse me, earned wage access know what it could you compare the unit economics of that business to your other lines of business and the upside to that over the long term from embedded finance.

And second, you're starting to see some improved performance out of the larger US Neo Banks, at least the ones that are public. And I was wondering if there's any if you could update if there's any renewed opportunity in the FI space for you? Thanks.

I'll maybe take the first one and then pass it to Simon for the second one. So are our union unit economics rate anyway, I would say are are very similar to our Neo Banking economics that we would have for other customers on those use cases are sort of tied together in many ways. And so our economics in that being quite similar. So it's some it's a very attractive use case for us in terms of how much we can earn on par with what we are in and many other use cases across our business.

In terms of other two other questions, which is are we seeing renewed interest or opportunities in the banking? And the third one was large FI's. So the answer on two is absolutely as we see some of the accelerated wage access players are expanding from just being a credit union for the lack of a better term and to be effectively a national bank and we are a benefit or of that trend.

And there's a couple that are getting interesting traction of those. So that's one of the large financial institutions. We're still on the same time line. I would say the commercial, the commercial side of the large financial institutions are starting to probably accelerate the conversations with us. But I wouldn't say that I mean, we're still on the same time line in terms of not that segment being material in terms of revenue. I still like that to a late 25, 26.

Okay. Thank you. Sir.

Cathy Chen, Bank of America.

Yes, thanks for taking my questions. So just want to ask any changes to your TPV growth expectations for the full year? I believe you previously said about 30% and obviously you're running slightly higher than that. Should we expect it to remain relatively steady in 24 and kind of associated take rate dynamic and then we should expect there.

And then kind of on a related note, you mentioned the mix of TPV swinging more towards the Power BI side, which is impacting some of those net revenue figures and expectations for the full year? I mean, is there any change in client behavior in the market that you're seeing? And how should we think about the mix of powered by versus managed by going forward? Thank you.

Thank you for your question.

So but in Q1, our TPV growth was 33%, but a little over a point of that is the leap year benefit from. So you know that we do still expect our TPV growth to be about 30%. Things are running a little bit better. But obviously, as we go through the year, as I mentioned in my remarks, this is the fourth straight quarter where we've grown 33% year over year, and so our comps will get tougher as the year goes on. So we don't expect material changes from quarter to quarter, but Q1 because the leap year will be a little bit on the higher end.

And we still expect our growth for the year to be about 30% roughly.

In terms of your second question on the shift to powered by, I think, and we're not seeing a change in the behavior. It's really related to two two dynamics. One is some of our very large customers who we are in a powered by relationship are growing very quickly. And so that's what that's one dynamic that's happening.

The second is that there are a lot more customers who are coming to us with what internally we call Power BI plus type of constructs where they want to maybe manage the network relationship themselves or have their own bank relationship, for example, but they still want to do everything else. So we're still going to do a lot of program management on activities for them.

But the big difference from a P&L perspective between powered by and managed by is that when we're managed by the network and bank costs are also running through our P&L versus in a powered by construct we're really just charging for our processing services and any other additional service we provide.

And so it ends up working out similar in gross profit, not exactly the same because obviously, in when we manage everything, we add a little bit more value, but the revenue difference is what's so significant. And so it's not really a change in behavior. It's more just about the growth of customers and where how people are approaching the marketplace.

Great. Thank you.

Alex Markgraff, KeyBanc Capital Markets.

You're taking my question. I just wanted to come back to the expense management volume migration that you mentioned. I'm just curious sort of taking that in the broader context of market and what is the right way to think about that? And maybe another way to ask it is sort of thinking about market share wallet share our TPV share at customers today. I'm just sort of curious, are there other opportunities in the future around this type of migration or if it was more of a one-time anomaly yet?

Maybe I'll start and then Simon may have some comments as well. I think that if you think about the way our customers view it is once as they sign a new customer, right? And they're in the expense management space in particular. And there we are going to start offering a card solution. If they're using more than one provider, typically they'll decide, okay, which platform are going to put that customer on, right?

So they can start to diversify between two providers and maybe they've been doing that for the last couple of quarters. And then they start to say, okay, but now the customers, I'm signing one of these types of capabilities. And so maybe before as of 70-30, 70-30 split the last few quarters now maybe I'm going to be 80-20 or 90-10 because a lot of the types of deals I'm signing are are things that I think will be better served on one of the platforms or the other.

So it really is a dynamic environment, particularly in this space where many of these companies are growing quite quickly, right? These are not customers growing 5%, 10% a year. These are companies growing 30, 50 percentage, you know, [50-plus type percentage] growth rates. And so as there bringing on that much additional volume where they decide to put that volume can be pretty impactful in terms of the share we capture.

And so in terms of as we look ahead to your second question, I think what we believe is because of our focus and the comprehensive nature of our platform as well as the consistent reliability that we deliver, it should help us increase our lead over time we should become more attractive to larger players who are looking to do a program that maybe is focused on engagement.

As Simon talked about rather than just loyalty in the co-brand space or if you're an expense management player and you're really thinking big, then that reliability and that focus in terms of the capabilities we can serve up becomes quite attractive as you get to even greater and greater scale. So and there will also be new competitors, of course, along the way. But but we think that our position should benefit us more and more as time goes on.

Yes, I'll add to that. That credit is a big differentiator like a lot of the customers that were focused on either a prepaid debit or a -- debit only or even at net 30, are actually all of them thinking about what their disposition is on credit. And they've come to us saying, Okay, we might we could have, you know, distributed volume again or the relationship among many debit providers. But but when it comes to credit, you guys are going to win windows.

The second thing is international expansion. So you can be a US-only or an EU only in this market where we're seeing a consistent experience across the globe. So those are helping us as well.

The last thing I'd say is it looked as our customers scale their regulatory requirements and the operation requirement and scale with them. So and while they could have taken it on their own and distributed their processing volume. It gets very complicated and expensive as they grow up.

So they're bringing that back to work and saying look, your economy of scale is significantly better than mine. So I'm hopping on your platform and that makes up, I'd say, the distribution or that or the whatever you want to call it diversification or distributing volume harder to accomplish. So I think all in all, we are benefiting from the winners winning more, and we'll it's looking good for us.

Okay. Thank you both.

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